Use our comprehensive email marketing data to sell your products and services to businesses, schools, and the public sector

For the best chance of creating the greatest return on email marketing campaigns, using the right email databases is essential.

76% of UK businesses believe that email marketing as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ when finding new leads and new customers.

The average return on email marketing in 2012 was £21.48 – now it is over £43.

59% of people claim that email marketing influences what they buy.

66% of marketers told the Data and Marketing Association (UK) that email delivers an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ return on their investment.

The More Than Words’ email marketing team have over 150 years’ collective experience between them in the sector.

Underpinning any successful email campaign are the following four factors:

1. selecting the decision makers to email with the highest likely interest in your products and services,
2. the quality of the database used,
3. the number of times clients are contacted, and
4. the content of your emails.

More Than Words’ offers clients three extensive, up-to-date, accurate, and quality-guaranteed email databases to choose from.

Contact us to identify which decision makers you need to get in touch with about your products and services.

What’s on our email databases

We maintain and update three major databases for clients to choose from.

Please click on the links below to be taken through to the databases of most commercial value to your company.

B2B email database – More Than Words’ extensive, continually-updated, and GDPR-compliant B2B email database contains over 590,100 UK business decision makers for you to choose from.

School email address list – over 40,000 regularly-updated, accurate, and GDPR-compliant email addresses for state-funded and independent schools across the four countries of Britain

Public sector email addresses– our public sector email addresses database contains over 130,000 public sector decision maker email addresses (plus an additional 43,000 organisation email addresses) across 88,000 organisations at over 118,000 sites across the UK.

Why choose the More Than Words’ email database for your company?

12 months’ usage licence

When you invest in an email database from More Than Words, you have a licence to use it for 12 months after purchase (a maximum of one email per calendar month).

Over 12 months, use your email database to:

• increase awareness of value offered by your products and services,
• credibility and trust in your company,
• build a pipeline for your sales team, and
• benefit from immediate enquiries from decision makers at the point of purchase.

The data you invest in is GDPR- and PECR-compliant and it’s updated regularly both by More Than Words and our media partners.

Guaranteed to be accurate and compliant

We offer a 85% deliverability guarantee on our email data (excluding soft bounces) – should we fail to hit our accuracy levels, we’ll either refund you pro-rata or issue you with replacement records.

Support services

From the time of purchase, your account will be handled by a specific and named manager with at least 5 years’ experience in email marketing.

Their role is as your representative within More Than Words and they make sure that what you ask of us is done quickly, efficiently, and correctly.

In addition, you’ll have access to our technical team – they’re on hand to help you with any help you need to use the database.

Backing your account manager and the technical team up is our advertising support team.

We want to make sure that you get the maximum possible return on your investment in our service.

Prior to sending an email to the decision makers on your email database, send it to our advertising support team instead.

Get their feedback on the email you propose to send – you’ll hear back from the team within 24 hours.

Ordering the right email database for your business

We’d appreciate the opportunity to find out more about your company, what you sell, and the markets you’re targeting.

To speak with one of our account managers, please call our marketing databases team on 0330 010 8300 or click here to email us.

9 ways to the maximum return on your investment possible when using our email databases for marketing

The first two months are about trying to cover the cost of your investment.

The next 10 months are about building your customer database and orders as quickly and as profitably as possible.

So what can you do to increase responses from your email database?

1. Assume no knowledge and don’t use jargon/specialist language

We don’t use jargon and technical terms specific to an industry when designing email adverts for our clients.

The reason for this is that audiences may not have your depth of knowledge in what it is you actually do.

If they don’t understand your advert, you’ve lost them and the opportunity to get an enquiry with that particular email.

Use phrases your target audiences are familiar with. Use words that they would use regularly and will easily comprehend.

That way, they won’t feel alienated or confused. The plainer your English, the better.

2. Write the advert with benefits, not features

Your target audiences do not want to know everything about

• you and your company,
• how many machines you have and
• how long you’ve been in business.

If they do, they can find it on your website after they’ve been sufficiently interested enough to click on your email because it’s that interesting to them.

All recipients really want and need to know is what you leave them with when the job is completed.

Don’t waste your valuable connection time telling recipients things they really don’t need to know.

Instead, explain the benefits they gain from you – for example do you save them time, money and/or aggravation?

Your targets only want to hear you can do for them.

They don’t want to read paragraph after paragraph about your company’s history.

3. Using social proof in your email marketing

Social proof is a demonstration of value to your potential customer by showing the experiences and satisfaction levels of your existing customers.

Its importance is down to the fact that no-one likes to make a mistake when buying something.

For all companies (large and small), the likelihood of being able to make a success depends heavily on credibility.

Link to testimonials, case studies, and any white papers you’ve had written in your email marketing – they are extremely powerful tools when it comes to strengthening your credibility.

Testimonials strengthen your trustworthiness and your business’s trustworthiness. Decision makers with companies, schools, and the public sector will not do business with you if they don’t trust you yet.

4. Offer flexibility in payment methods

If you can offer accounts, this is a huge advantage.

Going further than standard accounts, many businesses are used to getting new goods and services on 30 day approval – in other words, send them out what they want with an invoice to pay within 30 days.

One possibility is to allow them as well to return it with no penalty within the 30 days – this may really increase responsiveness although there is a higher risk of returns and we understand that many of our clients don’t want to take that risk.

If you can accept debit or credit cards, this is also very helpful.

Businesses paying each other by this method is becoming more and more common.

In fact, credit and debit cards are paid 19 days faster than standard invoices

There is less and less resistance to paying business invoices by credit or debit card. And in order for your business to benefit from that, you need to accept the most popular types of card.

Speaking on the Xero blog, Sue Pak, Xero’s New Zealand Head of Accounting stated that “We’re all busy, so if a client can pay online when they receive the invoice, they don’t have to remember to pay later…The sooner you receive the money (from your client), the sooner that money is working for your business.”

We would strongly recommend that you approach your bank or a merchant services provider for the ability to accept debit and credit cards.

5. Don’t give the customer too much choice

Except for catalogue-style emails (on these, if there are 25 links or more, clickthrough rates can increase by 12%), make the focus of any marketing message narrow and focused.

A marketing message is a silent salesman.

A salesperson’s job is to influence a potential customer to buy a particular product or service at a particular price within a particular timeframe.

If a telesales person, no matter how experienced, was given 10 different things to introduce to a customer and then get the customer to choose from them, it would not work.

The same sales principles apply in advertising messages as they do on the phone.

6. Demonstrate the value of what’s being offered

Always strongly emphasise the value you deliver to clients with your products and services in your email.

Unless a recipient feels that what you are offering has value, they won’t take action.

If you can and it makes commercial sense, load your email with offers. The offers should be as risk-free for the customer as possible.

7. Give them a reason to need it now

36% of companies using email marketing use time-constrained offers – giving a discount to buy within a certain timescale.

Customers using this method say it gives the best and quickest return on investment they get from any form of advertising or marketing.

Ask your account manager how to work this into your email marketing.

8. Let the customer know how to contact you and let them know how you’d prefer them to contact you

Always try to get them on the phone if you can.

You can build relationships with people on the phone.

Make your phone number really large, your email address large  and your website/fax number small.

9. Market to customers for the 12 months your data is licensed to you

45% of companies using email marketing say they get their best return on investment and strengthen bonds with customers by regular, once-a-month marketing.

If you buy data from us and only use it once or twice, you might as well set fire to your money.

As time goes on, your recognition, value and credibility to the people on the database we sold you goes up and up and up.

At the same time, so do the inbound enquiries, the sales and the buzz about your business.

Do it once a month. Call us for free and we’ll show you how.

Email databases UK - FAQ

What is an email database?

An email database is an electronically-held record, most often in Microsoft Excel or comma-separated value files, of email addresses.

Most marketers separate email databases into two classifications:

• self-generated lists – email lists of your customers and prospects (people or decision makers who have left you their details but who have not purchased from you yet), and
• bought-in lists – email lists you purchase from companies like More Than Words.

Self-generated lists always produce a higher return on investment than bought-in lists.

However, they can take significant amounts of time to build into sizeable databases capable of producing a noticeable return on your investment.

Bought-in lists generate lower returns on investment.

However, because More Than Words and/or one of our media partners has invested significant time, money, and resources into building these substantial databases, you can contact similar or greater numbers of prospects using bought-in lists from your first campaign.

The gathering, verification, and sale of email addresses for corporate subscribers (in other words, business decision makers, head teachers, and public sector officials) is completely legal under GDPR rules introduced in 2018.

GDPR however effectively outlawed the gathering, verification, and sale of email addresses for “natural persons” – in other words, people acting in their own private capacity.

What is our best advice on how to purchase marketing mailing lists for direct mail?

Our best advice on how to purchase mailing lists is led by advising basic common sense.

You need to satisfy yourself first that the companies you are dealing with are fully compliant with both GDPR and PECR. Ask to see their current policies on both issues.

You should also make sure that their email databases are segmented in such a way as to allow very narrow focused targeting.

For example, we split the businesses on our B2B email database into over 2,000 categories. If we only split them into 50 different categories, the likelihood is that we’d sell your email addresses of decision makers with absolutely no current or future need for your products and services.

We would also recommend that you enquire about accuracy guarantees and the number of times during a year that a record is checked for accuracy before making the decision to proceed with a given supplier.

How to find mailing lists suitable for your business?

The most successful marketing lists for your business will be accurate, compliant with all current legislation, and contain the decision makers within businesses, schools, and the public sector

On how to get email mailing lists for your business which have the greatest chance of return, you should make sure that they are also fully compliant, regularly updated, and only contain the contact details of decision makers within companies with a need for your products or services.

Why should we pay for your service when we can find a free email database for UK companies online?

The accuracy of your email database has a direct impact on how successful the campaigns you run off it will be.

B2B data decays at an average rate of 22.5% per year – the rate of decay within school email lists and public sector email lists are smaller.

However, if you decided to use a free email database you’d found online that was as accurate as possible when first published but which was now four years old, the maximum level of accuracy of that database would be 36%.

So, for every 100 emails you send out, 64 would bounce or be addressed to the wrong person.

ISPs and stop-spam organisations regularly buy domain names of companies which have ceased trading with a view to tracking which companies are sending non-GDPR compliant email campaigns to out-of-data email lists.

If you send to an address subsequently bought by an ISP or a stop-spam organisation which is contained in your free B2B email list, you are at risk of losing your normal email account and potentially having your website taken down by your ISP.

What’s the best way to use direct mailing lists?

The best way to use direct mailing lists, including email databases, is to use them often.

It takes time for your target audience to build trust in your company and its products and services.

Repeated exposure to your company builds the trust required for the decision makers you’re contacting to get in touch with you.

Are your email databases GDPR-compliant?

Yes – our B2B email database, school email address list, and public sector email addresses are all fully GDPR and PECR compliant.

What information do I receive in each email record?

The information contained on our B2B email database, school email address list, and public sector email addresses database varies to reflect the different decision making structures within each sector.

Please contact one of our account managers for more information or click on the links above and scroll down to the FAQ sections on each page for a full breakdown.

Do you offer CEO email lists as a database?

We do offer CEO emails on our B2B email database.

The current classification on decision makers whose details we hold are:

• Company Leader
• Engineering
• Facilities Decision Maker
• Finance Decision Maker
• Fleet Decision Maker
• Health and Safety
• HR Decision Maker
• Marketing Decision Maker
• Most Senior Contact
• Operations Manager
• Purchasing Decision Maker
• Sales Decision Maker
• Telecommunications Decision Maker

Within schools, we have, in the vast majority of cases, the head teacher’s name.

Where the contact we have is not of the head teacher, the contact we hold will be the school business manager.

For the public sector email address list, we list contacts by job title and seniority.

When choosing decision makers in the public sector for your email database, we generally select by purchasing responsibilities and seniority as the internal structures of public sector departments differ greatly from each other.

What’s on your school emails database?

For a full breakdown of what’s on our school emails database, please click here.

Do you sell a UK consumer email database?

We do not sell a B2C email database product because we believe that they are incompatible with GDPR and the Information Commissioner’s Office’s guidelines on obtaining and maintaining consent.

This is our interpretation of the current legislation and guidelines – not all email database providers agree with our interpretation meaning that they are available for sale.

Even if this were not our interpretation, the management team and sales team at More Than Words have never sold consumer email addresses out of a concern for the potential damage to clients’ online reputation if they carried out such a campaign.

Can I add telemarketing data onto my email database?

Yes. Please ask your account manager for more information when you call.

Depending on the source of the data, we may be able to add telemarketing data to your email database at no charge.

Can I add postal data to my email database?

Yes. Please ask your account manager for more information when you call.

Depending on the source of the data, we may be able to add postal data to your email database at no charge.

What’s the situation for GDPR and our existing emailing lists?

GDPR has complicated the situation greatly for companies and their marketing departments.

On every email you send out to existing customers or prospects, you must always give them the opportunity to opt out of receiving further emails from you.

If you have email contact details from consumers, sole traders, or businesspeople within unincorporated partnerships who have not bought from you yet, you should not continue to email them.

Can I use the data after the 12 months’ licence has expired?

When your 12 months’ licence has expired, you are no longer allowed to use the data to email prospects.

You will need to purchase another 12 month licence to continue to do so.

Your 12 month licence allows you to email each contact once a month.

If you wish to email recipients more than once, you will need to seek permission from your account manager and an additional charge will be made.

Neither of these rules apply to decision makers on your email list who have initiated contact with you after receiving a promotional email from you.

You can continue to email those decision makers as often as you like however please always remember

How to purchase bespoke UK email databases from More Than Words

We’d appreciate the opportunity to find out more about your business, the products and services you sell, and the target markets you wish to get in touch with.

Our team has over 100 years’ collective experience in running email marketing campaigns for clients and we hope to share that experience with you in helping you select your email database and make the most out of it.

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form and let us know what you want to achieve with the email address database you purchase from us.

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

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There is plenty of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk from North Shields Metro station.