Stick the words “UK mailing lists” into your favourite search engine and thirty likely companies come up offering you plausible business lists at reasonable prices.
They all promise the same sort of thing: up-to-date, fully post-coded, checked against CTPS, GDPR compliant and can be filtered by job title, geography, industry sector and company size.
But when your mailing list arrives in your inbox, too often it contains the same companies as the list you bought last month from a rival list company.
We have looked at the UK business mailing list market and discovered that most mailing list companies are buying data from one of just five data owners.
118
118 owns the brands Market Location, Intelligent Data Group, Cardwell Marketing, Get Me Everywhere, MIB Data Solutions, 118 Information, Elocation, IDS Data Services
Each of these brands has their own brand name for what seems to be the same dataset of 2 million UK businesses with 1 million email addresses, 20% of which are generic.
Thomson Directories is now a data reseller sourcing data from 118 and its brands.
Experian
Experian collects data from ‘trusted third parties’.
Companies selling Experian data include Selectabase and MarketingFile.com.
Dun & Bradstreet
American data owner with a global database of 10m business-to-business email addresses. It lists its data sources as ‘crowd source, third party and royalty based’. It feeds into data reseller Marketscan’s Megabase.
Corpdata
UK mailing list company which researches and manages its own data. It has 300,000 records, but has personal email addresses for only a small percentage of these.
Corpdata has a network of small list brokers selling its data under their own branding. It also feeds into data reseller Marketscan’s Megabase which is in turn white-labelled to Fulcio.
UK mailing list company which researches and compiles its own data focusing on named directors and executives in the big spending departments of the UK’s largest companies. 80,000 records, all with personal business email addresses.
Electric Marketing does not white label its data nor does it feed it into a pool of data from other providers such as the Megabase. Electric Marketing does sell data to list brokers and marketing agencies working for specific clients.
There are other data owners which specialise in very specific areas such as Oscar Research for NHS and public sector contacts, Brad Insight for media contacts and Crockfords, the 150 year-old directory of clergy for the Church of England.
And of course there are a myriad of list brokers and data resellers in the business data market which do not own their data and will buy in mailing lists from the list owners above. Some list brokers will be white-labelling data and selling it as their own.
So if you have recently bought mailing list data and don’t want to buy the same names again, either ask for a de-dupe against your current data file or ask your mailing lists company for the source of their data before you buy.