International address lookup: 3 steps to cleaner data

For address validation, an international address lookup is the process of matching foreign addresses against the local authoritative postal databases to ensure they are real and mailable. The process commonly corrects typos, parses the addresses into its component parts and standardizes it to match countries' approved formats.

The task of looking up and combining data sets for thousands, or even millions of international addresses is a daunting one. Just trying to keep track of each country’s valid address format alone, is a time-consuming challenge. Using Smarty's international address verification solution and standardization tools you can lookup international address datasets and keep the address components tidy.

In this post, we are going to cover the 3 steps for cleaner data:

1. Clean Up Address with an International Address Lookup
2. Prevent Future Bad Addresses at Point of Entry
3. Maintenance of Your Address Database

1. Clean up address with an international address lookup

Not being able to merge address datasets because they’ve been entered poorly is aggravating. Standardizing the international addresses by looking up each international address is the first step to cleansing your address datasets and ending the frustration of discrepant data.

Smarty's International Address Validation takes your bad address details and then parses and standardizes the address components so that duplicate addresses can easily be matched. Once you’ve standardized all of your datasets, they can be compared and deduplicated with ease.

2. Prevent future bad addresses at point of entry

Now that you’ve done a thorough lookup standardization and cleanse of your international address databases, how do you keep them that way?

Unless your users all know how to properly spell, standardize and format addresses for over 130 countries (43 rue Gouin de Beauchesne, for example), you can expect misspellings and improper formats to creep back into your database.

An International Address Autocomplete API can help you prevent poorly-entered data from reaching your database by suggesting accurate and complete addresses to your users as they enter them. The result is a smoother user experience, more accurately completed form fills, and a huge reduction in form abandonment rates and errant country address data.

3. Maintenance of your address database

Unfortunately, keeping a clean and accurate address database is an ongoing task that needs constant vigilance. Both International Address Verification and International Address Autocomplete are available as an API that will help you to lookup international street addresses and keep your databases squeaky clean on a consistent basis.

Once they’re set up and running, they just keep on doing their thing—keeping your database clean day after day.

Don’t know how to get started with building an API connection?

Smarty's clear and concise documentation will help you get up and running in no time. Plus, we may already have a pre-built solution. Smarty has several SDKs that might be exactly what you need to get started on your way to a cleaner international address database.

We feature full unicode support. You can standardize and validate addresses in numerous character sets and languages. We cover addresses from Canada to China, Japan to Jamaica, Hong Kong to Hungary, Australia to Argentina and The United Kingdom to The United Arab Emirates and 120 additional countries!

You can start implementing these steps right now, by signing up for a free trial.