Direct Mailing Lists
The UK Data and Marketing Association reports a response rate of 4.4% from postal marketing.
Direct mail catalogues have a response rate of 4.26%. In contrast, email marketing only achieves 0.12%.
The main reason for its explosion over the past 20 years is its low cost per lead.
Clients of More Than Words have direct postal access to nearly 4 million decision makers in British businesses, schools, and public sector.
Tell us about your company, the products and services you sell, and who you want to sell to.
Our staff will run a count of our entire database to find the decision-makers that need your products or services most.
At More Than Words, we offer clients 98% accuracy on postal addresses for businesses, schools, and public sector organisations.
In the event we don’t hit our accuracy target, we’ll either refund you pro-rata or give you replacement records free of charge.
Customers can build their company’s credibility and promote their products and services over a period of a year with the mailing lists we provide.
We will work with you throughout the year to make sure your targeted mailing list generates the maximum ROI.
If you need help with the database we provide, our technical team is on hand to help.
To be successful in direct marketing, you must understand your audience.
Besides understanding the commercial and operational needs of your target audience, you should also understand their motivations to make purchases.
Before you plan your campaign, decide what your overall goal is.
From here, you can create a detailed customer profile of the type of decision maker who:
To be successful in direct marketing, you must understand your audience.
Besides understanding the commercial and operational needs of your target audience, you should also understand their motivations to make purchases.
Before you plan your campaign, decide what your overall goal is.
From here, you can create a detailed customer profile of the type of decision maker who:
Marketers who segment their mailing lists and personalize their messages noticeably increase customer engagement, according to eConsultancy.
Using your current mailing list, you can segment your target contacts into groups by:
With time, you will be able to personalise mailing campaigns based on:
No matter how good your product or service is, decision makers in businesses, schools, and the public sector are only interested in the benefits of working with you. In every direct marketing message you send, you should focus on what you can do to help your audience and how your products and services will benefit them.
In addition to focusing on the customer, your business’ marketing communications should also convey credibility and experience. Even though headlines with incredible or misleading language grab attention, as do seemingly large discounts, most decision makers find these tactics displeasing.
You should use your direct mail campaign to offer something the recipient can use and does not require too much of an initial commitment. If you can afford it, a discount or free trial is a great way to attract strong leads from potential new customers.
Your direct mail message should be understood by decision decision-makers within 30 seconds or less. In this time, you must grab a prospect’s attention, offer them something of benefit to their company, and convince them you are the right company to do this for them.
Your headline should tell the reader in a few words what you are offering and how reading the whole mailing will benefit them.
All of your copy should be easy to scan, with sections that draw the eye to your call- to -action.
A call to action (or CTA) is the action you want the recipient to take after reading your message. Make sure that your CTA is clear, relevant, and compelling, whether you want them to buy, visit your website, or call.
You might want to offer additional value with your CTA to motivate uptake.
Your company can offer first-time buyers’ discounts to businesses, schools, and government agencies or send them a useful guide or e-book about your product or service.
Direct mail advertising usually comes in the form of letters or flyers, but you may choose any print medium. In some circumstances, a catalogue with an order form may be a better way to showcase your products and provide a call to action.
You can create interest in your product and demonstrate your expertise by offering tickets to an event you host. Be sure you are sending something unique and of interest to your target audience, whichever medium you choose.
Personalised marketing consistently outperforms generic campaigns. When segmenting your list, you can identify what products or services your contacts are likely to purchase.
Direct marketing lets you choose when and what you send to individual groupings of buyers.
Research shows 89% of customers are retained by companies using multi-channel strategies. A fully integrated strategy might use email ads or social media to follow-up on direct mail.
Through this you can retarget and remind a potential customer about your business and the services you provide. Having a mix of direct and indirect channels helps you stay top-of-mind with prospects without being intrusive.
Every customer engagement point should provide value. When you contact them, make sure they learn something new, see a new offer, or get an easier way to purchase.
Analyse the results of every direct mail campaign you send out in order to constantly assess your strategy’s performance. Measuring how each of your direct mail messages performs also allows you to gather vital market intelligence that allows you to refine your strategy moving forward.
Direct mail marketing is not as easy to track as digital channels, but there are ways to do so. To inform where your conversions are coming from and to determine what it is about your offer that appeals to customers, you may wish to use online landing page visits and offer codes.
Use A/B testing to track your campaign by sending slightly different messages to two different audiences and recording the results. If you want to get the most out of your direct marketing campaign, use your mailing list for the full year and contact your network at least once a month.
Get in touch to find out how many decision makers we have across our set of databases suitable for your products and services.
We’re available on 0330 010 8300 or fill out the contact form.
A mailing list is a database containing the details you need to send postal marketing campaigns to decision makers within businesses, schools, and the public sector with a need for your products and services.
Delivered as either a Microsoft Excel or comma separated value file, you have a couple of choices on how to run your postal mail campaign.
You can either use a mail merge facility on Microsoft Word to:
Although there will be an additional cost to this, you may also wish to consider using a printing company for your letters and a mailing house to organise delivery of your letters to the recipients on your database.
Postal mail campaigns are expensive in comparison with email marketing but, measured by contact made, they compare with the costs of a telemarketing campaign.
Most delivery services, including the Royal Mail, offer significant discounts to companies wishing to use postal mail marketing once a certain volume has been reached.
For example, Royal Mail offers discounts on volumes of 1,000 letters and 4,000 letters or above.
Many of these discounted schemes may however require you to sort the envelopes in a particular way to benefit from the savings.
In these cases, it may be cheaper to use an outsourced mailing house to benefit from the discounts although you will have to pay the mailing house for their services.
Our best advice on how to purchase mailing lists for postal marketing for a company is to ensure that:
Postal mail marketing is direct marketing – direct marketing is a form of advertising where you choose who you market your products and services to.
The profitability of your campaign depends on making sure that the decision makers whose postal addresses you purchase are most likely to need your products or services.
The less you can be sure that a particular decision maker would be a potential future customer, the lower your likelihood of being able to sell to them.
When you speak with us, request a count on the businesses, schools, and public sector organisations you believe you have the greatest chance of making a sale to. When we come back to you with our count and quote, try to refine the list down further to reduce the cost of your campaign.
Mailing list accuracy is particularly important. 20% of all postal addresses change every year as do 21% of decision makers.
If you use data which is over a year old, the likelihood is that only six in every ten of your postal mail adverts will reach the right person and the right address. The data you purchase needs to be updated by your supplier on a rolling basis – for example, our data is updated every 3-9 months depending on the sector.
In marketing, particularly direct marketing like postal mail marketing where the letters you send are personalised, accuracy is of the highest importance. Our opinions of the companies we deal with either as a consumer or as a business decision maker are often formed on our first exposure to a potential supplier.
If a potential supplier has got our name wrong or our job title wrong when they send us a letter or an email or when they give us a call, this creates a poor impression. While the vast majority of us are thick-skinned enough not to be personally offended by it, it doesn’t help you to make the sale.
Words are important. The letters you send to potential clients on your mailing campaign will be carefully worded – each word in them will justify its own place in the letter because they give you a greater chance of making a sale or generating an enquiry. Spending time, effort, and money on creating the most effective, response-driven sales letter is worth it.
And it’s worth making sure that your investment in your sales letter is not diminished by sending your campaigns to:
No company – no marketing company like More Than Words – can afford to give its database away free of charge. In addition, because no revenue is created by giving away a database, no revenue can be allocated to the upkeep and maintenance of that database.
While you will save money by downloading a free mailing list from the internet, you will lose a great deal in letters which never which their intended recipients.
The most successful mailing lists will be mailing lists containing the contact name, contact job title, and address details of companies, schools, and public sector organisations with the greatest need for what you sell. There are hundreds of mailing list owners and brokers in the UK, the vast majority of whom provide top-quality data at very reasonable prices.
There may be 10 or more target markets you have in mind. Make sure that you ask your potential data supplier for a breakdown of each target market. Then, with your colleagues, examine each of these markets with a view to choosing the ones where you’re most certain you could sell your products and services to.
Only order the data from the breakdown that you’re most sure about and invest in postal mail marketing to these sectors first. Assuming that your campaign has been a success, you may wish to reinvest some of those profits into buying data for the sectors you didn’t include in your original campaign.
For those sectors, our advice would be to ask your sales letter copywriter to create separate campaigns for each making sure that, within the letters themselves, you explain that commercial and financial advantages of choosing your products and service in a way which is particular and relevant to them.
Yes – the prospect mailing lists we have comply with GDPR on the grounds of legitimate interest.
For business to business marketing, GDPR does not really apply and neither does marketing to schools and the public sector.
Although you will be contacting named individuals, you will be doing so to pitch products and services which benefit the businesses or organisations those decision makers work for and which do not benefit them personally.
Yes – we can append email marketing data to your mailing list if you like.
We’re one of the UK’s fastest-growing email data companies and we have access to email data lists for marketing to Please ask your account manager for more information on all aspects of email marketing and email data management when you call.
Yes – we can append telemarketing data to your mailing list.
Please ask your account manager for more information when you call.
Unlike with email marketing, you don’t need explicit consent from consumers, sole traders, or entrepreneurs within an unincorporated partnership to send postal mail. This is also the case for limited companies, PLCs, LLPs, schools, and public sector organisations although contacting decision-makers within these organisations for marketing purposes is not really covered by GDPR anyway.
The permission to send marketing mail to consumers and decision-makers relies on the grounds of legitimate interest – marketing is considered as a legitimate interest as long as you believe that your products or services will be of interest to the recipients. For any existing mailing lists you have that you bought in or any existing customer mailing lists you have, you can continue to run postal mail campaigns to them.
We would however recommend that you offer each recipient an opt-out option on your website so that they don’t receive any additional letters from you if they don’t want to.
How much does B2B data cost? B2B mailing data as with school mailing data and public sector mailing data is generally charged at a price per thousand records subject to a minimum order. Your data is licenced to your company for 12 months. After the 12 months has expired, you need to relicense the data in order to be able to continue to use it.
You are allowed to stay in touch with decision makers on your database after 12 months if they have responded directly to one of your mail campaigns and they:
Excellent Quality Data delivered promptly with great service. Has been a huge help during the current pandemic and will be using them regularly. The best I have ever dealt with. Account Manager Lisa Kinghorn is an asset to the business. Great company with superb customer service.
We've recently worked with Scott. He was outstanding from our initial conversation, through to data acquisition and subsequent email marketing campaign. I have nothing but good words to say about him, the company and the service they provided. I should add that we were a little hesitant before agreeing to work with Scott due to a bad experience with another provider. He was extremely empathetic towards our predicament and ultimately guided us through the onboarding and service delivery. He clearly knows he's stuff.
Having a very specific need for B2B marketing we decided to use More than Words. We spoke to Clare Tweed who was very knowledgeable and made the whole process very easy. Clare is easy to speak with, happy to help and I could not recommend her enough, she got our order sorted very quickly and delivered to us as agreed. A huge thank you to Clare and the team at More Than Words.
On behalf of myself and DOM UK, thank you to Clare and the team for making our customer survey process as straight-forward as possible. Reached out to the company after finding them using a Google search and was contacted back straight away. They used expert knowledge to help set-up our survey to achieve the best result possible. Would recommend and will be using More Than Words Marketing again.
More Than Words Marketing Ltd
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Baltic Business Quarter,
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