Use our comprehensive and accurate list of school email addresses to effectively market to the UK education sector

What does “school type” mean?

• all-through – all-through schools are establishments which combine at least two stages of a child’s education, for example primary and secondary together.
• college – usually a smaller institution which offers post-16 education providing tuition for different types of qualifications such as foundation diplomas, bachelors, and top up degrees.
• grammar – originally a UK school teaching Latin, grammar schools are selective schools who intake pupils based on academic achievement but are not fee-paying.
• independent – also known as private schools, independent schools are fee-paying educational institutions. Their pupil intake pupils can vary from nursery-age children to age 18 depending on the size of the school and facilities. They are directed by an independent body as opposed to the UK government and follow their own curriculum.
• nursery – educating 3 to 4 year olds, nurseries are the first step on the education ladder. There is no obligation for children to attend school until age 5 but many parents choose to send their offspring to nursery as it fits in well with their working day.
• preparatory – prep schools are private, fee-paying schools for children from age 7 to 13.
• primary – a primary school, or junior school, is a state school which provides education for children between ages 4 or 5 until 11. They can vary in size and they precede secondary school.
• secondary – secondary schools in the UK educate children from age 11 until either 16 or 18, depending on size and facilities. They facilitate pupils to take their GCSEs and often A levels.
• special – special educational institutions cater for students who require extra help. They may have physical or mental disabilities or they may fall under the SEN learning difficulties umbrella with conditions such as autism or Asperger’s. They will employ specialist staff and have adapted equipment and materials.
• unclassified – awaiting classification
• university – UK universities are a high-level educational institution where students, usually aged 18 and over, can study for degrees or undertake academic research.

The data on our list of UK educational establishments is easy to search through. If you wanted to run separate campaigns to different types of school, the following lists are easy to extract:

• primary school email list
• high school email list
• public school email list (private school email list)
• nursery school email list
• school principal email list
• school email contact list

There are a number of search parameters you can use to extract specific lists for targeting including:

• current OFSTED rating (including when the last inspection was carried out)
• full postal address
• gender characteristics
• headteacher and other leader name (where available)
• local authority affiliation
• lowest and highest age of pupils
• number of pupils currently on the roll
• postcode (including the ability to search on outer postcode)
• Pupil Premium funding
• religious characteristics
• school capacity
• school type (all-through school, college, grammar school, independent school, nursery school, prep school, primary school, secondary school, special school, university, awaiting classification)
• school website
• SEN provision
• telephone number

In state-funded primary and secondary schools, spending and procurement is either:

• the sole responsibility of the headteacher in conjunction with individual subject or year co-ordinators and/or the Parent Teacher Association or
• the headteacher retains overall responsibility but works in conjunction with a business manager and allocates notional budgets to subject heads.

For primary schools, spending and procurement is the responsibility of the headteacher in conjunction with individual subject or year co-ordinators and/or the Parent Teacher Association.

Co-ordinators (usually within primary schools) tend to be in charge of particular academic years or heads of the following subjects:

• Art,
• IT,
• Citizenship,
• Mathematics,
• English & Literacy,
• Music,
• Geography,
• Physical Education,
• History,
• PSE,
• RE,
• Science,
• Technology, and
• SEN.

Click for our list of primary school email addresses.

Within secondary schools, the headteacher retains overall responsibility but works in conjunction with a business manager and allocates notional budgets to subject heads.

Likely subject heads within secondary schools (and all through schools) include:

• Art & Design,
• Economics,
• Maths,
• Psychology,
• Biology,
• English,
• Media Studies,
• RE,
• Business Studies,
• Food Science,
• Modern Languages,
• Science,
• Careers,
• French,
• Music,
• Sociology,
• Chemistry,
• Geography,
• PE,
• Spanish Language,
• Citizenship Studies,
• German,
• Performing Arts,
• Special Needs,
• Classics,
• History,
• Physics,
• Technology,
• Drama,
• ICT, and
• PSE.

You should direct your marketing of education-related products and services both to the Head Teacher and the relevant co-ordinator or subject head.

Click here for our list of secondary school email addresses.

Independent schools have their own funding sourced mainly through the fees paid by parents alongside other investments and revenue streams. This means their budgets are substantially higher than those of state primary or secondary schools.

It is a highly competitive market as independent schools have extremely high reputations to uphold. As a result, they expect the best from their suppliers and they have the means to pay for it.

As well as having a larger budget, independent schools are often boarding schools. This means they have additional needs as well as the usual educational services and products required for example beds and bathing facilities.

Independent schools also tend to offer a wider range of extra-curricular activities, they may have their own swimming pool or stables. This leaves huge scope for businesses to pitch any number of products or services.

A real benefit of independent schools is their small classes and their focus on children’s individual needs and abilities. They tend to emphasise and nurture a child’s specific talents which may require supplementary materials or services.

We can work together to work out how best to pitch your product or service to the independent school sector in order to gain maximum sales engagement.

Click for more information on our list of independent school email addresses.

General procurement on contract for services like administrative systems, catering, cleaning, facilities management and maintenance, utility supply (gas and electricity), health and safety, HR services, landscape maintenance, IT services and support, marketing, security, and website design and build are handled differently to educational products and services.

The head teachers in primary schools will normally consult with the Parent Teacher Association on these decisions.

In larger primaries and secondary schools, a business manager (part of whose job is to reduce expenditure to release funds for teaching) will solicit for bids. Bids are not solely awarded on price although price is an important factor. For much procurement, the business manager will present a series of options to the headteacher who ultimately has sign off.

For primary schools, you should generally approach the head teacher for non-education-related spending and, for secondary schools, the business manager.

Large capital expenditure projects like building renovation, general building projects, playground construction, and so on again have their own separate purchasing procedures.

Capital expenditure budgets have been diminishing in recent years for both maintained schools and academies (whether part of a multi academy trust or not). Schools with affiliation to a diocese may apply for funding for capex projects separately through them.

You have multiple chances to sell into the schools which form part of multi academy trusts.

Click here for our list of multi academy trusts.

To successfully break into the school marketplace, the three most successful routes are:

• email marketing sent directly to schools inboxes through contact information from our database
• telephone marketing targeting primary and secondary schools
• postal marketing strategies to primary and secondary schools

The first port of call for a successful marketing strategy targeting schools is via email campaign. Being much more environmentally friendly than postal marketing, it is also much quicker and easier to track result-wise.

For the campaign to work, you need to create a strong subject line to initiate the first click after grabbing the recipient’s attention. Remember, a school’s primary inbox will most likely be inundated with any number of emails daily so you need something which will stand out.

There is a 2 second rule – after the subject line has caught the readers eye, you have 1-2 seconds of scan time where the recipient will decide to either read on or press delete.

A further benefit of creating an email campaign for primary or secondary schools is that, once you have the necessary data and a reliable delivery platform, you can build a timely strategy which targets the schools regularly.

Click for more on our UK schools database.

If you’d like us to run campaigns to schools on your behalf, please click for information on our school email marketing campaigns.

Telephone marketing to primary and secondary schools offers a number of different advantages to business as you can gain an immediate response from your target customer.

With this method, you have the opportunity to make face to face appointments with headteachers and co-ordinators within the school. You can also gain first-hand knowledge about what they might be lacking from their current facilities and how it’s impacting them.

It is an instantaneous method of communication which allows you to quickly form a friendly working relationship between your business and the school.

If your company doesn’t currently have the staff required to perform telephone marketing to primary and secondary schools, we are able to provide this service. Please feel free to call us for a no obligation chat about how this might benefit your business.

Click for information on:

• our school calling list and
• telemarketing to schools.

Postal marketing campaigns are still used however are much less common than the earlier discussed email marketing strategies. This is generally due to the environmental implications and financial costs versus ROI.

However, this can work in your advantage because you now have a much lower level of competition and therefore higher rate of being seen. Printed marketing material also has a real impact due to its tangibility.

It may be constructive to your business to purchase our school data in order to utilise the full postal addresses to target local schools or educational institutions. You may wish to target your ideal school customers with an impressive postal marketing campaign and subsequently email lesser obviously potential clients just so you have all bases covered thoughtfully.

You may also wish to consider using both an email campaign alongside a printed advertisement in order for your brand to gain maximum exposure to the target.

Primary and secondary school decision makers regularly make purchases after being made aware of a product or service through a marketing campaign.

Whether approached via email, print marketing or over the telephone, schools do appreciate being told about products, services, and offers that can help them improve their institution or save them money.

As with most forms of marketing, there is an element of luck and timing for some sales to materialise. But we know that continued exposure to a fantastic company will cement what you can offer in the minds of key decision makers and pay off eventually.

It’s true that they may intermittently become frustrated if there has been some over-exposure. With that in mind, its best to remember that, when selling to schools:

• your campaign needs to communicate your understanding of the schools experience, what they might need help with and how you can make their life easier
• you need to be seen more than once to stick in the reader’s mind
• it’s important that, if you use emails, your message is clearly displayed on websites, smartphones and tablets.

The points of contact at your target schools will very likely be under pressure and have particular pain points that you need to be aware of in order to address.

By showing you understand their reality, they are more likely to engage with your company. You need to do this in every email, brochure or call you make to them.

The bottom line is that a school is there to help students learn. All schools want to get the best end of year results – if you can help make that journey easier, they will want to talk to you.

Consider the concise description of:

• exactly what it is you’re offering and where it may best be used
• highlighting pain points a teacher or co-ordinator may be currently addressing and letting them know how you can help aid this
• references to the Government website, the education press, or trade union websites which will put those pain points into a wider context and let the school know they are not alone

The tone of voice you use is highly influential. It needs to be friendly, yet formal. Long gone are the days of hardcore sales pitches – today’s decision makers value trust and helpful advice as opposed to the shouty hard sell.

If your product or service you’re selling is not related to education but to the running of the school, the key points you want to cover include how your company will save the institution money, add to their profits or assist in the conformity to any appropriate current legislation.

As mentioned before, in our experience we have learnt that schools tend to favour buying from companies who they have been exposed to on a number of different occasions. This doesn’t have to be in the same campaign, or via the same method.

A school will believe your brand to be trustworthy and reliable the more times they see you. All businesses, schools included, tend to sift out opportunistic sales pitches which only approach them once – be a brand who keeps coming back to make sure their voice is heard and products are seen.

As with other providers, schools have a tendency to venture in and out of the sales cycle at different times of the year or term. The sales, or buying cycle, refers to the point at which a purchase is either required or imminent.

For example, a school may have an excess of budget to use up towards the end of the summer term for the new school year where they are forced to spend it quickly or else lose it next time round.

Alternatively, they may be tied into a contract with an external cleaning client for 12 months but wish to change at the end of the specified term. If you are actively being seen every month, for example, you have a much higher chance of being considered when the right time comes along for the school to change providers.

As you would expect, the email you use to capture your target’s attention needs to be clean, elegant and concise. It should be structured in a thoughtful way in order for the reader to glean information effortlessly.

Your marketing email for schools will need to look fabulous on all platforms – computer, smartphone and tablets included. This adds authenticity and professionalism to your brand. We would also recommend maintaining continuity of brand logos, colours and fonts across the board.

Essentially, it needs to tell the reader what you are offering, why they need it, and how they can get in touch with you in an aesthetically pleasing way.

One email design

Working with our in-house copy writers and graphic designers, we’ll design an email for your company with purchase of our data list.

Our email designs connect by using a friendly yet engaging tone which edifies your brand and speaks directly to headteachers, business managers and decision makers.

It will contain a strong and carefully considered subject line in order to maximise attention and opens. We will describe the benefits of your service or product and how it can aid the school in any problematic areas they might be experiencing.

Finally, it will include a strong CTA link in order for the reader to make the important click-through to make contact with your business.

The email will also:

• conform to your company’s aesthetics, branding and ethos
• be designed in HMTL5 in order to be viewed correctly on all devices
• be delivered via our trusted broadcasting methods from our servers, maximising delivery rate

Full campaign management and consecutive reporting

You can count on us to manage your campaign from start to finish including reports of who has clicked through emails in order to follow any potential leads.

On our managed school email marketing campaigns, we will ensure to work with you to:

• inform you within one working hour if your email has been opened, how many times it has been looked at and if the CTA has been taken
• provide you with a full report three days after the transmission which includes which schools have received and opened your email
• manage requested unsubscription and be fully GDPR compliant.

12 month advertising and technical support

After purchasing your school database, you have 12 months of:

• Advertising support from our in-house team. Call your account manager at any time to discuss any ideas or comments which may be beneficial to the campaign. We endeavour to provide you with the most helpful and commercially-focused feedback.
• Technical support from our IT staff. If you need help navigating the database or breaking down the information, we can talk you through it.

Three email broadcasts and full reporting package

Included in your purchase of the school email list, we’ll also provide you with:

• A professionally designed email including relevant copywriting
• Three full email broadcasts to the schools of your choice
• A full report three days post-campaign and assessment of best ways to move forward
• Unsubscriber management if requested by any targeted schools

For marketing purposes, a “school email” is the main email address for an educational establishment.

School emails are not personalised email addresses in most cases.

You can apply to the Department for Education under a Freedom Of Information Act (2000) request for a list of school email addresses in England.

Unlike with our service however, you won’t be provided with the names of the headteachers on your data request.

You will also have to apply separately to the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish governments for school emails covering their countries.