Public sector email addresses

Extensive public sector list with accurate decision maker 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.

More Than Words Marketing’s 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 information for the personal email accounts of 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 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 and guidance from your account manager as well as our in-house technical and advertising teams.

Generating the greatest return from marketing to public authorities

More Than Words’ public sector email 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.

Using a public sector decision maker’s email account to pitch a product or service is, understandably, daunting. Whether you are contacting a government department, housing association or senior decision maker within the NHS, simply having access to their personal data does not mean that they will be interested in a cold sales pitch.

However, there is currently a serious drive for government agencies and organisations across the sector to cut costs and increase quality of service. This, combined with the government’s commitment to spending £1 in every £3 on SMEs by 2022, there has never been a better time to market to the public sector.

Buying cycles within in the public domain are longer and more complex than B2B cycles.

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.

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 on your mailing list.

In addition, procurement practices vary depending on the types of public service 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.

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 data which fully conform to GDPR standards, as set out in the Data Protection Act.

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

• engage in meaningful and necessary conversation, containing only information that is in organisational or public interest. 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 database is the most productive marketing strategy you can employ.

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.

Procurement managers look for UK businesses which display:

• a high level of insight and professionalism into the sector,
• how it works, and
• how their product or service could benefit their organisation.

A campaign of carefully planned marketing touches is key in using your data 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.

With each public sector 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.