Guest blog: The importance of geocoding technology in driving growth across all industries in 2025
When geocoding is mentioned thoughts usually turn to the logistics and delivery sectors.
It’s due to geocoding technology being able to take a verified postal address and enrich it by appending latitude and longitude location coordinates. This results in an accurate ‘rooftop level’ address location, which is particularly important when location and address aren’t necessarily the same thing.
By having access to precise geo-coordinates delivery agents and those in logistics are able to enhance the fulfilment or last mile delivery while performing their roles.
With geocoding technology those in logistics and delivery can reduce their shipping costs, speed up and reduce the cost of fulfilment by optimising delivery routes, while avoiding expensive – in monetary and customer experience terms - return to sender issues.
Returns and redeliveries are particularly big issues for those operating globally, with cross border trade and deliveries to other territories resulting in even higher costs for fulfilment should the delivery go wrong.
Additionally, geocoding helps organisations reduce their carbon emissions and meet their sustainability targets due to the more efficient delivery routes it provides, ensuring accurate fulfilment first time.
Benefits of geocoding technology across all industries
Today, geocoding technology can deliver a wealth of opportunities to those operating outside the logistics and delivery sectors. For example, it can play a valuable role in supporting any organisation’s sales and marketing efforts via sales clustering through the analytics opportunities it provides. Geocoding can map the location of customers and like-minded prospects in specific geographic areas. This provides the opportunity to deliver targeted communications that can then be distributed based on similar sites where there has been identifiable interest in your product and service. Furthermore, geolocation informed offers can be delivered based on the customer’s location, nearest outlet or distribution point to them.
It’s possible to simply map locations with geocoding technology by using geospatial visualisation. The benefits of using this are numerous, including planning for things such as store networks, event locations, or even risk exposure – like the likelihood of properties flooding - which is vital for the insurance sector, for example.
Gaining a deeper insight on your customers, such as a better understanding of your demographic, is something geolocation technology also provides. It therefore aids in the creation of well-informed strategic decisions across various business functions.
Taxes are different depending on location, so when an address might be incorrectly provided, for example with the State Sales Tax in the USA, this causes the wrong sales tax to be attributed, and on top of that you could have the additional cost of return to sender and redelivery to deal with. Latitude and longitude co-ordinates can only apply to a single location, therefore appending geocodes to customer addresses will ensure the correct sales tax is applied.
Geocoding technology offers huge benefits for the public sector, particularly in the planning for disaster and crisis response. Being able to access a driving distance calculation ‘street route’ element within the geocoding technology is critical to provide drive times to destinations, with the shortest distance provided. Also, it’s possible to effectively determine geolocations for ‘off road’ properties that cannot be reached by vehicle.
How to deliver effective geocoding
Access to clean address data is essential for geocoding technology to work successfully. The best approach is to source a geocoding technology with advanced address parsing and matching algorithms built in. These can correct spelling errors and complete addresses with missing or invalid components, to deliver even more precise results. They should have access to global data from multiple sources, including address databases, spatial data, street maps and navigational data, and census data to ensure they deliver the most precise coordinates.
Another option is to obtain industry leading data cleansing, standardisation and verification technology with a global reach to clean your customer database. There are services available that can provide data quality in batch and in real-time at the customer onboarding stage. Technology like a scalable data cleaning software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and an address autocomplete or lookup service, respectively, work well. In many cases geocoding is available as part of an address autocomplete or lookup tool.
Address autocomplete works particularly well because it can provide accurate, properly formatted address data in real-time, while reducing the number of keystrokes required by up to 81 per cent when typing an address. As a result, the entire onboarding and sales process is speeded up, reducing the probability of the consumer not completing a purchase.
As you start to think about your plans for 2025, whatever industry you operate in, a good starting point is to ensure your databases are optimised with verified address data and that you have geocoding technology in place to reap the wide range of benefits it offers in supporting revenue generation, efficiency savings and in meeting sustainability targets.
This guest blog was written by Barley Laing, the UK Managing Director at Melissa. To learn more about Melissa, please visit their LinkedIn and Twitter page.
Authors
Barley Laing
As Managing Director, with 27 years of technology and data industry experience, his role is focused on meeting the data quality and ID/compliance needs for organisations in the UK and worldwide.