Electric Marketing Blog

Competition for good staff is hotting up as the UK unemployment rates fall. The UK's largest companies are alive to the notion that one reward package will not fit all employees; different people at different life stages will value different rewards and benefits. Whether staff prefer a higher salary or extra paid holiday, gym membership or subsidised lunches, a flexible reward scheme is essential for staff retention and effective succession planning. Reward or compensation and benefits used to sit in the HR manager's in tray but now almost all of the UK's largest employers have a dedicated

Now that you've written those GDPR policy documents and tackled your corporate mountain of old data, you might be ready to leave the legal stuff to the lawyers and get back to marketing, comms and sales. But maybe you've read something about PECR and some people on LinkedIn are still insisting that b2b email marketing will be over in May 2018? What Is PECR? PECR is the Privacy & Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 which governs email marketing. As an EU Directive, the UK can choose how to interpret PECR. Crucially the UK allows businesses the freedom to email other

The new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules that if your mailing list is opt-in, consent to opt-in to receive marketing communications must be be "freely-given, specific, informed and unambiguous". It is no longer permitted to use mailing lists on the basis of the old opt-in wheeze of a series of double negatives to leave a box unticked agreeing to be contacted by "the company's marketing partners". The ICO's (Information Commissioners Office) guidance on interpreting GDPR specifically rules out pre-ticked boxes and states that any third party using a mailing list must be named

List focuses on client companies with dedicated events budgets Google "events managers" and get the names of thousands of people working in events. If you are selling to events managers, it looks as if you have a wide target market and hitting your sales figures will be stress-free. But start contacting those events managers and find that it is one of those job titles that carries different responsibilities depending on the industry sector. Large hotels have events managers but they focus on selling the hotel as a venue to wedding organisers and training companies. Travel companies have events

There has been a fair bit of low-level grumbling about the Apprenticeship Levy from the big beasts of UK plc. Payable by any company with an annual wages bill of £3m+, the Apprenticeship Levy has joined Brexit as the go to excuse for a CEO offering a sticky profits warning to shareholders. But many companies have embraced the the change; they are not just taking on apprentices, they have developed formal apprenticeship programmes and had their in-house programmes accredited as apprenticeship training providers. These companies running in-house schemes feature on our new lists of Apprenticeship

Why Email Marketing is Still Key to the B2B Marketer's Skill Set The under-21s are an entrepreneurial lot; revelling in their command of new technology, they blog, vlog and Snapchat, they roll their eyes at Facebook (it's where old people go online) and only check their emails if they are expecting something. But they are keen to make money out of technology: they dream of bringing a killer app to market and riding into the top ten of the App Store. How to achieve this? By blogging, vlogging and persuading other (more influential) bloggers and vloggers to write up the app. Sending an email to

Microsoft announced a leap in profits last month attributing the rise to its relaunch of LinkedIn. Since Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, the corporate social media site has been flooded with innovative new functions. Microsoft has focused on the site's main user-base - recruiters and jobseekers, and sales and marketing people. It offers packages of paid-for extras and add-ons for each of these target markets and promotes them relentlessly, largely by on-screen prompts and email. I have been on the receiving end of a few comments on the lines of "Can't believe Electric Marketing is still

GDPR sure has been a long time coming. We’ve been worrying about the effects of the new Data Protection legislation from Europe since 2011. We are now a year away from the deadline of 25 May 2018 to comply. And Brexit won’t save us. For consumer marketers there are big changes but for b2b marketing, changes need to be made but they are not too onerous. And if you already comply with current legislation, you will find yourself with a pretty short to-do list for GDPR. Electric Marketing has prepared this guide to GDPR for b2b marketing. It focuses on what is relevant for b2b marketing. The key

Target The UK's Importers And Exporters With These Mailing Lists Brexit talks have begun and the UK is committed to leaving the EU. While smaller, nimbler companies can afford a "wait and see" approach, the UK's largest corporates are making plans, and contingency plans, to change how they operate, no matter what the Brexit deal will be. Pretty much all companies will eventually go through a process of adjustment post-Brexit; the UK's importers and exporters will likely get there first. These companies are examining their supply chains, pricing imports from outside the EU, looking at currency

Mailing Lists Of Innovative & Disruptive Companies Our new mailing lists feature companies who are pioneers in their field: young, ambitious start-ups, companies with an invention to bring to market and companies with new ways of working. Why go after these companies? Apart from the excitement of working with innovative, passionate teams? Apart from being in at the beginning with a future star and all the financial rewards that could bring? Many of these companies are, at present, operating under the radar of your competitors. They are not on the lists that everyone else is using. And so they