AtData — Helping marketers maximize the potential of first-party data

Email marketing is a low-cost yet hugely successful revenue-generating marketing tool that delivers a high ROI for businesses. A whopping 69% of marketers rely on email marketing to get their content out, according to the most recent studies.

With email marketing, companies have greater say over the content and timing of their interactions with consumers. With this type of marketing, keeping in contact with existing and future customers is easy. Email marketing’s ultimate goal is to help you develop long-term relationships with customers and potential customers.

In a market saturated with email marketing solution providers, it’s frustrating to pick the apt partner for your needs. However, if you are seeking something out of the ordinary, say something extraordinary with your email address solutions, AtData is the right choice for you. AtData is a data-driven technology company whose fast, easy and secure email tools help global marketers verify, enrich and connect customer emails instantly.

In conversation with Tom Burke, CEO of AtData

Q. How was AtData founded? What were the goals when starting the company and how have you achieved them?

In 2001, I founded TowerData, now AtData, right as the dot com bubble was bursting – a rather chaotic and difficult time to be launching a tech company. Perhaps surprisingly, we managed to hit our stride after the 2008 financial crisis hit. Email is significantly cheaper and more effective than direct mail, and this was a boon for our business.

By prioritizing innovation and excellence; by expanding the suite of services we offer, organically and by acquisition; and by working with people of high integrity who are knowledgeable and passionate about what they do; I continue to be stimulated, challenged, and continue to learn. The most recent adventure was TowerData’s 2021 merger with its longstanding partner, FreshAddress. We doubled in size and rebranded as AtData to emphasize that we are the leaders in email address intelligence solutions.

It amazes me how we’ve evolved from helping a local NYC gift shop to being the trusted partner of Fortune 500 companies such as Verizon and McDonald’s. Several times along the way, "the death of email" has been proclaimed, but the email address remains key to digital identity, fueling our growth.

Q. What are the ways in which you prevent fraud at the point of entry and mitigate the risk it causes?

False identities are one of the primary attack vectors of fraudsters, and AtData protects businesses by recognizing emails used in fraud.

No one sees as many email activity events as AtData, literally billions of signals every month, which enables us to recognize when an address or domain first comes into use or presents anomalous behavior. An individual company is likely to only see activity across their systems and network, limiting the scope of information needed to identify malicious intent. Built from these signals, our historical email database, and our fraud feedback consortium, our machine learning models detect fraud in real-time. In this way our Email Address Intelligence helps reduce the unknown, so companies can protect themselves and their customers without adding friction to the process.

Q. What is the importance of enhancing first-party data to enable omnichannel personalization?

First off, why are we talking about first-party data? Customers are the lifeblood of a company, and, unlike inflation or the walled gardens of Ad Tech, your customer data is something you can control and leverage to maximize the return of your efforts. However, if you don’t know who your customers are, what they want, and how and when to best reach them, you won’t be able to execute your campaigns effectively. AtData’s Email Address Intelligence ensures you have accurate, complete, and safe first-party data.

We start at the very beginning, letting organizations know if an email address is valid and safe to send to. It’s not uncommon for us to block 15% of the emails entered on a website because they are typographical errors, fraudsters, bots, fake addresses, spam traps, etc. We can then go a step further than other solutions to tell you if an address is active and has been used to complete purchases. Knowing an email address is actionable is key, and often overlooked, in our increasingly digital-first economy.

Similarly, we are also able to update the email address associated with an individual to their most current and preferred, or link an email to a postal address or vice versa. This allows companies to reach their customers who otherwise might have lapsed, simply because they forgot to update their email address in the company’s database.

Our Email Address Intelligence Solutions are really all about developing relationships with your customers by being able to reach them, utilizing messaging that resonates with them, and protecting their interests.

Q. What role does innovation play when it comes to the services and solutions you offer?

We are constantly innovating, with recent advancements utilizing machine learning to further improve the insights we can provide for an email address. I would say we are one of the few companies that treat email verification and hygiene as the evolving technology that it is, going well beyond a simple SMTP ping to truly understand activity and the individual behind an email address. There are many reasons why we can offer our 100% SafeToSend^® guarantee — we are that confident in our results.

Q. What are AtData’s plans for the future?

We are investing heavily in developing machine learning models based on our unique datasets for a variety of use cases. We also recently improved on our high-risk and dangerous email domain identification and categorization.

Looking forward, we are developing an email quality score. Where our SafeToSend^® service tells you if an address is safe to mail, the quality score will tell you if an address is active, responsive, and belongs to a buyer. This will be game-changing for email marketers as they look to have better insight into who is and isn’t engaging beyond their limited scope. It will help to better differentiate if an email address is not engaged, or just not engaged with your campaigns. It really is something marketers have wanted for quite some time, and the technology has finally caught up such that we can’t wait to provide it for them.

A brief biography of the CEO

Tom Burke is the CEO of AtData. Tom has 25+ years of experience creating data-based solutions, thriving on finding new and better ways to clean and enhance email addresses.

Tom started his career at Oracle, designing and implementing database applications for enterprise clients. Tom received a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford University.