Electric Marketing - the UK B2B Data Specialist

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How To Sign Off Your Business Marketing Email

While the Information Commissioner’s Office has given b2b marketers guidance on interpreting GDPR, it is up to email and digital marketers to put the guidance into practice.

Electric Marketing and all readers of this blog know that we must inform data subjects that they are included on our mailing lists, that they must be given an opportunity to opt out and that we must make our (compliant) privacy policy easily available. But there is no standard template on how marketers communicate this. So far, we all agree that it goes right at the end of the email and definitely beneath the call to action.

How much detail should we include on our marketing emails? Should we make our statement easy to understand or confound the reader with a paragraph of techy legalese?

Companies are solving this problem in different ways, most of them reflecting the types of people who work in their industry.

This one is edgy and pithy and comes from a trendy content and ideas agency

We know you and thought you’d be interested to hear from us.

I found this one from the security industry:

We are sending you this email as you have signed up to receive information from us in the past or we have very good reason to believe our content is entirely relevant.

I like the use of ‘very good reason to believe’ and ‘entirely’. It has a nice echo of a constable presenting evidence in court.

Here’s one from a media company; it is short and easy to read. If there was a link to their privacy policy on the email, it would tick all the boxes.

Why are you contacting me? This email was sent to [email protected] because we believe the content to be relevant to you in your professional or business capacity. We respect your privacy and you may unsubscribe at any time by clicking here.

This email from DXP, a techy phone system company, mangles the language but the technology is great.

To not receive further information regarding this click here. If you wish to read our privacy statement, click here.

It clicks through to a super tool where you can object to all the different Rights as defined by GDPR; Right to erasure, right to access, right to object to processing and right to restrict processing. Click the link for whatever it is that is riling you the most or if you are very cross, click all the links. But there is no link to their LIA. Shame! DXP continues with this statement which veers towards legalese but is pretty good.

We have processed your information based on our legitimate interest, and the legitimate interests of your place of work and owner of the domain we have contacted. You have been processed regarding work related matters and not a personal matter. Our legitimate interest does not in any way undermine your right to object, erasure, portability etc…

GDPR has not touched every company. These guys are still pushing out bland sales emails to 10,000 people with the warning that their message may contain ‘confidential information’. Really? Who puts ‘legally privileged info” in a marketing email?

This message is intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential, proprietary or legally privileged information. If you have received this message in error, please notify us immediately by reply email and confirm that it has been removed and any hard copies made destroyed from your system. If you are not the named addressee this email and its contents must not be, copied, disclosed or otherwise used or distributed.

When I write a marketing email, the last thing I want is for the recipient to “remove and destroy” my email. I want you to forward it on to anyone who might be interested in buying mailing lists and spread the word that we’re open for business. This is out-of-touch, lazy email marketing. And it comes from a recruitment agency.

Here’s an example of a good end of email legitimate interest notice; it is sound and sensible, not perfect but it’s getting there.

We have contacted you on a Legitimate Interest basis and due to the nature of your business, we have strong reasons to assume that you can benefit from the information we are sending. We have processed your email address solely for the purpose of sending this message to you. If you would like us to remove your data from our list, please click the 'opt out' link below and we will remove you from our database.

The ideal email sign off is one that keeps you within the law but does not encourage your data subject to unsubscribe. I’ll let you know when Electric Marketing uncovers the perfect formula.

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Buying B2B Mailing Lists: Why Job Titles Matter

If you’re thinking of buying a mailing list, the first criterion is usually type of company – are you targeting retailers, banks, manufacturers? Then you might think geography – UK-wide or local? Then of course you want to target a decision maker so you may choose 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’re hoping that he or she will pass your information down to the relevant person in the company. While this is a reasonable view when targeting companies of say, under 50 people, for bigger firms (and it is big firms who have the biggest budgets) you need a more targeted approach.

If you currently deal with smaller companies where the managing director buys your product and you wish to tap into the more generous budgets of bigger companies, think which departments in a company usually use your product, and contact the managers of those departments directly.

If your typical buyers span two departments you may need to send two e-shots i.e. accounting software can be bought by the finance director and the IT director working together, so email the heads of both departments.

The most senior decision maker for a function does not always have a ‘director’ job title. For example, many firms don’t have an IT guy sitting on the board; they have a head of IT who reports to the finance director. You can ask a mailing list company to select IT directors and where there is no IT director, then select an IT manager contact.

A word of warning on job titles; some mailing list providers offer ‘the name of the person responsible for’ marketing, finance, IT, training, facilities etc. This is not always a manager with a budget, and in a small company you might end up being sold the email address of a director’s PA or an office manager.

If you are buying a mailing list of medium to large-sized companies and are looking for a list of say, marketing managers, be sure to check that their job titles are just that. Ask the mailing list company for a sample of the data and a preview file of the companies and job titles you are buying. If a company doesn’t have a marketing function, it’s often a clear signal that they don’t run ongoing marketing campaigns. You are likely to be wasting your budget chasing after a company that doesn’t engage in marketing if you’re offering marketing services.

On the other hand, even large companies will often not have the specialist job title you are looking for. Fleet managers, sponsorship managers, market research managers, travel managers, diversity managers, sustainability managers, IT security managers – these are all functions that may have a dedicated person or may fall into someone else’s remit. Again, ask the mailing list company to select, say diversity managers and where there is no one with that job title, select a related job title, such as human resources director or personnel manager.

You can see a full list of the 115 mailing lists of job titles offered by Electric Marketing here

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Compile Your Own Mailing List: Top 10 Tips From Electric Marketing’s List Research Team

Your best performing list in email marketing is your client list. Second to that is your list of enquirers and people who have recently shown an interest in your products or services. But if you’re looking for new business and a list of prospects is not readily available from a mailing list supplier, you could research the information yourself.

Electric Marketing has been researching business mailing lists for 23 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 not sure, look at your current client list and start looking for similar companies. Either companies in similar industries, of a similar size or in similar locations.

2. You probably know the responsibility of the person in a company who is likely to buy your product i.e. person responsible for _____. Think about the job title they are likely to have. If you’re not sure, look at the job titles of your existing clients.

3. Start by searching the web for people with that job title. LinkedIn is good for this but you could also consider trade websites for that particular industry and search for articles on business websites which will frequently quote senior people, giving their name and position within the company. Look for their responsibilities and check that you’ve identified the right job title.

No two companies are structured in the same way and there are likely to be two or three options and job titles which overlap responsibility. For example training directors, leadership development managers, workforce development managers, staff development managers and HR managers may all be responsible for buying in training courses. The finance director and the IT director are both likely to have a say in the accounting software a company buys.

4. When you have some names and company names, start searching the web for the addresses and phone numbers of the companies. Go to the company’s own website to make sure that you get the trading address where staff are based, rather than the company’s registered address, which websites such as Companies House and DueDil list. It’s now a legal requirement that all companies must have their address on their website and it’s usually on the Contact Us page.

5. Now you have your calling list it’s time to pick up the phone, check that the information you have found online is correct, and ask for the email addresses of the people you wish to contact. Expect a fair proportion of information found on the web to be incorrect. Explain why you want the email address and how it will be used. Be polite, professional and clear.

6. You might be able to verify contact information with the receptionist but be prepared for them to be hurried and abrupt if your information is very out of date. Ask to be put through to the department or, if your target is at a senior level, to the person’s PA.

7. If you’ve not been able to find any names online, your task will be more difficult. Some companies are happy to give out staff names and email addresses over the phone but there’s an increasing trend to refuse all requests for names and email addresses..

8. Have your sales pitch ready in your head. You can expect receptionists to put you straight through to any number of people. Some of them will be happy to chat, others not so much.

9. If you are handing this job to a junior person in your team, keep an eye on how the work is progressing. As your research progresses you’ll learn more from conversations with businesses as to who is responsible for what and hints as to the buying processes of your target companies. You might want to change the approach as you go along. It’s easier to correct your assumptions about companies early in the project.

10. Electric Marketing offers a List Research Service. Prices are between £1.50 to £3 per contact name and email address found. If we can’t get the information, there’s no charge to you. Just send us your list of target companies or even just an industry sector and job responsibility and we’ll research your prospect list for you and email it over to you. Recent projects have included:

a list of business intelligence managers

a list of chief risk officers and heads of risk in investment banks

a list of people responsible for marketing and eBusiness in car dealerships

a list of market research managers in charities

To commission your perfect prospect list, call David Evans or Mischa Watson on 020 7419 7999 or email [email protected]

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Using B2B Mailing Lists and Email Lists in conjunction with Social Media

The European Union wants to end one-to-one marketing. Anecdotal evidence suggests that returns from cold emailing are diminishing. Here we look at how to use social media to cut through the information overload and reach the unresponsive corporate decision maker.

Snail mail is too expensive, telemarketing calls go unanswered and sophisticated filters put all your cold emails into the ‘promotions’ file, which busy decision makers never look at. How do you get your message in front of your target – the corporate budget holder?

LinkedIn The downside: people exaggerate on LinkedIn. That marketing director for a tech start-up? He’s a teenager in his bedroom with a smart website and great plans. But he has no budget and he’s of no interest to you. Also many people don’t update their LinkedIn profile, or they forget their password and they have no access to the email address they used to sign up with, so they start a new account. LinkedIn is full of abandoned profiles.

The upside: LinkedIn lists thousands of senior people in big companies with important jobs and big budgets. It’s simply a matter of identifying these people.

You can overcome the site’s drawbacks by using a researched mailing list to identify the people you want to target and find them on LinkedIn. You can then contact them either by requesting to connect, which costs nothing, or by using the paid for InMail service. Whichever way you choose, you can be sure you’re putting your efforts into communicating with a genuine prospect for your business.

Twitter Twitter is a great tool for driving traffic to your website. But you want the right people visiting your site. You can use a researched, targeted mailing list to identify the people you want as clients and follow them on Twitter.

Your targets may not follow you back, but if you follow them, you can respond to their tweets. Strike up a conversation, maybe retweet some of their posts, or reply to a tweet with a simple ‘Yes!’ or ‘good idea’. Or just favouriting one of their tweets will get your name in front of them. Most Twitter users have their account settings formatted so they receive an email whenever someone follows them, retweets a tweet, favourites a tweet or mentions their name.

So there you are, with your name in their inbox and not their spam filter. And you’ve said something nice about them in front of an audience. Who wouldn’t respond to a compliment?

Electric Marketing’s mailing lists now include Twitter names. See here for details.

And if all this talk of tweets, favourites and retweets is confusing, read the Electric Marketing guide to using Twitter in business-to-business marketing.

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Details of the mailing lists we offer. Includes list of available job titles and industries as well as our postcode map. Also gives the full range of New Appointments listings and the Top 1,000 Companies lists.

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By Being In The Right Place At The Right Time, You Can Win New Business

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 are done at a company but the saying that ‘a new broom sweeps clean’ also applies to departmental directors and managers heading up teams.  In many corporate cultures it is essential to look busy and not accept the status quo. An ambitious new hiring needs to get noticed; he will often fire suppliers and bring in new partners with fresh ideas.

And this is the time to get your business card, your website or your LinkedIn profile,  in front of the new manager to make sure that you are on the pitch list.

As well as being timely, you can make your initial communication relevant to the prospect, maybe offer congratulations on the new job.

Electric Marketing tracks new appointments in a series of monthly updates, giving you contact details of newly appointed managers and directors in the high-spending departments of large UK companies.

We focus on the people who are likely to be buying in services: chief executive, marketing director, HR director, finance director, IT director , sales director, CRM manager and training manager. Once a month, we email our subscribers a list of all the new appointments we have identified (we phone every company on the list a few days beforehand) with their full contact details.  At just £355 for 12 datafiles, one every month for a year, it is the most effective information for b2b trigger marketing campaigns available.

We offer ten lists of new appointments, every month, each one focusing on a corporate department. See the full range of new appointments mailing lists here.

By being in the right place at the right time, you can win business.

Read more about trigger marketing.