Our extensive public sector list with accurate decision maker email addresses

Our 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.

We have email addresses for budget-holding decision makers in:

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

We licence data to you for 12 months’ usage giving you time to educate the public sector decision makers and influencers you target about:

• your company,
• its products and services, and
• its unique selling points.

During the year, you have full and free access to support from your account manager as well as our in-house technical and advertising teams.

1. Choosing the right public sector email addresses

Who do you need to connect with to increase your chances of creating new leads and winning new orders from the public sector?

Email marketing to public sector contacts works well for both:

• complex tender-led procedures involving multiple decision-makers and influencers, and
• smaller, ad-hoc orders (sub-£100,000) not requiring the level of scrutiny or involvement of higher-value deals put out to tender.

Your More Than Words’ account manager will help you to identify the right decision-makers and influencers within the organisations most likely to need your product or service contained on our public sector data lists.

2. Accuracy guarantees and More Than Words’ support

For the 12 months you use the data, please direct your concerns, comments, and questions to your account manager.

Their role is to ensure that you have best possible experience working with us – they make sure that what you want us to do is done correctly and quickly.

In addition to the support of your account manager, we offer two further layers of support:

1. technical and usage support – our in-house team of data managers provide any assistance you need to use the database in the way you want, and
2. marketing support – send us the email you want to use on your public sector marketing campaigns and we’ll get back to you (normally within a day) with our feedback and any suggestions for improvement

Our public sector email addresses are also covered by an accuracy guarantee.

Failure by us to hit those guarantees triggers either a pro-rata refund or we’ll supply you with replacement records.

3. Using the data

When you purchase public sector emails from us, your licence allows to use them 12 times during the year following your order date.

You may only email the recipients 12 times during the year – additional sends will incur additional licensing charges.

Following the 12 month period, you must relicence the data if you wish to continue using it.

An exception to this rule is that you can continue to contact decision makers on the database we’ve supplied who have initiated contact with you as a result of responding to one of your campaigns.

Find out more

Please get in touch with us to let us know about your business and the products and services you sell to the public sector.

You can contact our email databases team on 0330 010 3495 or by email.

When you speak with us, please ask us about our managed email marketing to the public sector service – this is more suitable for your company if you have no experience in sending out email campaigns.

You may also want to ask us about our bespoke telemarketing to the public sector campaigns.

Generating the greatest return from marketing to public sector email addresses

More Than Words’ public sector email address list offers your company a proven and direct way of selling your products and services into a complex market.

Content Marketing Institute’s 2019 B2B Content Marketing Research reveals that almost 90% of marketers use email addresses as an inexpensive and effective way to target potential customers.

Research also shows that this number is consistently on the rise.

Pitching a product or service to organisations within the public sector is, understandably, daunting.

However, with the government’s recent commitment to spending £1 in every £3 on SMEs by 2022, there has never been a better time to put public sector email addresses to good use.

Public sector buying cycles are longer and more complex but the rewards for successfully marketing to this market are:

• financially significant, high-profile long-term contracts and
• added credibility and prestige for your company at large.

The following tips will help you to get started:

1. Understand the sector
2. Who are your contacts?
3. Example: selling to the NHS
4. The marketing service standard
5. The long game: employing multiple marketing touches

Understand the sector

As a private company dealing with the public sector, you must carry out specific research in advance to better understand the specific issues affecting the organisations you’re marketing to.

In addition, procurement practices vary depending on the types of public sector organisation you’re marketing to, including:

• central government: departments and their agencies,
• NHS: hospital trusts, ambulance trusts, GP surgeries,
• local government: councils and local authority services including police and fire services,
• further and higher education: colleges and universities,
• schools: state, independent and academy primary and secondary schools, and,
• private- and charity-run public services: Housing Associations, care homes, health and social Care.

 Boundaries can also be blurred with some organisations (like Housing Associations) which provide public services but which are partly privately funded.

Get to know how the sector that you are interested in works so that you can approach the contacts on your email list with a full understanding of how their area finds, accepts and pays for private services.

Who are your contacts?

Once you understand the sector and have obtained your specific list of public sector email addresses, you should research the contacts on your list and get to know the individuals.

More Than Words provides email addresses for high-level personnel and decision-makers on our databases, making it easier for you to research your contacts.

Nevertheless, you will likely need extensive knowledge of their specific area to be considered credible.

Look at the structure of the sector and organisation that they belong to and find out who the budget holders and influencers are.

Most public sector organisations have a pre-approved list of suppliers that they usually buy from.

Decisions outside of this procurement list will be made by those in senior positions under very specific circumstances such as an immediate requirement or in response to a very recent situation.

As a supplier, you will want to use your list of contacts to find out which is the best course of action for approaching them.

Try to be as clear as possible about whether your products and services are tendered for or whether decision makers can procure them outside the tendering process. 

For example, let’s consider selling to the NHS

The NHS is an immense organisation with innumerable separate departments and organisations within it.

For this reason, marketing teams often find it challenging to generate leads from the correct decision makers for their sales teams to follow up.

The best way to draw attention from the right purchasers within the NHS is to work out which of the various departments have a need for your product or service and then use email marketing to target the people who would use your products and services on a regular basis.

 As an example, a business which designs and manufactures mobile hoists for use with disabled patients might directly contact primary care workers and managers with the benefits of their product instead of the procurement department.

Doing so would places the advantages of their product in front of those who actually understand why those details are important.

These contacts then act as ‘sponsors’ for the product, bringing it in front of the buyers and decision makers and bestowing your products and services with their own, more trusted, seal of approval.

Once you have succeeded in selling a product or service to one department of the NHS, the same process will need to be repeated for the next as each department exists often as its own self-functioning entity.

Other than the profit you make from each sale, the major benefit of having the NHS as a customer is the prestige this connection gives you with other businesses.

It can be as hard selling to other businesses as it is to the public sector.

To be able to demonstrate that you’re an approved NHS supplier to B2B decision makers gives these decision makers extra reason to have confidence in your company and its produces and services. 

Email marketing best practice

GDPR guidelines came into force in 2018 changing the ways in which we are able to use and share data.

More Than Words only provides public sector email lists which fully conform to GDPR standards.

There are certain best practices we recommend that you follow when email marketing to the public sector including: 

• engage in meaningful and necessary conversation. No hard sales pitches!
• only send the same marketing email once
• do not use diary invitations as a way to begin unsolicited marketing,
• understand that your contact receives hundreds of marketing emails each week and it may take time for them to get to yours, and,
• do not contact the assistants of senior managers claiming a business relationship with them that you do not have.

 The key to remember when approaching any public body is that you are attempting to break into what can appear as a somewhat ‘exclusive’ sector.

Building an honest and authentic relationship with the individuals on your public sector email address list is the most productive marketing strategy you can employ.

High-level professionals in this area will not respond well to standard marketing tactics designed to grab attention and using them means that your company is more likely to add you to block lists.

The long game: employing multiple marketing touches

More than any other market, the public sector requires patience in lead nurturing in order to close a deal.

The buying cycle for public sector organisation is very long with early consultations starting up to 24 months before procurement.

This means that the classic and legitimate mass-email tactics of most marketers simply do not work here.

You need to choose your target companies carefully.

You also need to put a lot of time and energy into nurturing those leads and building those relationships.

Procurement managers look for companies which display a high level of insight and professionalism into the sector and how it works as well as how their product or service could benefit their organisations.

A campaign of carefully planned marketing touches is key in using your public sector email addresses database to its full potential.

Marketing touches refer to the various ways in which a business interacts with a potential customer before a sale.

Marketing touches include exposure to your company and its products and services through email marketing, social media, direct mail and even in-person meetings.

Often, your very first email contact with a public sector organisation is the start of that relationship.

With each marketing touch, you should:

• ask questions – this has the dual benefit of engaging the recipient and gathering information for you to use later down the line.
• connect with multiple contacts – use your prospecting communications to connect with not only buyers but also those who sign off on decisions. Every opportunity is attached to a person.
• avoid the ‘hard sell’ – we can not reiterate enough that this is the easiest way to lose the interest of anyone working in the public sector.

Public sector email addresses - FAQ

Which formats are the public sector email address database sent to me in?

We send your data by email or via secure transfer.

We can send the data to you in one of the following formats:

• Microsoft Excel,
• Microsoft Access, and
• comma-separated values (CSV).

What support do you offer to clients post-purchase?

Your account is overseen by an experienced manager whose job is to coordinate all your communications with us so that you experience the best possible service.

All clients receive a full 12 months’ worth of telephone- and email-based support from our in-house team of technical experts.

If you like, we can also review any email or other promotional literature you propose to send out to the public sector to offer constructive feedback.

How accurate is the data and what guarantees do you offer?

Data accuracy is a significant factor influencing the success of your email campaign so we make sure that our list is continuously updated.

We offer pro-rata refunds on data if we miss the following benchmarks:

• 85% email deliverability (excluding soft bounces)
• 92% telephone number accuracy
• 98% postal address accuracy

Which standard information is provided on my records?

The following information is contained on your public sector email database:

• Contact Salutation – Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms, Dr – etc
• Contact First Name – the contact’s first name
• Contact Last Name – the contact’s last name
• Contact Initial – the contact’s first name abbreviated to the first letter
• Job Title – job title of the contact
• Qualifications – educational or vocational qualifications the contact is known to have
• Town/City – the town or city in which the contact is based
• County – the postal county in which the contact is based
• Region – the Economic Planning Region in which the contact is based (London/South East/etc)
• Email address – the email address of the contact
• Main Email – the main e-mail address for the organisation
• Seniority – the contact’s level of Management of the contact within the organisation
• Main Site – indicates is the person is located at the headquarters or main site for the organization they work for
• Department – the name of the internal department which the contact works in
• Name of the organisation – The official legal title of the organisation
• Type – General area of the government – eg Local Government, Regional Government, Central Government, NHS, QUANGOs, etc
• Organisation Type Higher – Specific type of organisation – eg NHS Trust, Local Authority, etc.
• Organisation Type Lower – Used for Further Categorisation of Organisation Types – eg Acute Trust, Metropolitan Council, etc.
• Number of Employees – Number of Employees employed across the organisation
• Annual Spend – The spend of the organisation, shown in millions.
• Organisation Notes – Useful information we find about the organisation – forthcoming changes/mergers etc
• Website URL Website address for the organisation
• Region – The Economic Planning Region in which the contact is based (London/South East/etc)

What additional information is available on the records I purchase?

We can append the following additional information to some or all of your records for an additional charge.

For care homes, information is provided on:

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

For FE and HE information, we share the number of students for each college or university shown in bandings.

For housing associations, we provide information on:

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

For local government, we provide:

• the population served,
• the controlling political party,
• the last time political control changed hands,
• the next eletion 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 provide:

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

For parish councillors, we share the population covered by the parish council displayed in bandings.

Can you send the emails to the public sector for me?

We can send one or more of your email campaigns to the public sector data you select from our file.

To find out more, please click for more information on our email marketing campaigns to the public sector.

Can you carry out telemarketing to the public sector for me?

Yes – our team is particularly experienced in contacting public sector officials and councillors.

Click the link for more information on our telemarketing to the public sector campaigns for clients.

What are standard requests for clients looking for public sector email addresses?

We supply a wide range of public sector data lists to clients including but not limited to:

• Government email addresses for UK departments
• NHS email database
• Local authority mailing list (including email addresses)
• GP email list
• Housing Association email addresses
• List of practice managers email addresses

Decision making structures vary from public sector organisation to public sector organisation.

In addition, the job titles of decision makers responsible for purchasing your products and services varies from public sector organisation to public sector organisation.

Let us know more about the products and services you want to sell.

We’ll then get back to you within 24 hours with a full breakdown of the decision makers we’ve identified together with a competitive quote.

How do I order public sector email addresses from More Than Words?

To order public sector emails from More Than Words, simply call us on 0330 010 8300 or click here to email us.

The UK’s most accurate, detailed, and comprehensive public sector database

Looking to get into the public sector for the first time and need help?

Alternatively, are you looking for an new public sector data supplier?

More Than Words’ service is suitable for all companies, particularly SMEs.

Our public sector email marketing databases contains over 130,000 budget-holding decision makers and our service enables much easier access to these traditionally hard-to-reach buyers in ways they’ll respond positively to.

You select just the targets you want from our best-researched list of public sector buyers with back-up advertising and marketing support from us.

We even supply many public sector organisations ourselves and the knowledge we hold within our company about public sector procurement could make the difference to your success.

Contact our public sector email marketing team

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

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form and let us know which products or services you wish to sell into the public sector and we then help you identify the right contacts.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can contact our UK public sector database team by clicking here to email us.

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