Electric Marketing Blog

We’ve been doing this for 30 years now. Compiling lists of directors and senior managers working in UK companies. Finding the company phone numbers. Phoning the companies to check where the people are based. Checking the company addresses, line by line. Asking for the email addresses. Typing it all into a database. List compiling is the most boring job in the marketing department. The job nobody wants to do. It seemed like a good idea to set up a business to do it for you.

Electric Marketing’s New Marketing Appointments service is 28 years old and we are preparing Marketing Appointments issue number 337 this month. Why has this business list product lasted so long? Is it that amidst the supercharged technological change of the last 30 years, the old saying that a new broom sweeps clean still holds. A new manager with a new job will likely kick off by hiring some new suppliers. Whether it’s a marketing manager looking to revitalise the advertising campaign (hires new ad agency) or an HR director looking to recruit new talent (uses new executive search firm)

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

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

The market for business mailing data and email marketing lists changed after May 2018. Marketing departments stepped back from buying cold email and mailing data for fear of tripping up over the new GDPR regulation. But social media, blogs and vlogs do not pull in direct sales in quite the same way as email marketing. Marketing teams selling in to businesses are getting to know GDPR and looking beyond the scary headlines of last summer to discover that for b2b marketing, GDPR does not mean the end of great email marketing campaigns. But there is a check list of key changes to run through

Now that we are all getting used to GDPR, you have probably seen mailing lists advertised with the reassuring words "GDPR Compliant Data". But what does it mean for b2b mailing list data to be GDPR compliant? The mailing list has to be current and up-to-date. The new General Data Protection Regulation does not define 'current'. Electric Marketing is taking the view that our mailing lists, verified by telephone two or three times a year, qualify as being current. If the mailing list contains personal information, and names and company email addresses which contain a person's name do count as

Have You Invested In an eMailing List which is GDPR Compliant? Have you remembered to change your email sign offs and to put links to your privacy policy and legitimate interests assesment in your marketing emails? After the deluge of permissioning emails around GDPR, many people are acutely aware of which emails they have signed up to receive and which requests for permission they denied or ignored. This means that slack marketers can no longer rely on the short memory of a target by writing something like this: "You are receiving this email as you have subscribed in the past to receive

Before the introduction of GDPR in May 2018, many companies emailed everyone on their client and prospect databases with a polite request (with a helping of desperate pleading) for consent from the data subjects to receive marketing emails. But with reported response rates at below 10% and with "consent fatigue" running high well before the deadline, any company which sent an email threatening that the recipient would 'never hear from us again' is now looking at a much diminished marketing database. But businesses marketing to other businesses do not have to rely on consent as a lawful basis

There has been a fair bit of scaremongering (and some unseemly profiteering on the back of scaremongering) surrounding GDPR. If you are looking at files of old email addresses and wondering if you can continue to send business marketing emails, Electric Marketing's data cleansing services can help you tidy up your b2b mailing lists and remove the records that are incorrect. If you are unlucky enough to come to the attention of the ICO, the fact that you have taken steps to comply with the regulation that data must be up-to-date will stand you in good stead. The new regulation is clear that

If you buy business mailing lists and email lists, you can be forgiven for thinking that you can no longer use them since the arrival of GDPR on 25th May 2018, when the new General Data Protection Regulation came into force. Much has been written decrying this Data Protection Regulation update as the end of cold email marketing. And it does herald some big changes, most notably the tightening up of how people consent to their personal data being used. But this does not rule out cold b2b email marketing or using bought-in business mailing lists to generate sales. Since 25th May, for consent to