In some industries, mailing physical letters and shipments are a business-critical task. We recently built an integration in HubSpot to allow mailing address verification right from within HubSpot. No more wasted postage to addresses that don’t exist! Interested? Read below for details.
In this blog post, we are going to take a look at a custom workflow action that we created for HubSpot. HubSpot allows you to write custom code to support your automation needs. You can code things that may not be supported natively in HubSpot, or integrate with outside services.
Use Case : Address Verification
In this example our client needed to validate that a physical US mailing address was valid before sending postage and correspondence to the customer address on file.
For this workflow we used a integration to a service called LOB. LOB provides an API that accepts address data and returns a response indicating if a physical mailing address is deliverable.
The Workflow
To enable this workflow, we added a custom “Valid Address” field on the HubSpot contact object. This field is a true or false field which indicates if the address on file has been validated. The sequence of events that enable this address verification process are:
- Custom Code in the workflow takes the Contact address field and calls the LOB direct mail service to validate the address.
- LOB responds with a Yes/No for the address validity.
- The results are stored in a custom “Valid Address” field.
Once the “Valid Address” field has been updated, the client knows that they can send correspondence to the address on file or that they need to contact the customer to update their information.
Demo
Here’s a short demo video of the address verification solution:
Business Impact
The impact on the business was a positive one. Because of this custom HubSpot workflow automation clients can:
– Save considerable money on annual postage.
– Save additional labor costs on return-to-sender processing.
– Reuse data they already have readily available.
Of course, this is just the beginning. Similar services could be used to send direct mail postcards, print holiday cards, and other HubSpot-to-direct-mail capabilities.