The Illusion Of Choice In The Business Mailing List Market

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.

Electric Marketing Ltd

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.

The Rules for Direct Marketing & eMail Marketing in the UK

Despite all the publicity generated by the introduction of GDPR, there is still a lot of confusion over the rules for using mailing lists and email lists for direct marketing in the UK. This brief guide aims to dispel a few myths and clarify what marketers can and cannot do in the post-GDPR UK.

Business-to-business marketing: the marketing of business services or business products to people at work.

Emails
You can send promotional emails to corporate email addresses. This includes personal corporate email addresses e.g. John.Smith@BigCompany.co.uk. You do not need consent or opt-ins to be able to do this. You should offer a way for individuals to opt out of receiving further emails from you. If an individual opts out you should not contact that person again.

Post
You can send promotional mail to individuals at companies and other corporate bodies. Individual employees can opt out of receiving mail from you.

Telemarketing
You can make live sales and marketing calls to companies that have not registered their phone number on the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS). You can check whether a number is registered on the CTPS for free here https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/ctpschecker/

You must have specific consent to make marketing calls about claims management services. You need specific consent to make recorded marketing calls to any phone number.

Consumer marketing: the marketing of products and services to people in their homes or on personal numbers or to personal email addresses. This also applies to marketing to sole traders and partnerships.

Emails
You must have specific consent to send promotional emails to personal email addresses. However you may send emails about similar products to your previous customers as long as they have been given the chance to opt out.

Post
You can send promotional mail to people in their homes as long as the names and addresses have been obtained fairly. Individuals can opt out of receiving mail from you.

Telemarketing
You can make live sales and marketing calls to numbers that have not been registered with the Telephone Preference Service. People can opt out of receiving calls from you. You must have specific consent to make marketing calls about claims management services or pension schemes. You need specific consent to make recorded marketing calls to any phone number.

Texts
You must have specific consent to send promotional texts to personal numbers. However you may send texts about similar products to your previous customers as long as they have been given the chance to opt out.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is responsible for the regulation of data protection, freedom of information and privacy and electronic communications in the UK. The ICO’s guide to direct marketing can be seen here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/marketing/

What links these brands: Land Rover, Lucozade, Weetabix, Gieves & Hawkes, Pizza Express?

Yes they are all big brands with a solid British heritage, but they are no longer in British hands. All of these brands have received major investment from Asia and are majority Asian-owned.

If you can see a business opportunity targeting companies with overseas parent companies, Electric Marketing now offers mailing lists with email addresses sorted by nationality of parent company.

We have lists of companies operating in the UK owned by Chinese, French, German, Indian, Japanese, Scandinavian, South Korean and US companies. The lists don’t just feature British brands but brands from those countries with a market presence in the UK such as EDF (France), BMW (Germany), Honda (Japan) and Samsung (South Korea),

No other UK mailing list company offers this as a selection criteria.

The mailing lists are ideal for any company focusing its marketing efforts on multinational corporations; from international marketing and advertising agencies to multilingual market research teams, from translation agencies, international relocation agents and business language training schools to companies offering legal advice on visa and immigration issues.

As with all Electric Marketing mailing lists, all data has been checked within the last 4 months by calling the companies and checking that the information we have is spelt correctly and is up-to-date.

See how many contacts we have for each country and order your lists on these pages. There is no extra charge for using this marker as a selection criteria.

China   https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/Chinese-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

France  https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/French-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

Germany https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/German-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

India https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/Indian-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

Italy https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/italian-companies-in-uk-mailing-lists.html

Japan https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/Japanese-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

Korea https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/Korean-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

Scandinavia https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/scandinavian-companies-in-uk-mailing-lists.html

USA https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/USA-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

Are you interested in companies from other nations? Email lists@electricmarketing.co.uk and we’ll put your chosen country at the top of our research list and get back to you within the week with a quote.

Company Culture: Marketing Mailing Lists of Companies With Non-UK Parent Company

For 30 years the UK Government has pursued a policy of attracting inward investment. From the Nissan factory in Sunderland to the owners of Land Rover (Indian car maker Tata Motors) and owners of Ribena and Lucozade (Japanese Suntory), overseas companies have invested heavily in UK manufacturing.

UK high streets host overseas retailers Muji and Uniqlo (Japan), Zara, Bershka and Mango (Spain) and H&M (Sweden). On London’s Oxford Street the first UK branch of Reserved (Poland) has taken over the former BHS site. Wind back to the 1980s and the high street looked very different.

Each company that comes to the UK to do business brings its own culture, language and ways of working. If your company offers services to overseas companies in the UK or if you can offer a particular understanding of a nation’s culture and sensibility, you might want to target companies by the nationality of their parent company.

We’ve added a new marker to our mailing and email lists; you can now select companies by country of origin. So far we can offer companies who originate from or whose parent company is based in Japan

https://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/Japanese-companies-in-UK-mailing-lists.html

But we’ll be adding India, China, South Africa, Brazil and USA plus any other country of origin for which there is client demand. Just email Robert at electricmarketing.co.uk with the nation which interests you.

These lists are ideal for business language schools, translation services, visa and immigration lawyers, international relocation advisers and M&A advisers or any company that wishes to target companies whose parent company is not based in the UK.

If you are using these mailing lists, it is best not to specify a turnover band or number of employees limit. Mostly these companies do not publish annual sales for the UK only or give details of employee numbers country by country. Their annual reports feature Europe-wide or even worldwide sales figures which we don’t record.

Suffice to say that if a Japanese, US, Chinese or Indian company is in the UK, it is a big company with budget to spend and worthy of your marketing team’s attention.

For Targeted Email Campaigns, Know Your Postcodes | Postcode Map Provided

Spot the odd one out: SW SE NW NE WC EC

A young graduate was given the job of appointment setting for the marketing director who wanted to ‘touch base with our London clients’ and have a few lunches in Soho. The Cambridge graduate selects a list of London clients using these postcodes and gets down to making the phone calls. He makes four appointments and proudly hands the marketing director the lunching schedule.

“Newcastle! Why am I spending Thursday afternoon in Newcastle!” yells the director.

Rest of team sniggers; the trainee assumed that if London has postcodes for South West, North West and South East, it also has one for North East London. It doesn’t – NE1 is the postcode for central Newcastle.

If you’ve put the time in selecting your mailing lists by postcode, you probably have a postcode map of your local area in your head. But if not, here’s a link to the Electric Marketing postcode map, for you to bookmark www.electricmarketing.co.uk/map.html

Selecting mailing lists by postcode may seem laborious and nerdy, but it does save time and budget if you are buying data for a campaign inviting people to an event. Admit to yourself that however triumphant your breakfast seminar, few executives from Exeter will make the trip to Manchester for breakfast. So don’t bother mailing or emailing them. Save your budget, look at the postcode map and only invite companies from within a certain radius. You don’t need to get into numbered postcode districts for business marketing – that really is nerdy – using the first letters of the postcode is usually enough. You won’t send out as many invitations, but your response rate will be more impressive and you will save budget on data, print and postage or ebroadcasting.

For (almost impartial) advice on buying and selecting mailing lists, see our guide How To Buy Mailing Lists For Email & Telemarketing Campaigns

Data On Large, Dynamic Companies Needs Updating More Frequently

I have always accepted the industry standard that business-to-business data decays at a rate of 30% a year and good sceptic that I am, assumed that the data industry was talking this up to encourage repeat orders.

Last week, we were pricing a list research project for a client and we happened to put this to the test.

We took a data file from June 2013, ran the exact same search again, compared the two files and found that 50% of the records had changed. Whether this was companies moving offices, email address changes, new phone numbers and most often, people switching jobs, we found that over the course of a year, this file of Electric Marketing data had decayed at a rate of 50%. Can’t be right (there’s that sceptic again), so we tested another, larger file of data. Same result. We tested a third file. Same result.

Why are we so far off the industry standard?

Theory One: the industry standard has not been tested since before the dawn of email. Email addresses are changed more frequently than postal addresses and these are pushing the rate of decay up from 30% to 50%. This was my first thought but I reckon that our more profit-focused competitors will have tested their rate of data decay within the last 12 years and I assume found no change in the rate of 30% data decay.

Theory Two: The focus of Electric Marketing email data is on large, dynamic businesses where staff are promoted and switch jobs more frequently; where merger and acquisition activity makes for more office moves, company name changes and email address changes.  Dynamic companies where change is frequent make good sales prospects as they are receptive to new ideas and changing suppliers.

Theory Three: 30% is an industry average which would include all the micro-businesses employing under 5 people. They are characterised by people setting up a business and running it for 30 years until they retire; change in these businesses runs at a slower pace – they may still be dynamic businesses but the contact details for the MD are likely to remain static for longer periods. These small businesses are not included on Electric Marketing’s datafile.

Theory Four: The changes to our data included all the new managers and directors we had added to the data file over the year. Our cycle of updating and researching new names is more aggressive than other data providers.

So the bad news is that if you bought a file of data from Electric Marketing in summer 2013, half of it is probably incorrect. And this likely applies to any data you hold on large businesses.

If you’d like to fix this, Electric Marketing offers 50% discount on any list which you have bought within the last 12 months. But if you are reading this thinking about buying new data, consider our LeadStream service where we alert you to changes in email addresses on your datafile and send you new contacts that we’ve added to your datafile every month. See http://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/leadstream.html

Update on the proposed EU Data Protection Legislation – March 2014

The European Parliament has voted to adopt the less business-friendly version of the Data Protection Regulation, proposed by the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) in the November 2013 report.

Update on the proposed EU Data Protection Legislation – February 2014

The European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers have now all drafted different versions of the proposed data protection regulation.

Europe’s Justice and Home Affairs ministers failed to reach an agreement on the draft legislation at their Council meeting in December 2013.

The Greek government has taken the chair of the Presidency of the EU Council and hopes to thrash out an agreement on the wording of the new legislation by summer 2014. If this happens it is possible that the new regulations could be agreed in 2014 and become law in 2017.

What impact will these changes have on your business? See http://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/EUdata.html

Responses to our concerns about the proposed EU Data Protection Legislation

We wrote to a variety of MEPs, MPs, government ministers, other politicians and business organisations.

Here are summaries of their responses:

Charles Tannock MEP, Conservative – no response yet

Claude Moraes MEP, Labour – no response yet

Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Liberal Democrat – I am seeking to create an instrument with standards that are workable, realistic and enforceable by being user-friendly for citizens, allowing reasonable business to proceed, focused on outcomes rather than on process and tick-box exercise, and tough in sanctions on companies which practise deception or otherwise cheat the customer.

Dr Syed Kamall MEP, Conservative – The regulations must protect the privacy of citizens without putting too much of a burden on small and medium sized businesses. There is still a long way to go but we are optimistic a good result can be achieved.

Gerard Batten MEP, UK Independence Party – All legislation affecting citizens of the UK should be made at Westminster. I will therefore be voting against these regulations.

Jean Lambert MEP, Green – no response yet

Mary Honeyball MEP, Labour – I do not sit on the committees considering this matter. [BUT SHE DOES GET TO VOTE ON IT]

Marina Yannakoudakis MEP, Conservative – The regulations must protect the privacy of citizens without putting too much of a burden on small and medium sized businesses. There is still a long way to go but we are optimistic a good result can be achieved.

David Cameron, Prime Minister – It’s the responsibility of the Business Secretary, so I’ve passed your letter to Vince Cable.

Vince Cable, Business Secretary – Letter passed to the Ministry of Justice.

Lord McNally, Justice Minister, Liberal Democrat – We want to protect the civil liberties of individuals while allowing for economic growth and innovation. The UK benefits of the proposals are outweighed by the costs of additional administrative and compliance measures they introduce. The regulations in their current form could have a net cost to the UK economy of £100m-£360m per annum. The Government’s position is to negotiate for EU legislation that does not impose disproportionate burdens on business, including the direct marketing industry.

Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Opposition – Your comments have been noted.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London – I have no input to this. Try writing to the Direct Marketing Association.

Chuka Umunna, Shadow Business Secretary – no response yet

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister – no response yet

Institute of Directors – We are working on forming a policy position around the incoming legislation.

Federation of Small Businesses – We agree that the new rules will have a devastating effect on the direct marketing industry and are working hard to have them changed.

EU Data Protection Legislation

You may have heard that the European Union is planning sweeping changes to data protection laws. What you may not have realised is the impact these changes will have on your business.

As the proposals currently stand it will become illegal to

• send a mailshot
• send a promotional email
• make a telemarketing call

to any named individual either at home or at work without first obtaining their explicit consent.

Quite simply it will mean the end of targeted direct marketing in the UK.

These proposals are probably well intentioned. It is likely that tougher data protection laws would protect vulnerable and elderly people from unscrupulous companies. But the proposals make no distinction between a company phoning an 84-year-old widow in her home and a company writing to the marketing director of British Gas at the company’s head office.

How can we stop this happening?
The best course of action is to write to our MEPs. Before becoming law the new data protection proposals have to be approved by the European Parliament. Each region of the UK has several MEPs. The contact details of these MEPs can be seen here: http://www.europarl.org.uk/view/en/your_MEPs/List-MEPs-by-region.html

All that’s needed is a brief letter or email to each of the MEPs that represents your region describing what your company does, how many people it employs and the impact this legislation would have upon you.

What we think
Electric Marketing’s view is that the proposals should make a distinction between business-to-business marketing and consumer marketing. We believe that the current opt-out system works perfectly well for the business-to-business arena and that a switch to an opt-in regime would severely limit the ability of small companies to promote their goods and services to larger businesses. It is anti-competitive and would lead to the failure of many potentially successful start-up businesses.

Whatever your view NOW is the time to make it known by writing to your MEP.

More details of the EU’s proposals can be seen on the Direct Marketing Association’s website: http://dma.org.uk/eu-data-protection/the-proposals-at-a-glance

If you’d like to contact me about this please send an email to robert@electricmarketing.co.uk

Robert Bingham
Director
Electric Marketing Ltd
March 2013