Emailing Schools - Help & Advice

Our Database has been under full-time development and maintenance since 2003 and is arguably the most complete and up to date list available.  In addition, in 2004 we were the first company in the UK to offer an email-to-schools service. 

Our email addresses are the preferred administrative email addresses of the school, usually office or admin, as published on the school and/or LA website.

The schools' email addresses are used by parents, the public and LA staff.  Because they receive spam and junk mail like the rest of us, schools mostly use office staff to screen out junk mail and forward legitimate mails to the Head or Bursar or any other staff member.

Hence we work by marking the emails in the Subject line: FAO Headteacher, Head of Maths, Facilities Manager, Bursar or whoever;and find that largely this is successful in reaching any of the specialist teaching and non-teaching staff in the schools.

We have been contacting staff in the schools in this way since 2004 and now most schools are geared to receive communications by email in this way.

[ This is the only legal way of doing it under EC regulations. Using the office addresses of the school makes these legitimate B2B emails.  We don't have names (except Heads) or personal addresses of staff, as spam regulations mean these staff would all have to 'opt-in' before we could email them. Hence, nobody has the addresses of all the individual staff. Any list of say 'SENCOs' is likely to be very incomplete and to contain a lot fewer than 29K members.  ]

Online Senders

Many businesses use MailChimp for their email-shots but MailChimp uses an American algorithm which weeds out and rejects admin@... addresses.  This is not a problem if you are emailing consumers but unfortunately 7,293 (about a quarter) of UK schools have chosen to use admin@.... as their published address.

We recommend  ZoomMail  which is regarded as “easier, better and cheaper than Mailchimp" and doesn't suffer from the 'admin' problem. The company is based in Plymouth and uses UK servers.  They offer a monthly tarriff. '

Send it Yourself

Most companies nowadays have some sort of emailing software such as Salesforce to email their own customers.

We recommend Groupmailwhich will sit on your PC and control all aspects of the emailing.  You can download a free trial copy of the software which has a built in html editor for composing html-emails. The software is 'purchase once' and there are no ongoing fees or per-email charges.