Business Directories for the UK

The main business directories that we find available as a look up service are also available through 3rd parties as mailing and telephone lists used for sales and marketing activities.  It is advisable to buy your lists through one of the recommended sources rather than directly from source as a great deal of enhancement and cleaning is normally undertaken by each of the 3rd party sellers who take a feed from the business directory companies.  Agencies therefore add value by increasing your targeting ability by adding content to the business directory raw data feed and this will reduce your waste.  In other words the agencies enhance the raw business directories data with additional information.

To explain:

OSIS - Telephone Database

This is the central business directories database of all telephone instillations throughout the country.  This central business directory is constantly being updated by licensed UK telecom operators such as BT, Virgin (NTL) etc with new instillations, disconnections etc.  The business directory database has very limited marketing information and is perhaps more relevant to a telephone engineer and not suitable for direct mail purposes without first reformatting and conditioning the raw data.  Key information such as business type, employee size, and financial information will not be found on the raw directory file.

YELL / Yellow Pages

Business Directories are based on the OSIS business directory raw database.  Every day Yellow Pages received a feed from the OSIS file and each day hundreds of telephone operators will contact the records found on the feed to verify records and clean the address, correct incomplete address fields and then finally enhance the record with key marleting detail such as line of business / trading activity, number of employees, contact names and such like.  This information is often then sold to 3rd parties who will sell extracts of the file as mailing or telephone marketing lists.  These 3rd party agencies often enhance the information further with modelled detail or specialised content such as fleet size, broadband, web address, email address etc.

Thomson Business Directory

The same process undertaken by Yellow Pages, described in the paragraph above, although possibly in a slightly more localised fashion.  What's different?  Well Thomson's Business Directories work on small geographic areas and are perhaps stronger on towns compared to a national player like Yellow Pages.  This allows Thomson to collect more detail during the verification process, especially email address and other very specific details.  You can commission Thomson to collect very own fields at the time of their verification which is a usefull service is your running a research campaign.

Directory Enquiries (118 XXX)

The OSIS business directories file (including consumers) is also passed onto many of the 118 organisations.  Although primarily a consumer data enquiry service, the 118 companies will enhance key business directory sectors with detailed information.  An example of this is 118 118 and 118 247 who each enhance their business directories file with Cinema Information, Opening Times, Payment Types Taken, Emergency Help Lines and such like.  Later these organisations may decide to start offering their enhanced data files for 3rd party use, e.g. marketing to the records they have enhanced.

Companies House

A directory of limited companies registered in the UK.  This business directories database includes limited liability partnerships (LLP), Limited Companies (LTD), Private Limited Companies and Public Limited Companies.  The database can be accessed for free online although the information presented for free is simply the name and address.  You can purchase records for marketing use via their web site.  We point out that this file is reliant on the company directors or partners keeping the information up to date and will not include about 80% of the businesses that trade in the UK (Sole Traders and Partnerships will be missing as they are not limited entities).  Also worth mentioning is that a high percentage of the addresses you purchase from companies house will not be the trading address details but more the address of a solicitor, accountant, secretary or director acting on the companies behalf.

If you would like an extract from any of the above files then please call us or use the 'brief us' tab on the menu bar.