TowerData Turns 15: Reflecting on Milestones, Looking Forward

Today, our email addresses are a critical piece of our identity-our passport to the digital world. Each time we create an account on a website, we enter an email address and, often, don’t think twice about it. When we started TowerData in 2001, though, this wasn’t the case.

This year we celebrate our 15th anniversary, and we decided it was time to take a look back and share with you what we’ve learned over the past decade and a half and the major milestones that shaped who we are today.

Email Append and Email Validation

In the early 2000s the number of active email accounts was growing, but direct mail was still the preferred marketing method. This gave us an idea. What if we could help brands use their direct mail lists to both increase the size of their email lists and enable multi-channel marketing by matching email addresses with postal records? All signs pointed to email becoming the most popular marketing avenue, and we wanted to help our customers stay ahead of their competition and keep the customer experience consistent across all channels. Thus, Email Append was born.

Email Validation, our second solution, was created with the goal of helping clients ensure the email addresses they collected were correct. A database of thousands of email addresses is great, but not if that list is filled with syntax errors, invalid addresses and potential spam traps. Trying to market to such an email list will not only be a waste of time and money, but it can also hurt a brand’s reputation.

By introducing Email Validation, we began assisting brands in reducing bounce rates, avoiding spam traps and improving engagement metrics such as opens, clicks and conversions. And in 2005, TowerData introduced the industry’s first API for email validation.

Acquiring Rapleaf and the Launch of Email Intelligence

In the decade following our founding, we witnessed a data revolution. Marketers not only saw data as beneficial to their efforts, using data to both fuel and analyze campaigns became essential to their success.

In 2013 we acquired Rapleaf, a consumer data aggregation company. Using Rapleaf’s database, we developed our Email Intelligence solution, which matches demographic and behavioral data to 80% of U.S. emails. Now we can simultaneously clean our clients’ email lists and offer valuable insights about their subscribers. With Email Intelligence, we can offer marketers a more detailed picture of their prospects – for example, specific behavior, interests, preferred channels and more.

By taking advantage of data, companies can better understand their prospects and customers, segment their audiences more effectively and tailor their messages to provide the most relevant offers to each individual. Email Intelligence gives our customers the opportunity to use the data acquired via email addresses to personalize experiences, delighting customers on every channel and consistently driving engagement.

Looking Forward: Data and the Future of Email

From the start, we recognized the power of data and how it could help our clients build their brands, increase customer loyalty and boost their revenues. Today, we’re continuing to innovate and in the near future will be offering expanded services and analytics as well as releasing additional data attributes. Email will remain a critical component of modern marketing, and we’re working hard to make sure our customers have everything they need to succeed today – and well into the future.

It’s been a remarkable 15 years, and we’re proud to have been on the cutting edge of email for nearly two decades. The TowerData team and I sincerely thank all of our clients for their patronage, and we remain committed to providing you the best data with the highest level of service.

We’d love to show you how a partnership with TowerData can take your email marketing to the next level. Get started with your free Email Validation Report.