Electric Marketing Blog

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 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

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

For 30 years the UK Government has pursued a policy of attracting inward investment. From the Nissan factory in Sunderland to the new 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. In recent years House of Fraser has sold an 89% stake to Chinese conglomerate Sanpower before coming back under UK ownership, while high streets host overseas retailers Muji and Uniqlo (Japan), Zara and Mango (Spain) and H&M (Sweden). Wind back to the 1980s and the high street looked quite

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

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

It is not hard to find a business which has had a bad experience of buying an email list. And there are plenty of bloggers who preach building your own email list organically by getting people to sign up on your website. This is good eMarketing practice but building a sizeable list of clients, prospects and interested parties can take years. If you aren't sure whether buying an email list is right for your company, ask yourself if your business fits into any of these categories. Your business is a new start up with a handful of happy customers and you want to find more customers. Quickly. Your