AtData is a technology-driven provider of email address solutions for first-party data. Pulse 2.0 interviewed AtData CEO Tom Burke to learn more about the company.
Formation Of AtData
How did the idea for AtData come together? Burke said:
“The foundation of AtData is based on combining and building on two decades of email data expertise. Our origin has two main tracks. TowerData was an email-based identity-matching tech company I founded back in 2001. FreshAddress was a leading email marketing intelligence company. In 2021, we merged TowerData with FreshAddress and together became the leader in email address intelligence, combining industry experts, leading data assets, and intelligence solutions. Our legacy services are still at the core of what we do today.”
“Together, we became AtData, the market leader of technology-driven email-centric solutions providing fast, secure access to accurate and complete data to better understand the person behind the email address. It amazes me how we evolved from helping a local NYC gift shop to being the trusted partner of Fortune 500 companies. Throughout the years, “the death of email” has been proclaimed, but the email address remains key to digital identity. And the need for email identity services has grown as a critical component to verifying identities in digital commerce as other tools fall away.”
“Today, our data assets leverage billions of historical email and postal addresses with billions of monthly activity signals, and we provide services to thousands of clients across industries.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Burke explained:
“AtData has two core product suites today – data services and fraud prevention.”
“On the data services side, AtData serves as a valuable partner for brand marketers looking to seize control of their first-party data and leverage it for multifaceted benefits. By employing data validation and enrichment processes, we ensure the accuracy and quality of email data, which, in turn, accelerates omnichannel marketing performance and ensures data integrity.”
“For fraud prevention, AtData observes a wealth of activity around an email address to determine the validity of the person behind it. This helps safeguard against fraudulent activities, minimize the costs associated with fraud, and ensure that genuine customers are engaged effectively with minimal friction.”
“Additionally, we help propel data-driven business strategies by offering insights into customer behavior, preferences, and demographics. This rich data contributes to enhancing businesses’ understanding of their customers, enabling them to create highly personalized and relevant campaigns, thereby nurturing stronger customer relationships and driving higher conversion rates. AtData is pivotal in equipping brands with the tools and insights they need to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve business objectives.”
Evolution Of AtData’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Burke noted:
“We prioritized innovation to expand the suite of services we offer, both organically and by acquisition. Our recent advancements have heavily involved utilizing machine learning to improve our ability to recognize, qualify, and score email addresses.”
“Just within the last year we implemented new algorithms to our SafeToSend email validation to maximize the number of email addresses it could provide a status on. We added our Engagement Score to identify email addresses engaging across our network providing marketers more insight beyond their own martech stack. We also created a Quality Score to help organizations better segment and qualify customer databases.”
“Because of the strength of our data and network, we were able to expand into fraud prevention with our API launching recently. This has already grown to include a first of its kind Domain Risk Score to offer instant classification and tracking of domains the moment they go active. When high-risk domains can often disappear in a matter of days, this gives prevention strategies an edge. Powered by proprietary email activity data, our fraud prevention enables companies to more effectively combat growing fraud in the digital space and preserve revenue. It includes a wealth of insight, including platform tumbling checks, domain activity metrics, behavioral analysis, IP verification, and our consortium that combine to create our AI-based Risk Score.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Burke cited:
“The successful merger and rebranding of TowerData and FreshAddress is a top milestone as it was critical to help fuel our competitive market position today. In that process, we continue to hire top talent to help us scale the company’s innovations and successes.”
“And overall, we are really excited to be layering machine learning and AI technology on top of our already leading dataset, as this helps businesses holistically. For example, our recently released Quality Score interprets billions of activity signals to determine the engagement level and likelihood the person behind the email address will be a good customer. Plus we can train the Quality Score algorithm on a customer’s data so it is unique to them.”
“Fraud professionals are showing quite a bit of interest in the Quality Score for revenue enablement. Since they’re determining which email addresses are risky (via the Risk Score), now they can determine which of the non-risky are worth pursuing (via the Quality Score). The whole business benefits from this level of insight.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Burke about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One of AtData’s classic use cases is helping an organization that has no process in place to ascertain which of the hundreds of thousands of email addresses in its database pose a threat to sender reputation and deliverability.”
“As an example, AAA Ohio’s email marketing program serves nearly one million members. When the organization engaged AtData, the club sent 17 million email messages to nearly 600,000 recipients annually, using a mix of targeted and broadcast emails, but they didn’t know the quality of its list. Good email addresses are critical for member organizations’ revenue, renewals, and member communications. In fact, AAA Ohio knew that members with good email addresses spent $75 more per year on average. But 20 years of pulling data from a variety of legacy systems to build out its database meant a high number of invalid, duplicate, and deliverable but problematic addresses. Not only that, but a competitor had found itself on an email blacklist.”
“Serving as a trusted partner for AAA Ohio, AtData cleaned and continues to maintain the email list. In fact, AtData’s SafeToSend solution flagged one-third of email addresses in the database as invalid or problematic and identified 2,200 toxic spam trap addresses for suppression. After completing the hygiene process, AAA Ohio was able to reduce its undeliverable email addresses in its database from 25% to 6.5% and increase its email engagement by 20%.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Burke affirmed:
“AtData is the leader in email address intelligence because it has been our primary focus for over 20 years. We combined industry-leading datasets, technology, and solutions to get us where we are today. Because of that, we have an unmatched proprietary network and consortium of activity signals with the email address at its core. We’re now processing close to 5 billion signals a month that gives us unprecedented real-time results. Our bet on email has given us the history and the technology to thrive in an increasingly digital-first economy.”
“Thanks to our focus and bringing on key talent, we’re able to scale with our thousands of customers and partners, including many Fortune 500 organizations, while still providing white glove, hands-on support. We pride ourselves on being the email address experts and truly want our customers to get the most out of what we have to offer.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Burke concluded:
“Amid the evolving landscape of digital threats, we are investing heavily in developing machine learning models based on our unique datasets for a variety of use cases. We recently improved on our high-risk and dangerous email domain identification and categorization with the release of our Domain Risk Score. With this we’re already seeing customers adjusting their escalation strategies to reduce costs without compromising on security. We are also focused on growing our global fraud prevention partner network, delivering robust email address intelligence to identify fraud with a common digital entry point – email.”
“In addition, we will continue to develop advanced machine learning for our data services, such as our recent Quality Score. This score is trained from our robust dataset and real-time signals to identify the potential value of an individual to an organization from just an email address. The wealth of insights feeding into this score will aid marketers well beyond only the metrics they see within their marketing software.”
“Our goal is to be a major factor in preventing fraudulent activity and rapidly innovate with machine learning and AI to provide the most advanced email-centric solutions.”
