Buying data from the UK’s most accurate B2B data provider is a solid investment in itself, buy it during March and you can get yourself one of the most anticipated devices from Apple this year: The iPad 3 (iPad 2S perhaps?) Whatever it’s named, we’ll have one for you.

Quality so good we guarantee it – double your money back for any contact who has gone away.

Corpdata is all about connecting you with the decision maker – the right person, the right job within the right organisation. Simply, we do the job as it should be done.

• If you spend over £5,000 in a single transaction during March we’ll give you the brand new iPad.
• If you don’t need that much data, then for every £500 spent in a transaction during March you will be entered into our draw to win a new iPad 3. So larger orders are entitled to more entries; spend £2500, you get five entries!

Simply quote IPADMAR12 to be entered

Corpdata – The UK’s most accurate B2B data provider – bar none

 
 
** Terms & Conditions for iPad 3 March 2012 offer
 

“iPad 3″ means the new version of the iPad, perhaps iPad 3 or iPad 2S, rumoured for release in March 2012.

Specifications have not been released, but the specification of the prize(s) will be the ‘basic’ UK specification of the “iPad 3″.

1. “Order value” is defined as the total net value of the products purchased from Corpdata after deducting any discounts and before the addition of VAT.

2. “Qualifying Orders for Draw Entry” are orders with an “Order Value” of greater than £500 and less than £5,000.   For each £500 of  “Order Value” you will receive one entry into the draw for one “iPad 3″.

3. “Qualifying Orders for iPad 3″ are orders with an “Order Value” of greater than £5,000.   For each £5,000 of  “Order Value” you will receive one “iPad 3″.

4. Specifications have not been released.  The iPad on offer is the standard UK specification.

5. This offer is being made by Corpdata Limited for your company, the winner will need to confirm the iPad is received on that basis.

6. This offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer.

7. The iPad will be shipped by registered post to a UK addresses as soon as possible after full payment has been received and processed (normally with 28 days). It will require a signature on receipt.

8. There is no cash alternative or any option to exchange for an alternative item.

9. Only people who quote reference “IPADMAR12” at the time of ordering will be eligible for this offer, it cannot be quoted retrospectively.

The most amazing iPhone yet!

Use your voice to send messages, get your voice heard using Corpdata.

We take pride in always being up to date, we offered the newest iPhone before release in October 2011.

Following the success of that offer, we decided to start 2012 by giving you another chance to win the iPhone 4S.

For each £500 spent with Corpdata during January 2012 you will receive one entry into our draw to win a brand new iPhone 4S. Larger orders are entitled to more entries; so if you spend £2500, you get five entries!

Simply quote ’4SJAN12′ to be entered

Corpdata is all about putting you in contact with the right people, in the right organisations. You can depend upon Corpdata data for accuracy and reliability for all your campaigns.

** Terms & Condictions for iPhone 4S January 2012 offer

1. For each £500 of ‘order value’ you will receive one entry into the draw for one iPhone 4S.

2. “Order value” is defined as the total net value of the products purchased from Corpdata after deducting any discounts and before the addition of VAT.

3. The iPhone 4S on offer is the standard UK specification without any contract.

4. This offer is being made by Corpdata for your company, the winner will need to confirm the iPhone 4S is recieved on that basis.

5. This offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer.

6. The iPhone 4S will be shipped by registered post to a UK addresses within 28 days after payment has been received and processed. It will require a signature on receipt.

7. There is no cash alternative or any option to exchange for an alternative item.

8. Only people who quote reference “4SJAN12″ at the time of ordering will be eligible for this offer, it cannot be quoted retrospectively.

Nowadays you seem to be able to find marketing information from all sorts of places and prices can vary substantially.  In some cases you can find huge numbers of contacts for very little outlay.  But, as with many other things in business, or life generally for that matter, often “you only get what you pay for”.  A cheap list is probably cheap for a reason, and as a direct marketer you know that keeping even small amounts of data accurate and up to date is a costly business.

There are also less obvious dangers associated with sourcing data.  You need to consider if the person you are buying from actually has the right to pass this on to you, otherwise you may be guilty of handling stolen goods.  Of course the problem sounds simple, just ask if the vendor owns the rights to the data, but many people think information they use as part of their work belongs to them, and they are entitled to pass it on if they choose.  In practice most organisations jealously guard their data and rarely allow this sort of access.

Naturally, licensing data from Corpdata guarantees you are entitled to use it.

Corpdata is one of just a few companies that create their data from primary research.  We research our own information using a team of in-house researchers on a six month rolling cycle.  What’s more Corpdata information is researched for one purpose only – Direct Marketing – and that is all we do.

This is important for your results.  Most other list owners have initially built their databases for other purposes like financial risk assessment, or their data may result from a more important area of activity, such as credit rating or governmental statistical analysis.

This really matters to you.  For example, SIC codes were designed by the Government to describe what were seen as the most significant industries.  It is remarkably difficult to sensibly target activities of organisations based on SIC codes, it offers extreme precision in areas where direct marketing does not really require it, and is almost useless in other areas vital for direct marketing.

Corpdata’s data offers a unique view of the world, from a direct marketer’s perspective, having broken down the activities into only 24 usable DM sectors.

Another component that shows up in your results is the accuracy of the data.   Corpdata focus on what direct marketers want, so our rolling research cycle results in our information having an average data age of just 94 days, considerably less than twelve months which is typical for many other reputable suppliers!

This means you are much more likely to be contacting the person who is currently responsible for sourcing the products or services you offer, rather than the person who used to make that decision before they left six months ago.

Accurate information obviously saves you money on lower wastage, but it also helps to ensure your sales team are more likely to remain bought into the process.  You will know how easily poor data rapidly leads to lower morale, and lower results.

If you are planning a direct marketing campaign, then it makes sense to use up-to-date, accurate information that is well targeted.  Get this right and your campaign is bound to deliver a better return.

As a purchaser of direct marketing data, there is a very real danger that you have to take much on trust.   Trust is an important factor in all purchasing decisions, and using a reputable and well established organisation will enable you to trust more easily.

Over recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of data offerings available, but few live up to their billing, many are operated by charlatans who will promise much but deliver little.

Even very reputable companies though do not always live up to their claims and many complaints we hear are about the poor quality of data provided by some of the most respected companies, and how significantly the data differed from the promises.

An important tool in helping you to decide which data supplier to work with is to request samples, but beware of the ‘golden sample’, which is a sample chosen or improved by the supplier that is intended to mislead you about the quality of the underlying data.

Three tips to ensure you get a representative sample

1. Request a sample of data from an area you determine, often in your postcode region is good because you may also have some personal knowledge of the data that is provided.   Don’t just take the biggest organisations; make sure you get a sample of large and small ones.   Most data suppliers spend much more effort on maintaining information on larger organisations and the smaller ones are often neglected.

2. Ensure the data can be provided quickly enough that it has not been altered between you asking for it and the supplier providing it.   Basically if data will take longer than a few minutes to arrive, you run a risk that it has been ‘doctored’.

3. Review the data using your own personal knowledge, but also call the records, or mail them and monitor the results.   If you have a set of 20 or 25 records you would expect almost none to be gone-away, data being data, there is always the possibility for one, but more than this should set alarm bells ringing.

If your potential supplier is unable to provide data to your specification, or in your timeframe, or if there are too many errors, you might want to ask yourself why.

You would probably be best advised to choose a different supplier.

Now you know we have the best marketing data around, but we aren’t all work!  We have a few ‘foodies’ and they wanted to point you towards some recipes.   After all, what could be better, as the weather changes, than some delicious and warming early winter feasts.

Here are the ones our ‘experts’ chose, we hope they inspire you.

Firstly a wonderful collection of seasonal ingredients and recipes for all the dishes you could require:

http://www.http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/seasons/november

The three remaining links are for more delicious soup recipes than you can throw a stick at. It’s what cold days are made for; big jumpers, fresh bread and homemade soup:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/real_food/article5419057.ece

http://www.seasonalfoodrecipes.co.uk/warming-winter-soups.html

http://http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/content/recipes/favourites/soup/

With so many businesses adopting email marketing as a major part of their B2B marketing strategy should we all forget about traditional direct mail?

You don’t need a long memory to recall when most of your daily post delivery was made up of mailings for everything from photocopiers to insurance.

As a business involved in providing marketing information to other businesses we are well aware of the trend to email and have of course responded by collating and including email addresses as part of our data offering. Most of the lists we now provide include a very high percentage of either personal or generic email contact addresses.

These days it is your inbox is overflowing with emails again promoting everything any business could need, which may of course be somewhat easier to deal with.

But how many physical pieces of direct mail have you received recently? We have noticed that we certainly don’t seem to receive anything like the amount that became the norm in the past.

How do you react when someone does actually send something by post? Is it still straight to the bin or does it feel rather unusual and perhaps even a bit special that someone has actually bothered to send you something physical.

So does direct mail have a place in B2B marketing today or should we all be relying on email?

Email is simple, quick, environmentally friendly and relatively low cost so there are a lot of plusses. But to offset those plusses there are several minuses.

From a data point of view there is no doubt that email data degenerates at a far faster rate than conventional names, addresses and telephone numbers and no major list owner offers the same quality guarantee for email addresses as they do for other information.

A web-harvested list of email addresses is rarely correlated to real world data, so the only approach available is the “blunderbuss” approach.

Spam filters are becoming ever more sophisticated so you can be certain that only a proportion of your e-shot will reach the desired destination, the good news is, that the people who do receive it are not as likely to be offended because they would probably have filtered it if they cared.

Email comes with some baggage as a result of the huge amount of spam circulating and this has led, in some cases, to some people viewing it in a somewhat negative or distasteful light, which can potentially have knock-on negative effect for your brand or company.

The fortunes for direct mail however, seem to be changing, if the opinion of many of our data sourcing customers are a guide.

From the feedback we get from customers, receiving something by post does seem to be perceived as having a higher value. I think people would agree that having something physical to hold and view is preferable to an image on a screen and can be used to great effect in generating a positive view of your brand or company.

With reduced amounts in circulation, competition in the direct mail channel is lower and so a far higher percentage is likely to arrive on the intended recipient’s desk. Secretaries are passing on more to their managers as it is not so common.

Data available for direct mail tends to be of better quality and offer higher degrees of targeting than email lists. On the environment front much of our printed material today comes on stock from sustainable sources.

Whilst distribution costs are undoubtedly more, better targeting and higher response rates can more than make up the difference.

Who knows? If you want to be seen as a business doing something innovative and different that appeals to your prospects maybe you should just send them a mail shot? (using the best available data from Corpdata of course!)