Email marketing

Well I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.  Would need to know more details, but I'd see what guarantees they can offer and what the expected return rate to be achieved is...

....if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. 

Hi mrb,

I know it just seems a little easy to be honest. I love hard work more or less.
I am just interested in how it all works but its a put off when the email was sent from a Hotmail email account.

Have a nice weekend.

Its rubbish ignore it.

Data is the currency of the digital world we live in. But data has a huge flaw, it degrades. If you have a database of say 1000 previous clients, that information is only as good as the last time you spoke to them. If that data is 6 months old, some clients will be no more, ceased trading, moved address, changed contact details, or have opted out of marketing, such as TPS or MPS.

If that data is 2, 5, 10 years+ old, it will be mostly worthless, and legally unusable.

Now if I offer you a targeted list of 10,000 potential leads, with current up to contact details, with opted in permission to be contacted (that hasn't been sent to death), how much do you think that would cost? You can get this data, you can buy it in directly from companies house and other providers and it is very expensive.

Professional data houses will normally give you some sample data to evaluate and test, plus they would never use a web email address, it would be come from their own domain.

Selling data is a huge business, and old data lists are regularly nicked, scraped, repackaged and sold, again and again and again. If you get lots of business type spam, then your email is on one of them. Unfortunately until people stop buying this rubbish, it will never end

Using old/dirty data will at best leave you out of pocket, and worst land you in serious trouble as well as causing brand reputation damage.

Thanks for that Steve,

Not once have I used them and have completed over 1000+ jobs.... Would it be beneficial to go through an established email marketing company? I have thought about this in the past but never opted into it really.

The best data you have is your own, so apologies if sucking eggs, but assume you already maintain and look after you own data list. So email campaigns to current and former customers.

For fresh data, we sometimes buy in data from Market Location (they own 118 information and ThomsonLocal). For transparency we are also partnered with them, but there other data houses about. ML is now one of the major ones though in the UK.

Depending on the level of data you want, will depend on the cost, but they can target to your exact demographic and target audience.

An interesting development is Companies House, which has just opened up their database to the public. You only get public domain info, so no email addresses, but it will open possibilities to a cheap offline marketing campaign, as marketing companies will be able to tap into their data for free.

Results can vary when it comes to cold email sending. Don't expect instant sales, expect it to be the beginning of a conversation, so stay away from long sales pitches. Industry standard response rate is 1%, so be realistic about what you want to achieve versus cost of data.

it would only be any good if you could target the area you want, ps how much would they charge,

Rather than waste money on email campaign do the following 

Spent 100 quid on creating yourself a professional website. Make sure it has your contact details, past work history etc 

Register on yellow pages, google business directory and other business directories 

You may want to conisder signing up on websites such as rated people. If you are doing a good job for a reasonable price positive feedback alone will be enough to generate business

Print flyers and distribute to the the areas you are happy service. You can also leave flyers in local businesses such as hairdressers etc (consider giving a discount with the leaflet this increases the chances of people not binning it) 

Good luck