What is Address Cleansing that makes your marketing tools work better?

As you can guess from the name, Address Cleansing is the process of standardizing and normalizing address descriptions. Maybe you haven’t heard this term before, but it’s a process essential for the management of addresses. We don’t usually pay much attention to how addresses are described, but there are actually many different ways to describe a single address. Let’s take a look at the four address representations below. They are described differently but refer to the same address.

Other than those above, we often see the use of variants of kanji characters in address representations in Japan, for example, “霞ヶ関” and “霞が関” (Kasumigaseki),  and “壺川” and “壷川” (Tsubokawa).

Address Cleansing is such process to standardize such orthographical variants in address representations and then rewrite them into normalized addresses.

When you use a customer data management system, orthographical variants in address representations present a serious problem. As long as orthographical variants exist, sorting, narrowing down, and measuring data by address will not function well. For example. if “霞ヶ関” and “霞が関” (both pronounced “Kasumigaseki” and refer to the same place) are mixed in the address data, the computer system cannot count them as the same description. Moreover, if you try to standardize such orthographical variants manually, it will take a lot of effort and mistakes may also occur. Such inefficient operations will generate excess costs.

Because of orthographical variants in address representations, your system might identify a single person as different persons. If you send a letter containing the same information twice to a single person, your customer will get a poor impression of your company. As you can see, operating with flawed address data will damage your company’s brand indirectly.

Address Cleansing can not only standardize orthographical variants in address descriptions but update old addresses to their new addresses. Through the merger of municipalities, many addresses change accordingly.  Long-established companies tend to have such old data without being updated. Needless to say, it is difficult to analyze data accurately and deliver mail smoothly as long as the company keeps using data containing old addresses.

That’s why it is important to perform Address Cleansing on the data you have and to manage addresses in the data in a standardized format. What you need to do first before using a CRM and/or SFA tool is to develop and improve your customer information thoroughly.

One of the advantages of Address Cleansing is that you can standardize address representation rules. As mentioned earlier, if the data you have contains orthographical variants in address representations, the data will provide incomplete customer information. Cleansing such information into standardized address data helps you utilize the data more efficiently with your customer management system. Address Cleansing system of Increment P keeps a log of where changes have made, and you can clearly check which addresses have been changed in the address cleansing process. The system also allows you to detect incomplete addresses and invalid addresses (for example, street numbers that actually do not exist in real world). This feature wouldn’t have been realized without the database of Increment P who, as a map company, possess massive amount of location data as our assets.

Increment P performs Address Cleansing using more than 40 million pieces of address information which has been accumulated and updated.

Furthermore, Increment P’s Address Cleansing system can divide an address for each element (for example, prefectures, municipalities, and buildings) in the address hierarchy, allowing users to sort or narrow down the data for a search.

Accumulating such data in Excel in which columns are divided according to each element will allow you to easily aggregate and analyze data by element even with a widely-used tool like Excel.

The second advantage of Address Cleansing is name-based aggregation. Systems for managing customer information often use addresses as one of the user identifiers. You might identify a single customer as multiple different customers because of orthographical variants in address representations. Unless you update and organize your data by performing name-based aggregation, you can have such adverse effects as the following:

In each case, if you let the problem go unchecked, you will be in trouble sooner or later. A smart use of an Address Cleansing technique can resolve such problems too.

Based on its credible information accumulated through its experience in the map business, Increment P provides an Address Cleansing service using web APIs. As an industry-leading map business company, Increment P is quite confident in its address database that contains the largest amounts of fresh information in the industry.

Case 1: Developing and improving your customer data

This is the simplest way to use Address Cleansing. You are to normalize customer address information and standardize formats to convert the data into information that can be operated with your CRM and/or SFA tool. For example, you can integrate customer data individually collected according to various input formats, such as a survey form, bill, and customer card, and avoid redundant registration of customer information.

Case 2: Integrating Address Cleansing APIs into website forms

Increment P provides an Address Cleansing service using web APIs. You can incorporate not only CSV files but address cleansing web APIs into website forms. If you integrate APIs into your website form for prize drawing, you will be able to prevent multiple applications by a single person using invalid addresses or reduplicated addresses. This way of using address cleansing can be one countermeasure against the existence of resellers who resell things such as, for example, tickets, at a higher price.

Case 3: Printing address labels for delivery

You can also use the system of Address Cleansing to print address labels for delivery.

“This address is too long to fit the label size.”
“The layout of this printed address is poor.”

Have you had such an experience during preparation for delivery? Because our address cleansing system divides elements of each address into hierarchical levels, you can print any address neatly on an address label.

How did you like the story about Address Cleansing this time?

If you have any flaws in your customer information, you might send the same information more than once to a single person or the information might not be delivered to the person. You won’t be able to carry out accurate aggregation and analysis unless you have well-organized customer information. You can say the same for your CRM and/or SFA tools. Such tools will not be able to fulfill their original function unless the original data is updated and improved correctly, which is an important point here. If you have any problems with using a CRM and/or SFA tool or organizing/improving your customer information, why not reconsider the use of your address information?

It will take much hard work to integrate pieces of customer information, which are managed separately in different departments, into the same format, for the future use of the data. It’s like putting the cart before the horse if you become worn out with the data integration work. Please take advantage of Increment P’s Address Cleansing service to help you proceed with your data integration work.

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