How to address your UK mail correctly

It is important to address mail and goods correctly to ensure they get delivered to the correct address first time. Mail which is not addressed correctly may take longer to process or be returned to the sender, which delays delivery and often upsets your customers.

Royal Mail is the UK's postal authority and requires a certain standard of address formatting to ensure their processing of mail is efficient.

Some examples of various addresses in their correct format are as follows:

** A county is not part of a postally correct address **

Other elements which can be added to this format are Department, Sub-Building Name, PO Box Number, Double Dependent Locality (small village) and Dependent Street (a business park or cul-de-sac).

Any business who collects customer address data over the phone, online, in the post, or who performs direct mailings, can benefit from addressing their mail correctly. Individuals sending personal post and packages will also benefit.

For Businesses:

• Improves your record keeping so that customers address details are kept accurate and up-to-date
• Consistent format and ready for any mail shots you send out - after all, nobody likes to receive badly addressed mail, do they? Speeds up address collection, saving you time
• Website purchase processes are easier and shorter, increasing online sales and conversion rates
• Increases the number of goods that get delivered first time and reduces the number of undelivered/returned items and associated costs and time
• A professional image of your company is presented to your customers

For individuals:

• You can be confident that you have prepared your mail as best you can ready for Royal Mail processing to help it get to the correct place, first time. This means you won't have to pay to send it out again!

To see how much time your business can save by implementing address lookup software into your data collection processes, why not try our time saving calculator.

For Businesses, we offer a range of address checking software:

• Add address lookup to your website with PostCoder Web 2.0
• Integrate address lookup into your internal applications with PostCoder API Professional
• Use one of our ready-to-use products such as PostCoder Pro to help you lookup addresses
• Clean your existing databases with PostCoder Batch

For individuals:

• Why not visit the Royal Mail's website to check that the addresses you are posting to are up-to-date and accurate?