Electric Marketing Blog

When you’re thinking of buying a mailing list, the first criterion is usually type of company – legal firms, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers, retailers. Then you might think geography – UK wide or local? And then obviously you want to target a decision-maker so you may choose managing director/someone senior. But you can really target your list (and therefore pay less for it by buying less data) by considering the most likely job title your target will have. If you email the managing director, you assume that he will pass your information down to the relevant person in the company

Now that it's common practice for email list suppliers to offer money-back guarantees on emails which do not reach the target's inbox, you might find yourself sifting through returned emails, wondering what sort of bounce back will get a refund and what the mailing list company will refuse. Here are Electric Marketing's definitions: Hard Bounce - you have the wrong email address. Check the spelling of the person's name, the company name, that the address has an @ and a proper ending. It is easy to type .con instead of .com. Or the person has changed their email or left the company. If you have

Your best performing list in email marketing is your client list and second to that is your list of enquirers and people who have shown an interest in the recent past. But if you are looking for new business and a list of prospects is not readily available from a mailing list supplier, you might research the information yourself. We've been researching business mailing lists for 25 years and while we'll happily take on list research projects to your specification, we've compiled our top ten tips for mailing list research. 1. Start by compiling a list of companies you wish to target. If you're

Electric Marketing is always busy in January as UK plc’s marketing team schleps back to work, grabs a coffee and makes itself comfortable in the office. This week our time-pressed clients, usually marketing managers, have been taking advantage of our two-hour turnaround promise for quotes for mailing and email lists. We’re always surprised when clients are surprised that we can get a quote out so quickly and we’ve compiled the top five questions you ask the data sales team. 1 How soon will you get back to me? We can get a quote for a mailing list to you within two hours. It will have a small

With the EU eager to ring the death knell for one-to-one marketing and bloggers on the web shouting that cold emailing doesn't work, we look at new ways to cut through the information overload and reach the unresponsive corporate executive. Post is too expensive, no one takes telesales calls anymore and gmail-type filters put all your cold email shots into the 'cold email shot' file which your target corporate executive never opens. How can you get your message in front of your target - the senior executive with a serious corporate budget? LinkedIn The bad news: people exaggerate on LinkedIn

Trigger marketing or event-driven marketing usually refers to consumer marketing but by focusing on key moments in a company's life, you can use trigger-marketing in marketing to business. You can increase your sales by contacting companies when they are likely to be hiring new suppliers. The hiring of a chief executive can mark the start of a new chapter in a corporate’s life. A new chief executive is expected to make changes to the way things have always been done at a company but the saying that 'a new broom sweeps clean' also applies to departmental directors and managers heading up teams

We are following the progress of the proposed EU Regulation on Data Protection very closely. While the MEPs voted overwhelmingly for a set of proposals which would outlaw list broking, cold telemarketing and cold mailing to named contacts, the Ministers of Justice & Home Affairs from each of the 27 EU nations are taking a more business-friendly, risk-based approach. They met on 10 October to agree their own set of proposals. They will meet again in January 2015 to try to reach agreement on the issue of the 'right to be forgotten'. When the Ministers of Justice & Home Affairs have reached

We’ve been lobbying against the proposed new EU data protection legislation for getting on for two years now. Earlier in 2014 the EU Parliament agreed a piece of draconian legislation that would outlaw list broking, insist on written consent for all marketing communications sent to a named person, with no distinction between b2b and b2c, and effectively finish off personalised marketing to anyone other than your recent customers. If that legislation were enacted it would mean the end of direct marketing as we know it. We will return to the days of writing to Dear Marketing Manager or Dear

As anyone who has ever done cold-calling and appointment setting will tell you, it is difficult to penetrate the mind-set of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. How can you sell into a company which is embedded with another supplier? Sometimes you just get lucky and your cold call hits the buyer when there is trouble with the existing supplier – a price rise, a delayed job – and the buyer is in the mood to make a change. You can increase your new business success rate by contacting companies when they are likely to be hiring new suppliers. We’ve identified a company merger or acquisition as

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, Italian, Japanese, Scandinavian, South Korean and US companies. The lists don’t just feature British brands but brands from