Clear Blue's website receives a targeted hit "every minute"

Many years ago, well before the days of the world wide web, Clear Blue's marketing was based on a combination of trade advertising, direct mail, a little telemarketing and exhibition at various trade fairs; James Barwell, who has worked at Clear Blue since leaving university in 1981 says: " Our telephones used to ring about every 30 minutes, usually with an existing client making a new enquiry or asking about the progress of his or her order; there was, in fact, very little new business, and new clients often iinsisted on coming to our offices, then in Barnes, London SW13, to 'check us out' and see our databases".  "The thought that we now have prospective clients looking at our lists on our website every single minute of the day and night, with a good percentage of those casual visitors becoming repeat customers, is amazing", concludes Barwell.

Clear Blue's Alexa rating currently hover arounds the 80,000 mark, which translates into approximately 1,500 unique visitors a day.

Clear Blue puts 'glossary of direct marketing terms' online

A siginficant number of direct marketing terms are not known or understood by the casual list purchaser.  Terms such as 'net names agreement', 'merge-purge', 'de-duplication' 'seed names' or even 'ASCII text' are not well understood and require explanation.  Clear Blue have started putting a glossary of direct marketing terms online and will add to it over time.

"It is not our intention to develop an encyclopedia of marketing terms on our site", says James Barwell.  "But it is most useful to provide explanations vis-avis the various elements of direct marketing terminology, be it direct mail, telemarketing, fax marketing, e-mail marketing and their key raw material, lists!", says Barwell

To access the glossary, click here

Clear Blue now has 500 lists available for online purchase

Clear Blue has today uploaded its 500th list onto its servers. "More and more potential buyers of mailing lists now routinely use Google, Yahoo etc. as a first means of locating a list source, and, once located, expect this source to be available online" says Jane Neville, Clear Blue's webmaster. "The reality is, regrettably, that only a handful of list owners actually offer a 'buy online' facility, turning prospects to the next available supplier who does".

"We'll be putting more and more lists online over the coming months aiming at well over 1,000 within the foreseeable future ", concludes Neville.

Clear Blue most cost effective UK list company

Clear Blue's list rental charges are consistantly lower than any of its UK and European competitors.  "It is not unusual for our competitors to charge twice, three times or even four times as much as Clear Blue does for the same list ", says James Barwell, list manager for Clear Blue; "Particularly when it comes to 'multiple use' prices or added value IT data, some of our competitors charge up to £1 a lead, which I think is too much; however, because of the relative lack of transparency of the list market, many end users end up paying these prices because they are unaware of alternative suppliers".  "End users should pay no more than between 11 pence and 20 pence for single-use data and 25 pence and 40 pence for multiple use data", continues Barwell.

"The situation in the US is far worse, with few list companies offering their lists online and 90 cents per lead the norm; we are currently building our US list portfolio and our prices will simply be a mirror of our low UK and European prices", says Barwell.

Clear Blue enters Top 100,000 Alexa

Clear Blue have entered the exclusive club of the 100,000 most accessed websites in the world, according to Alexa, the amazon.com subsidiary.   With over 20 million different websites currently online, the Top 100,000 ranking puts Clear Blue in the top 0.5% of visited websites today.  Says Jane Neville, website manager for Clear Blue: " We achieved this accolade with little to no online marketing or other paid ways to drive traffic to our site; most of our prospects come to our site through word of mouth or because they have been sold a good list by us in the past; there is also some evidence to suggest that, because of the size of our site, it is indexed under more and more different keywords by the search engines; proof again, that providing rich content is key to coming to the attention of the search engines, and more useful than a decade's worth of fiddling with metatags".

Clear Blue named one of the "top 3 most reputable" UK list companies

A recent, comprehesive, survey conducted by London University with over 10,000 senior marketing professionals in industry, commerce, and the direct marketing industry itself named Clear Blue amongst the top 3 most respected list owners/brokers in the UK.  "This is a great honour", says John Thorburn, senior list manager with Clear Blue.  "Our data is behind more and more of the successful direct marketing campaigns of the large scale mailers and we have worked hard to provide such an accurate and responsive pool of data; particularly in the field of IT data, Clear Blue now offers an unrivalled set of selections".