250,000 decision makers
88,000 organisations
118,000 UK sites
Local/central government
NHS/GPs/dentists/care homes
Further & higher education
Home » Marketing Databases » Direct Mailing lists » Public sector mailing list

Personal data for contacts in a wide range of publicly-funded organisations

Connect with budget-holding decision makers within public authorities with our comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date public sector mailing list.

Use our database to run direct mail campaigns to:

  • Care Homes
  • Central Government
  • Dentists
  • Further and Higher Education
  • Housing Associations
  • Local Government
  • MP’s and Lords
  • NHS
  • Parish Councils

How small businesses use our databases

We always prefer to provide our clients with insight into and relevant data for their marketing purposes.

Your account manager will speak with you first about what you do and which organisations your products and services will be of the greatest benefit to.

The data will be provided on a 12month licence, during which you can use your list as often as you like

Over your year with us, your account manager is there to provide expert advice and to help you make the greatest return from your investment in our public sector mailing list.

How small businesses use our databases

More Than Words guidance: If you don’t have the experience or infrastructure to carry out your own direct mail campaigns, please ask us about our managed email marketing campaigns to the public sector, and telemarketing campaigns to the public sector.

Generate more leads and sales from public body budget holders

Technological advances have seen email and social media marketing rise to prominence in recent years.

But marketers are more recently seeing a resurgence in the popularity of direct mail marketing campaigns.

A direct mail campaign can provide significant returns and build your company’s credibility in the minds of these important buyers.

The DMA recently reported that 57% of direct mail communications are opened.

This is an impressive metric when compared to the 21.33% average open rate of email marketing messages, as analysed by MailChimp .

Our team share their approach to generating the maximum return on your investment in marketing to the Government and local authorities.

generate leads from the public sector

Define your audience

Procurement within any public sector organisation tends to be founded on trust.

For the most part, these contracts will go to those businesses considered “trusted suppliers” – relationships earned over time.

Contacts within a public sector body will be most interested in giving an opportunity to suppliers that know their needs well.

More Than Words‘ mailing list includes personal information for over 250,000 budget holders and influencers.

This can form the basis of your research.

For the greatest success, you should segment your list according to the specific needs of each local authority or public function.

You can group contacts by characteristics including:

  • location,
  • job title,
  • purchasing responsibilities, and
  • organisation size.

Personalise your message

As mentioned previously, relationships are fundamental to winning contracts within this sector – “hard sell” tactics don’t work in this market.

Buyers want to work with companies that demonstrate industry knowledge, innovation and an interest in working with their organisation specifically.

Personalisation greatly improves the response and open rates for your direct mail communication, and it’s easy to do.

Using your segmented list, you can take your standard direct mail message and alter it to address the motivations of each sub-group.

Write persuasive content

The final goal of any direct marketing campaign is to persuade recipients to take a specific, measurable course of action.

To do this, your direct mail message must include three basic elements:

  • a call to action,
  • enough information to persuade the recipient to perform the desired action, and
  • clear instructions on how they can respond.

A call to action (CTA) tells your recipient the desired course of action you want them to take after opening your mail.

This could be anything from making a purchase to calling your business or booking a consultation.

Remember, accessibility is important, so clear instructions are necessary to ensure that your targets carry out this action.

Make your marketing strategy measurable

Direct mail is not as easily measurable as digital marketing.

Nevertheless, successfully optimising your direct mail campaign relies on having measurable goals.

Decide what your objectives are for each campaign, then keep track of every customer action taken so that you can make adjustments and refine your strategy over time.

Record when visitors respond to your CTA via offer codes or a campaign-specific landing page or tailored URL.

Public sector mailing lists - FAQ

The public sector mailing list you purchase from More Than Words is a database containing the postal address contact details for decision makers within the organisations and departments you choose.

Your database is licensed to you for 12 months meaning that you can run multiple direct mail marketing campaigns over the course of the year.

You have two choices available to you on how you actually run your campaign – do it yourself or involve third parties.

If the campaign you want to run only involves contacting a few dozen or a couple of hundred decision makers, you may wish to do this using your existing resources – staff, printing equipment, franking machine, and so on.

This will be time consuming but it will be cheaper for your company than using third party companies.

For larger campaigns running into many hundreds or thousands of recipients, you will probably save a lot of time and money by outsourcing all or most of the work to other companies.

The third parties you’ll need to engage with on your campaign will include a:

  • copywriter – copywriters create the text used on your sales letter and in any supporting material you include in your envelope
  • designer – your designer will be responsible for the appearance of your sales letter and supporting materials
  • printing company – they will take the raw graphical files produced by your designer and print them off in the required number
  • mailing house – mailing houses are responsible for inserting the materials outputted by your printing company and taking advantage of the reduced postal charges offered by Royal Mail and other carriers on larger volumes

The information contained on each record on our public sector mailing list includes:

Contact details

  • Title, first name, last name, initial
  • Job title
  • Postal address (and whether or not they work from their organisation’s main site)
  • Known highest education qualifications
  • Seniority
  • Name of the organisation the contact works for
  • The name of the department the contact works for

Organisational details

  • Organisation name
  • Type of organisation (for example, local government, central government, NHS, QUANGOs, education, and so on)
  • Type of department (for example, metropolitan council, acute trust, and so on)
  • Number of employees
  • Annual spend of the organisation
  • Economic Planning Region to which the organisation belongs

In addition although not on every field, there are useful notes on each organisation including information o department changes, departmental mergers and so on.

For care homes, information is provided on…

  • the type of home and
  • the capacity of a home

….for an additional charge.

Our database contains information on the number of students for each college or university shown in bandings.

For an additional charge, we can populate each record on Housing Association contacts with the following information where available:

  • type of tenants,
  • type of housing,
  • number of units or houses owned/managed,
  • whether the association is currently building new homes or units, and
  • the name of a parent organisation (where applicable).

Across our list of boroughs in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, we can provide for an additional charge per record:

  • the population served,
  • the controlling political party,
  • the last time political control changed hands,
  • the next election date,
  • the official LA code,
  • the number of seats within an LA, and
  • the name of the ward represented by a councillor.

For the NHS, we can provide you with for an additional charge per record:

  • the population covered (shown in bandings),
  • the number of GPs within a practice, and
  • the official code for the practice.

When speaking with our account manager, please ask us to select the parish councils to include on your database of the size you want.

For an additional charge, we can share the population figure we have on each record we supply you with.

In order to keep the costs as low as possible on your direct mail campaign, you should only purchase decision maker contact details where you can demonstrate to those decision makers how your products and services:

  • improve the quality of outcomes delivered by a public sector organisation,
  • save money in the provision of services, or
  • allow them to offer additional services which they could not offer because of constraints placed on them by limitations of the products and services they are currently using.

Although direct mail marketing offers impressive returns on investments, the actual return you make is partly dependent on the cost of organising and executing those campaigns in the first place.

It’s better to restrict the number of contacts whose details you purchase to 2,000 where you know there will be an interest instead of buying 10,000 where the motivation to purchase is not clear to you.

Yes – please ask your account manager about adding email data to your public sector mailing list when you call.

Email data is asked for by clients much more frequently than postal data because it’s possible to run twelve email campaigns to public sector decision makers for the price of one postal mail campaign on large enough volumes.

We sell a variety of bespoke public sector email lists (including GP email lists and our NHS email database) – let us know how we can help you.

Yes – we have over 200,000 direct telephone numbers for public sector decision makers on our calling list.

You can purchase them for your company’s use or, if you’d prefer us to call decision makers on your behalf, please ask your account manager about our telemarketing campaigns to the public sector.

Because you’re communicating with decision makers offering for sale products and services which benefit the organisations they work for rather than them personally, you can continue to use any public sector data you already possess which you have gathered yourself.

You have a legitimate interest under GDPR to contact public sector decision makers in these circumstances.

Please make sure that, if you purchased public sector contact data from a third party supplier, your licence allows continued usage.

No – you’ll need to relicense the data for another 12 months’ usage from us one year and a day on from the time you originally purchased the data.

You are allowed however to stay in touch with decision makers who have contacted you as a result of receiving direct mail from you under the following two conditions:

  • if a contact has purchased your products and services from you or
  • if a contact has entered into dialogue with you about your products and services but no sale has taken place yet.

How to buy public sector mailing lists from More Than Words

Get in touch with More Than Words Marketing

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form and let us know what you want to achieve with the public sector mailing lists you purchase from us.

We’re open during office hours between Monday and Friday.

We’re available on 0330 010 8300 or you can email our mailing lists team by clicking here .

Contact us about our public sector mailing list

To speak with one of our account managers, please call us on 0330 010 8300, click here to email us, or fill in the form below and we’ll get straight back in touch with you.