How to clean address data for the holiday rush
It’s November, and online shopping is ramping up to its climactic end-of-year blitz. www.blackfriday.com estimates that between Thanksgiving and Black Friday of this year, consumers will spend approximately $13 billion (1).
That’s great news for your business. But if you don’t have the right tools in place to help you meet that demand, you might be left wishing you had better prepare.
Staffing may be one issue for many businesses. According to the US Chamber of Commerce, the wholesale and retail trade industry has experienced the second-highest quit rate of all industries since November 2020(2).
That means fewer employees available to service that $13 billion worth of purchases. Fewer employees mean that businesses will have to get creative to keep up with deliveries, reduce returns, and eliminate negative reviews. Is your business ready to make the most of this season’s spending?
Smarty® can help.
With our unmatched ability to validate addresses, Smarty can help you reduce costs, increase revenue, save time, and keep your customers happy – all while reducing stress. And let’s be honest, less stress during the holidays is good for everyone.
In this post, we’ll show you how to:
- Reduce Costs with Address Autocomplete
- Save Labor Hours & Your Customers’ Time
- Make Happy Customers
Reduce costs with address autocomplete
The anticipated $13 billion is a big chunk of change. Therefore, it’s important for your business to capture and maintain as much of that spending as possible. But bad addresses, typos, and undeliverable addresses can eat big holes into your hard-earned profits. It doesn't have to be this way.
Smarty offers lightning-fast, hyper-accurate, and reliable Address Autocomplete APIs for addresses in the United States and internationally that include validation. With this powerful technology, customers only need to enter a few characters into an address field, and Smarty can autocomplete their entries with validated, standardized addresses.
Having Smarty autocomplete addresses ensures that the addresses are complete, free of typos, and verified (meaning they’re real, deliverable addresses). Try Smarty’s US Address Autocomplete for free to see how easy it is.
Consider the savings you’ll enjoy with that kind of power behind your checkout and delivery process! Implementing an address autocomplete can reduce:
- Hours lost receiving undeliverable packages and investigating why they were undeliverable.
- Losses from readdressing, repackaging, or reshipping undeliverables.
- Carrier charges from returned packages with incorrect or invalid addresses.
- Losses from perishable goods that died or spoiled during transit to the wrong address.
- Losses from upset customers who returned merchandise that couldn't be delivered when needed (i.e., party and holiday decorations, gifts, consumables, etc.).
- Lost, stolen, misdelivered, and damaged inventory.
With more competition than ever and inflation on the rise, your business must do everything possible to prevent unnecessary expenses. Shipping is one area where avoidable costs can add up in a hurry.
But with the right tools, those potential losses are easy to mitigate.
What shipping and delivery issues keep you up at night? Solve them today with Smarty so you can enjoy more rest and revenue this holiday season. See how Speedway Motors optimized their eCommerce Checkout UI with Smarty.
Save labor hours & your customers’ time
Just as important as helping to reduce costs, Smarty can help you and your customers save time. During the holidays, everyone can use a little more time.
Smarty’s address autocomplete feature allows customers to enter purchase and shipping information in a snap. All the customer needs to do is start entering the address they need. Next, Smarty’s lightning-fast US autocomplete algorithm scours its database of over 210 million verified addresses to find the right one.
Once the correct address is determined, a single click allows the customer to continue checking out. They’ll be happy because you saved them time and made checkout a breeze. You’ll be happy because you’ll enjoy fewer abandoned carts and more positive reviews.
Smarty’s US Address Validation will also provide you with ZIP+4 Codes that can help you qualify for bulk mail discounts and even speed up USPS deliveries by up to two days.
While Smarty’s autocomplete and address verification saves your customers plenty of valuable time, it also does double duty and saves your company labor hours. For example:
The shipping department won't waste time tracking down and correcting undeliverable addresses with properly verified customer and shipping addresses in your files. Instead, they’ll be able to focus on more productive activities.
Warehouse employees will be free to get goods boxed and out the door instead of reapplying labels and possibly reboxing parcels.
Call center employees will be able to capture addresses from phone orders faster and more accurately.
Customer service agents will be able to spend more time caring for your customers and less time trying to solve issues related to undelivered or late packages.
With Smarty, everyone wins.
Make happy customers
The benefits of keeping customers happy have been studied and taught for decades. And while it used to be that a good result was all it took to please most customers, technology has changed that.
These days, it’s not enough to simply provide a good result. With increased competition, social media, and the importance of online reviews, the entire customer experience needs to be positive to keep shoppers happy.
Keeping your clientele happy is worth the effort. Happy customers are return customers.
But that’s not all. Happy buyers will recommend you to their friends and family, leave you glowing reviews that attract and influence new customers, and be the best product evangelists you could hope for.
So it makes sense to do the little things that help make life easy for those who choose to spend their money with you.
Using Smarty to save everyone time during the holidays leads to happier customers. Happier customers lead to:
- More return customers
- Better reviews
- More business
You’ve already learned how Smarty can make the purchasing experience smoother for your customers. From form fields that are easier and faster to complete to more reliable delivery of their purchases to a better customer service experience, Smarty does some heavy lifting behind the scenes to ensure your customers are happy. And when it comes right down to it, aren’t the holidays all about spreading happiness and joy?
So try a free demo to see how your business can claim an even larger portion of that $13 billion spending spree by reducing costs, saving time, and delivering happy customers.
