Contact data can be an extremely valuable resource for a business, but only if the data is actually correct and up-to-date. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses are all data points that can change in the years since a customer first fills out a form.

Melissa’s SmartMover Cloud API provides a way to validate addresses to ensure that when someone moves, that change is tracked in the database with the updated address. It can also be used to standardize addresses across the entire customer contact database, even if the person hasn’t moved.

Available in the United States and Canada, it utilizes data from the USPS and Canada Post to obtain the most recent address information for a user.

SmartMover can perform real-time single requests, such as for customer onboarding or form entry, or batch requests, for situations like processing a database or historical data, scheduled processing, or ETL transformations. Batch requests can either be single-threaded (for small to medium-sized lists with 10,000 to 100,000 records) or multi-threaded (for large lists of over 100,000 records).

Because Melissa is licensing the data from the two postal services, it is required to keep track of who is using the service, so customers must fill out a processing form before using the API.

There is also a requirement that SmartMover only be used for updating mailing lists, and the mailing lists must have a minimum of 100 unique names and addresses. Another result of the strict requirements for licensing the data is that it is only available as a cloud API because Melissa cannot put sensitive PII data on client machines.

Visit Melissa’s Quickstart Guide for code samples, documentation, and an FAQ.

Melissa also offers a number of different APIs to validate and keep other contact data up-to-date, including:

  • Global Name: Validate the names of people and businesses to root out misspellings, vulgarities, and suspicious names

  • Global Phone: Verifies phone numbers and appends country dialing codes, returns Caller ID information, and checks if the number is active

  • Global Email: Verifies email addresses to improve deliverability by fixing typos in domain names, correcting syntax errors, and performing real-time mailbox validation