Ryan is the Marketing Communications Executive at Data8, taking care of digital content in various areas of marketing.
In the realm of website usability, we strive to make our sites as convenient and easy-to-use as possible. Web interface UX is an ever-growing focus, especially when it comes to collecting personal information from your customers as this can determine the success of your online conversions and overall user journey. With this in mind, after looking into your web analytics you might find that a high percentage of your web traffic falls at the address information page.
But luckily there are address validation tools out there that will allow you to verify an address at the point of capture whilst allowing the user to autocomplete the address they are submitting, speeding up the process and improving the user’s experience.
Making the User Journey Easy
We all want our websites to be as easy and convenient to use as possible for our users. As site owners, we know that making this user journey as slick as possible comes with a variety of benefits including a reduction in disengagement in various areas of our site.
Improving the look and feel of your user journey can help tremendously, but even with a high-end website, the most tedious pain point in the journey for the user can be the address information page.
For every web user, typing out a full personal address is an inconvenience and may ultimately cause the customer to disengage with what you are trying to get out of them if they lose interest during this part of the journey.
Having accurate address data isn’t just beneficial to your customer whilst on your site. By having submitted their address in a correctly formatted standard on your site when making a purchase, there is 92% more chance that their delivery will make it directly to them without getting lost in transit or sent to another address.
Address Validation isn’t just for websites
The way you store your data and the validity of that data stored is a key factor in saving time and revenue when conducting any communicational exercises to your existing customers. Not only does validation provide convenience for your web users, it also provides benefits for your business internally in regards to how data is captured and stored within your CRM or CDP, including:
Address Submission Speed
Much like a web-user, CRM or CDP users can be given access to an address autocomplete tool that will vastly improve the speed of address submission within the platform. The user will simply need to type in a small fraction of the address information and the address autocomplete tool will figure out the rest.
Address Formatting
Address validation tools ensure that the address information stored within the system is formatted to the Royal Mail PAF standard, eliminating the possibility of invalid or incorrectly formatted addresses entering the system.
Quality Data Collection
Having quality data is essential when needing to interrogate addresses within your database. Thinking of performing a targeted marketing campaign to a specific country or region? Without quality address information, you won’t be able to target the relevant people with the information that you want to.
The different forms of address validation
Address validation tools will ultimately help you in a variety of different ways to improve your overall user experience during the address submission process. But with so many services out there, it is best to get an understanding about the two forms of address verification tools and what they may look like.
PredictiveAddress™ (UK & Global Addresses)
PredictiveAddress™ is an AI powered, type-ahead technology that allows the customer to simply start typing their address and a list of possible addresses will appear with a drop down picklist in real time. Once an address is selected, all address fields will automatically populate automatically.
With PredictiveAddress™, the customer or user can start typing from any point of an address. Whether the user starts from the postcode, house name / number, company name, street name or locality, PredictiveAddress™ will narrow down a list of options in real-time as the user continues to type away.
PredictiveAddress™ is an international solution with coverage for over 250 countries.
Postcode Lookup (UK Addresses)
Postcode Lookup works in a very similar way, however, it requires the customer to simply input their postcode, click a button and then the customer will be displayed the list of addresses associated with that postcode. Once the customer has chosen the relevant address that they are searching for, your chosen custom address fields will automatically populate.
The results found during a Postcode Lookup search are the same results that would be found when performing a PredictiveAddress™ search for the UK. This is because both Postcode Lookup and PredictiveAddress™ share the same up-to-date data sources for the UK.
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About the author
Ryan Pickering