FAQs

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[accordion-item title=”What is targeting?”]

Targeting involves the identification of potential new customers by reference to where and how they live. Prime Prospects can help you focus your marketing spend where it will do most good, picking out people whose age, gender, circumstances, interests and pursuits make it likely that they will want your products or services.

For example, if you run an hotel with adventure playground facilities for young children and a nearby golf course, it would make sense to mail and try to contact known golfers with children of the right age and type.

If you run a bookshop specialising in rare books about collectibles and gardening, it is obviously beneficial to target people who live near your bookshop, who are reasonably affluent and who have stated on a lifestyle questionnaire that gardening and an interest in fine art and antiques are amongst their hobbies. See examples of how targeting works below.

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[accordion-item title=”What can targeted marketing achieve?”]

A new golf club chose us to arrange targeted mailings to generate enquiries and trial visits to the new course. The target membership was realised within four months of the campaign being launched. This put them eight months ahead of schedule for debentures and significantly reduced the overdraft.

A new medical support complex for the elderly required paying residents. We targeted geographically located prospects and provided a 6% response, which helped to kick-start the business. Management was expecting something like a 2% response.

We created and executed a personalised door-to-door sales lead programme in selected local areas for a big electricity company. The company’s engineers followed up with the respondents. The programme achieved an average response of 7%, compared to only 1% prior to our involvement.

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[accordion-item title=”What sort of organisations use it?”]

We executed a personalised local ‘knock and drop’ questionnaire programme for a large supermarket chain that uncovered the need for home delivery to the elderly and helped to boost customer loyalty.

For seven years we have run lead generation services for a number of major car manufacturers and their dealer networks, targeting both private individuals and business users. We have become an integral part of their local sales lead programmes.

We targeted, created and managed a national marketing initiative for local garage workshops, sponsored and organised by a major oil company.

We work for charities, both at regional and national level, for whom we target local donor prospects and provide small quantities of specific data. There is a case study of this type on the Examples page.

Educational institutions such as Colleges of Further Education need to target the parents of children or young adults of particular ages. We have many colleges amongst our repeat business clients.

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[accordion-item title=”What does it cost?”]

If you haven’t already looked at the Services page, you might want to link to it and then come back. As stated on that page, the minimum charge for purchasing small amounts of data is just £200. This allows local targeting without excessive expense.

Briefly, this equates to purchasing 1,000 names or 20p for each name.

It is cheaper for us to deliver to you electronically or on disk and let you mail merge or print the labels yourself.

If telephone numbers are required, it will involve an extra process. Telephone names are more difficult to acquire now due to the TPS service. Expect to match on average10%.

1,557 names and addresses, delivered by e-mail, would cost £346.40 (excluding VAT) if there are no special difficulties or complications.

The data could be used once only, within six calendar months of delivery. Appending telephone numbers to these names would cost about £150 (excluding VAT) and the data would have to be used within 28 days, by law.

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[accordion-item title=”How do you plan and cost a particular mailing?”]

Let’s say you run a fast food franchise and you want to make a special offer to all the people with children in your area – something like a free personalised birthday cake for anyone booking in more than 12 people for a birthday party.

Phone one of our team on +44 (0) 203 893 5799 for a free count and impartial advice – surely you don’t want to contact all the parents in the area but only the ones with children over a certain minimum age and under the challenging age when teenagers start to make their own decisions?

One of our team will run the count and report – perhaps it is a huge number, far more than you need or could afford to mail. Then we would help you to refine and re-scale the search, still without any charge. They might advise reducing the geographical coverage or the age spread and/or concentrating only on households with a reasonably high level of affluence. Incidentally, we are almost the only company in the U.K. which offers precise target selections based on the exact ages of children for small scale direct marketing projects.

Once the count is looking good, it is easy to work out the approximate price of the final order. You can, at this stage, wait a few weeks before committing. When you confirm the order, we will confirm the precise cost and your data will arrive shortly afterwards, almost as soon as the bill has been paid.

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[accordion-item title=”What else do you need to do or know before using targeted marketing?”]

To use targeted mailing you need access to data. That is what we provide. To use data you must be registered with the Data Protection Commissioner. This is a simple process and we give a link to the relevant web page below so that you can register on-line with a minimum of difficulty. Just one small caveat. The Data Protection authorities refer to this procedure as “notification”, not registration. For information see www.ico.gov.uk.

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[accordion-item title=”Where does the data come from?”]

The names and addresses are drawn from lifestyle databases available in the U.K. These are the Lifestyle Selector, Behaviour Bank, Infobase Lifestyle Universe owned by Acxiom. Other targeted databases are brought in as required.

The people whose names and addresses we arrange for you to use have all filled in one of the Acxiom questionnaires and have voluntarily given information all about their interests and activities. Alternatively, they have filled in product registration cards when purchasing a new consumer durable like a washing machine or a TV.

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[accordion-item title=”Will we own the data?”]

No. The names and addresses are for one use only. A second use within six months can be arranged but will cost extra. The data files are ‘seeded’ so we can and do check to make sure that multiple use is not occurring without our knowledge.

Any information about respondents gathered by you in the course of your selling operations becomes your property.

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[accordion-item title=”Why won’t all the names and addresses be usable?”]

You may get some items of your mail shot returned undelivered. This will be because people have moved house recently. Mailing industry rules allow for up to 5% returns. Over this a refund for the data is part of our terms and conditions.

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[accordion-item title=”How do you deal with complaints?”]

Occasionally someone rings up indignantly to ask where the mailer got his or her name and address and ask for the details to be removed from the database. This can easily be arranged but it may soothe the caller if you are able to refer to the information in the section above (“where does the data come from”) and point out that the caller, his spouse or someone in his or her household has volunteered personal information to the database owners without ticking the box that asks for this information not to be used for mail shots.

In principle, everyone on the databases is there by choice. If the caller still wants us to suppress his or her name, that can easily be arranged and you can also tell him or her how to get in touch with the Mailing Preference Service (Tel: 020 7291 3310) and/or the Telephone Preference Service (Tel: 0845 070 0707). These two organisations will, given time, make sure that no unsolicited mail or phone calls reach people who do not want them. If the mailing has been addressed to a person who has died, it is very regrettable and upsetting. An apology from the data owner, will be forthcoming.

Why does this ever happen? Because there is no complete list anywhere of the 500,000 or so people who die in Britain each year. A suppression file listing everyone known to have died is checked against our databases on a regular basis and, of course, individual suppressions which reach us. The database is updated monthly with suppressions and quarterly with new additional data.

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[accordion-item title=”Legitimate interest or informed consent?”]

The majority of the direct marketing activities Prime Prospects undertake on behalf of our clients, or for our own purposes, are conducted on the basis of legitimate interest. Specifically, it is lawful under the GDPR act for a business to send direct marketing to those individuals (consumers or business) where there is reason to believe that the recipient may be encouraged to investigate the product or service which is the object of the communication.

Sometimes the recipient is concerned because they have never given specific permission for the business to have sent that communication. However, as stated above, provided the communication is itself lawful, it is not necessary that it should have been sent on the basis of informed consent. What is necessary under the act is that the recipient should have the right NOT to receive any further communication from the business, if they do not wish to do so.

If you do not wish to receive communications from Prime Prospects go to unsubscribe or visit our page to provide your preferences as to how we should communicate with you: Opt-in or opt-out 

For further information, visit: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/legitimate-interests/when-can-we-rely-on-legitimate-interests/ 

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