MarTech Edge Interview with Tom Burke, Chief Executive Officer, AtData

You’ve been leading AtData for 20+ years now; how would you narrate your journey and experiences?

In 2001, I founded TowerData, now AtData, two months after 9/11 and right as the dot com bubble was bursting—a rather chaotic and difficult time to be launching a tech company. The first few years were very lean and hard, always worrying if we would make payroll, and it was at least five years before I thought the company would actually survive.

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. At the same time, I felt like we were in a rut, and I had my own crisis, unsure I had the desire to keep going. I had actually negotiated the sale of the company but, at the last moment, changed my mind, instead taking a 6-month sabbatical in Europe to recharge and reset.

I haven’t looked back since. 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, be challenged, and 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 email marketing remains a highly effective channel, fueling our growth.

How does AtData empower companies to make the most of their first-party email data and decode customer identities?

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 marketing 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 addresses in the company’s database. When the average consumer can have hundreds of profiles and subscriptions, it’s not a rare occurrence that data becomes outdated. AtData also enriches first-party email data with demographic information to improve personalized messaging.

We provide a wealth of information to evolve a company’s first-party email addresses into more robust, accurate, and up-to-date profiles so they can really get to know the person and have meaningful conversations. 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.

In your opinion, what works better during economic crises—sticking to the core business approach or trying something out of the box?

In general, I am a proponent of going with the core business as long as that core business was working prior to the crisis. Refocusing efforts on fundamentals can have a big impact on a business. Many companies are either resource-constrained or moving quickly, and it’s not uncommon for them to get too far ahead of themselves and forget about the quality of their messaging and datasets. For example, when was the last time the customer welcome series was reviewed? I think we have all seen statistics on earning a new customer versus keeping an existing one—so retention efforts can make or break a company through economic downturns.

With the help of partners like AtData, customer email addresses can be turned into a wealth of information so marketers can be sure they’re reaching their audience at their preferred addresses with better messaging for the offers that make the most sense. Along with that, we help prevent fraud, utilizing the largest global email address network. Unfortunately, economic uncertainty tends to correlate with malicious individuals trying to take advantage. Focusing on protecting the core business by preventing fraud and protecting customers can also go a long way in building loyalty.

In what advanced ways do AtData’s fraud prevention solutions ensure to keep companies a step ahead of cyberattacks?

False identities are one of the primary attack vectors of fraudsters, and AtData protects businesses by recognizing emails used in fraud. In fact, newly created email addresses are 300% more likely to be fraudulent, and emails are much more predictive of fraud than phones or postal addresses.

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 its systems and network, limiting the scope of information needed to identify malicious intent. Built from these signals, our historical email database, fraud feedback consortium, and 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.

Transactions, account creations, profiles—the list goes on—are all becoming digital. If email is central to your customer identities, email-based fraud prevention will help you minimize risk and reduce costs.

What fundamental strategies do you implement at AtData to ensure a working equilibrium among all BUs?

We start with business objectives, one of the best ways to get everyone on the same page. Our trajectory is determined by these primary goals, which each department then builds from to develop its team and individual goals. They really do keep us all moving in the same direction and, perhaps more importantly, keep us honest and on task. We also have our core values—data-driven, innovative, collaborative, agile, experts—that underly everything we do, from who we bring on board to how we operate. These form the framework for how we do business and make it easier for our various teams to work together.

Beyond that, our goal is to work transparently with all our employees. We strive to empower everyone to have an owner’s mentality, so they are accountable and always willing to help. Keeping everyone informed with regular staff meetings and ongoing communications helps drive collaboration, alleviating siloes and making sure everyone is aware of what we’re building together.

Should we be expecting any new product launch from AtData soon in the future?

Not necessarily a new product per se, but we are investing heavily in developing machine-learning models based on our unique datasets for a variety of use cases. We recently unveiled a new model that reduces the unknown rate of our email verification service, maximizing the number we can provide a status on. This equates to potentially 20% more actionable email addresses within a database.

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.

What differentiating brand characteristics enable AtData to become one of the best in business?

AtData was brought about by the merger of two very strong email intelligence brands—TowerData and FreshAddress. The resulting organization has a depth of experience, robust dataset, and technology that is unmatched in the industry. Our proprietary network alone provides us with a scope of email activity not found anywhere else, ultimately making our Email Address Intelligence solutions the leader in accuracy and comprehensiveness.

We are constantly innovating, with recent advancements utilizing machine learning to further improve the insights we can provide on an email address. I would say we are one of the few companies that are treating 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.

How influential a role, do you think, will AI play in both escalating and preventing digital fraud?

As an industry, we’re still just scratching the surface of AI. It will definitely play a role in the very near future, unfortunately, in both escalation and prevention. But I believe there are far more individuals working diligently on prevention, that the AI models used to identify malicious activity will advance at a much more rapid pace. Sadly, digital fraud is still too lucrative, but I trust that, as we work with AI and machine learning, we’ll be able to develop systems that make it harder and harder.