Troubleshoot the Address Field

Some features, such as segmentation, require a specific format for your contact’s address. If an address isn’t formatted right, our system won’t recognize it.

In this article, you’ll learn how to check a contact’s correctly formatted mailing address, and what steps to take if it’s not.

Things to know

Here are some things you should know about formatting addresses.

• This article is for users who already have contacts with address data. If you still need to import your contacts, check out Format Guidelines for Your Import File and Format and Import Mailing Addresses.
• Each line of the address field must be fewer than 45 characters.

About the address field

Every new audience has an address field designed to store each contact’s full mailing address. This field is hidden from signup forms, but you can make it visible to collect addresses from new subscribers.

Mailchimp formats mailing addresses collected from your signup form or connected e-commerce store. But if you’ve imported your contacts and their data, we suggest you verify that their addresses are ready to use.

Verify formatting

There are a couple ways to check for proper address field formatting. If you only need to review a few addresses, you can check each one in the contact profiles. To verify many addresses, it may be easier to export them.

Review the address field

First, make sure your addresses are correctly stored in your audience. Each address, including the country and zip code, must be saved in a single audience field. The field must be an address field, not a text field, and the merge tag name must be ADDRESS.

To review your address field settings, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. In the contact table, confirm that each contact’s entire address is contained in a single address field.
4. Click the Settings drop-down and choose Audience fields and *|MERGE|* tags.
5. Find the address field and confirm that the field type is address.
   
6. Confirm that the merge tag name is ADDRESS.
   
   If you have multiple addresses for each contact, you must use this merge field name for addresses in postcard campaigns.

Review a contact profile

To check whether a contact’s address field info is properly formatted in your audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click a contact to view their address data.
4. In the Profile Information section, click Edit Profile.
   
5. In the Edit Profile Information pop-up modal, confirm that each part of the contact’s address is displayed in the correct field.
   
   If the address fields are empty, or if certain info is in the wrong field, we can’t use it with our features.
6. Make any necessary changes and click Save Changes.

Review exported addresses

An easy way to find address errors is to export your contacts and review the addresses in the CSV file. When mailing addresses aren’t formatted correctly, our import tool inserts “US” as the default value.

To check the formatting of all of the addresses in your audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click Export audience. To export a segment, click Manage audience>Segments, click the edit drop-down next to the segment you want to export.
4. After the export loads, click Export as CSV to download the file to your computer.
5. Open the file and review the Address column. Addresses with incorrect formatting will display as “US.”
   
   Next, you’ll fix the incorrectly formatted addresses and auto-update your contacts.

Fix incorrect formatting

If your export reveals formatting issues with many addresses in your audience, use the auto-update import feature to fix them.

First, you’ll open your original import file or a new export file in a spreadsheet program. Then, follow our formatting guidelines to create or edit the address column or columns. Lastly, you’ll use your edited file to auto-update your contacts.

Format guidelines

Addresses stored in a single column are easier to import than addresses in multiple columns. When you have multiple address-related columns, you’ll match each one to a different part of the same address field. To learn more, check out Format and Import Mailing Addresses.

Auto-update your contacts

Auto-update replaces audience field info with data from your import file, so you can quickly update multiple contacts at once.

To auto-update your contacts, you’ll follow the usual import process, then check the box next to Update existing contacts on the Organize step.

Before you auto-update, verify that your import column names match your Mailchimp audience field names and that no fields are blank. Blank fields can overwrite existing contact data.

Import Contacts to Mailchimp