[This is a series that will explore 101 ways you can benefit from address verification services.]
Deduplication
Deduplication means finding and removing duplicates. Every database or address list in the world has duplicates (unless they’ve been using our address verification service, of course). If you gather or store addresses, you’ll have to deal with it eventually. Many organizations choose to just ignore the duplicates so that they don’t have to deal with them until later.
The problem with ignoring them is that when later comes, it generally costs more to take care of them. These costs can be things like, additional postage, sending multiple catalogs to the same person, additional storage space in a database, or making notes in the wrong customer account, to name just a few.
What is a duplicate address? It should be very simple to figure out, right?
100 North Main Street, Anytown CA 90210
100 North Main Street, Anytown CA 90210.
Even a quick glance at these two addresses in a spreadsheet would show that they are 100% duplicates.
However, what happens when the address is typed in differently, like these:
100 N Main Street, Anytown CA 90210
100 North Main Str, Anytown CA 90210
100 N Main ST, Anytown California
100 N Main Street, 90210
100 North Main ST, Anytown 90210
Each of these is the exact same address written a little differently. (There are at least 10 more variations of this same address that are valid.) If these addresses were scattered throughout your address list (or database) you might not ever notice that they were the same one, being repeated. If your list is bigger than 10,000 you might not even want to look through it for duplicates.
If only there were a way to standardize the addresses so that the duplicates could be easily removed. THERE IS! That’s one of the ways you can use our address verification service. In fact, the first step in our address verification process is standardization. Our service utilizes the US Postal Service standards for addressing. Thus, each of the previous example addresses would be standardized to be exactly the same:
100 N MAIN ST ANYTOWN CA 90210
After this standardization, when you could enter this into your spreadsheet and then sort by address, making it very easy to see the duplicates. However, you don’t have to sort through them manually. Our address verification service automatically marks the duplicate addresses for you and places them in a separate file called “duplicates”.
So, instead of dealing with the hassle of sorting through all of those addresses, you can bring you lists and databases to us. Use our address verification service to deduplicate them today, instead of ignoring them, and dealing with the stress later. It only takes a few minutes, and then you’ll be duplicate free!