Sending out your own emails?

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Posted on 21st May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

If you are sending out your own emails to schools, or if you are using a commercial service which allows you to send through their servers, it can sometimes be hard to know how many of those emails are arriving, and if any are not arriving, why that is the case.

Emails can fail to arrive for all sorts of reasons, but the prime ones are

a) the email address is wrong

b) someone somewhere along the email chain is specifically blocking you as a sender

c) there is something within the email which is causing the school, or a group of schools, to block this email.

Obviously if your system is set to give you a list of undeliverable emails then you can deal with part a). But you may not always be aware that somewhere in the chain of events that takes an email from you to the recipient someone else has a block in place, and that can take quite a while to get sorted. It could be a major industry player, or a local authority. Until you start looking it is hard to know.

Even then once you have sorted the block, there is still the problem of what you say. Obviously you are not going to use swear words when writing to schools, but it is a fact that certain words have dual meanings, and may have a perfectly legitimate meaning within one context, but which in another context have a different connotation.

In such cases you can find your email being blocked for a reason that you could never have imagined. I don’t want to write such a word here, in case it affects delivery of this message to you. But if think of the slave trade and the way in which children were sold into sl and bo (complete the second those two words) you’ll see how easy it is to use a word that has a double meaning.

Sadly, most blocking systems have no concept of context so blockages do occur. (They also don’t know much about humour, word games or the sudden usage of a foreign language).

All of which adds to my feeling that if you do want to send out your own emails to schools then it is often a good idea to work with a company that is expert in the IT side of things, and which knows a thing or two about the creative side of writing to teachers.

What caused me to think of all this was a conversation last week with a educational supply company who told me that email to schools doesn’t work. When I told him that First and Best (the publishing company owned by Hamilton House and which we use to test out both our system and our creative ideas) promotes itself primarily in this way and does quite well, he was disbelieving. It was only after we explored matters further that we found that this company had no policies or activities in place to check if the emails were actually getting through.

If you have any doubts – we are always very happy to help with your promotions. It is, after all, what we exist for.

http://www.educationmarketing.org.uk/Services.html gives a run down of what we offer while http://www.educationmarketing.org.uk has a list of our current special promotions.

Tony Attwood

Developing your reputation as a supplier

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Posted on 20th May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

What is the most effective way of developing a reputation of being a quality supplier to schools?

 

Here’s a conundrum: teachers often like to buy the cheapest products and services.  But teachers also hate it when a product breaks down, or a service fails.

One response to this is to advertise oneself as not only offering a good price but also giving the teachers some reason to believe that you offer a quality, reliable product or service as well.

So, how does one build up a reputation for reliability with teachers who have never used your product or service?

Unfortunately just claiming that you have the highest quality doesn’t really help much. Instead the answer is to use a two pronged attack. 

The first part of this approach involves selecting elements of your product or service which you know offer good quality and which differentiate you from the competition.  This might relate to the be speed of delivery, the guarantee, the average reliability within the market place, and so on.

The second part involves getting your customers and potential customers to change their perception of you as an individual.

When you start out you will have a reputation that is little more than, “I’ve never heard of them” which in effect equates to meaning, “I know a lot about buying supplies for this school, and if I have never heard of them, they can’t be any good.”

To overcome this one needs to communicate with teachers regularly by varying your adverts so that while you always mention the product, you also sometimes talk around the product, while taking in other issues and factors that may be of interest to those in schools.

This approach avoids the shorthand of phrases such as “Developed by teachers for teachers” which have been overplayed so much that many teachers now disregard them – not least because some of the products developed by teachers for teachers have turned out to be a load of tosh.

The other point to make here is that one must address teachers in a conversational way which accepts them as the experts but which also offers some support and help with what they do.

If you would like to explore this approach further, please do call 01536 399 000.   We are always happy to share our ideas, and also work with you either on a one off basis or through a continual campaign.

Five educational web sites to advertise within

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Posted on 17th May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

The impression that Mr Gove, secretary of state for education, sometimes gives, is of a man who walks around with an old envelope and a pen. He has an idea and writes it down. Out it pops.

In the past week one of his ventures (the new SPAG) test has been undergone for the first time by primary school children. But the dust has hardly settled on that (or his plan to eliminate most of the GCSE exam boards – a plan now acknowledged to be anti-competitive and thus illegal) and we have a new one.

This time it is the plan to change the grading system for GCSEs, and you can read the full story at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-secretary-michael-gove-reveals-radical-rethink-on-grades-in-new-gcse-revolution-8617827.html

This just one of over 100 education stories that appears each day on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

Leaving aside the fact that the site does keep you fully informed about current education issues, it is also a place where you can advertise, with your advert appearing as one of the rolling stories in the central screen. If you want to see what happens to an advert look for a story that comes from “Schools News” on the right hand column.

You can advertise on this and four other education web sites for two months for £49.99. Details are on http://www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk/2012/11/29/advertise-on-major-teacher-websites-49-99/

Tony Attwood

Trust is at the heart of dealing with teachers

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Posted on 16th May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

It is my experience that many teachers are rather dubious about the companies that promote to them – there is no automatic level of trust when they open an email or sales letter from potential suppliers.
 
The heart of this distrust comes from a belief that quite a few teachers have that no one outside the classroom really understands what teaching is like – and that is a hard barrier to break down.
 
To give an example, so extreme can this lack of trust be that when I have been promoting the free weekly news letters that we send to various groups of teachers, I get emails back saying “let me see a sample before I subscribe.” The newsletter is free, the advert says you can unsubscribe at any time, it makes the point that if you unsure about subscribing just subscribe and then unsubscribe, and it gives the full details of Hamilton House as the originator of the email.
 
And still they ask for a sample.
 
So how do you get teachers to trust you?
 
First, use a conversational tone. Not lots of exclamation marks, and sudden discounts. Talk with the reader as you would talk with him or her if you met the teacher at a trade show or conference.
 
Second, be calm about your claims – don’t over hype. Don’t claim pre-eminence, don’t shout that this is the best, or that your product is just what teachers have been waiting for. But of course emphasise your genuine unique selling point, and make sure it is unique. Saying that you are friendly and deliver on time every time is not a unique selling point. True, you might be the only firm in the universe that is friendly and delivers on time, but the fact is that everyone claims this so the claim will fall on deaf ears.
 
Third, avoid commonplace claims such as “by teachers for teachers” (or worse “By Teachers For Teachers!!!”) It may be true, and it may be worth mentioning in passing, but it can’t be a lead item, because it has been done so many times before.
 
Fourth, don’t tell teachers what they already know. Telling a teacher that times are tough, that there is a change about to happen to the National Curriculum, that money is short or that summer is almost upon us, is a good way to get them to delete.
 
In short, engage in a conversational, but professional discussion, through which you manage to put forward your point of view. There’s an example of how I do it on http://www.emails.gs/email.html – in case that helps.
 
Alternatively you could contemplate becoming a member of the Velocity programme with Hamilton House, within which you can have as many one to one discussions on the phone with myself and the rest of the Velocity team as you wish, and we will be there writing your emails and sales letters (again if you wish) and analysing your own proposition to see exactly how it can generate ever more sales. There are details on www.velocity.ac
 
Or call us on 01536 399 000. We’re mostly harmless.
 
Tony Attwood

In my view the BBC’s grammar is quite wrong.

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Posted on 15th May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

The BBC is running a quiz to find out how good the English grammar of readers is. But there is a problem – or to be more exact, I had a problem.
 
Here is the information given:
 
“The man next door has a garden that is being overrun with cats. Which of the following questions is correct?”
 
One of the four possible answers given is
 
Whose cats are using our neighbours’ garden?
 
But if you choose that answer you get told this:
 
WRONG! It’s the third one…. The garden belongs to the neighbour (singular) so needs an apostrophe before the “s”. The correct answer is “Whose cats are using our neighbour’s garden.”
 
Now that may well be one solution to the issue, but let us go back to the original line: “The man next door has a garden that is being overrun with cats.”
 
We know that the man next door has a garden. But what we don’t know is whether that garden is only owned by him alone or is owned by him in partnership with others – for example his wife, or his partner or his children. If the garden is owned (or indeed even used by) more than one person then you could legitimately say it is our neighbours’ garden – the garden of our neighbours. We know it is the garden of the man next door, but we don’t know anything else about the property, so we can’t be sure that it is the garden of just the man next door. That has not been established thus s’ and ‘s could both be correct.
 
Is that me being silly and picky? Well, yes it is, but being picky and exact is what grammar is all about. To be complete the BBC test should have said
 
“The man next door lives on his own and has a garden that he exclusively owns. That garden is being overrun with cats. “
 
If I were a child taking the current round of SPAG I would be left not only trying to get the answer right, I would also be trying to work out the thinking of the person who set the question.
 
You can take the test at…
 

The ideal way to test your product or service

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Posted on 14th May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

Shared emails are a low cost way of seeing if your product or service is of interest to teachers, and as a way of keeping your company details in front of teachers.

Each email contains detailed announcements from a maximum of five companies They go directly to the relevant teacher’s personal email address and not via the school administrator.

There’s a standard format for each email (see the link below) and the information includes your address, phone, fax, email and website link, plus up to 100 words about your company. The base price for all this is just £49.95 plus VAT.

If you want to appear as the top company in a list, you can guarantee this by paying an extra £40. If no one pays the extra £40 for the shared emailing that you are in, then we will place the first company to book in the first place.

Also, you will get one link included with the email. If you want to have a second link, that will be an extra £15.

The dates below show the earliest date on which we will start transmission. You can book in now, and the final date for receipt of material is one week before that date.

There’s an example of how a shared email looks at http://www.emails.gs/sample_shared.html

To book a place in a mailing please call: 01536 399 000 or Email: Sales@hamilton-house.com

E-shared Dates for the coming weeks. Please note that copy is required no later than one week before the despatch date.

Date Subject
   
May 28th Primary
May 30th PSHE
June 4th Deputy Heads
June 6th Sixth forms
June 10th SENCO
June 12th English

 

Tony Attwood

The secret of selling to schools

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Posted on 13th May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

Is it possible to generate a set of procedures that virtually guarantees that an advertising campaign aimed at teachers will get the best possible results?

 

It is an interesting notion that there might be a set of procedures which if followed will aid every company that is selling to schools. 

The belief that there is such a list of factors has emerged from the work Hamilton House has done with companies that have joined the Velocity programme in which the company and Hamilton House work closely together developing advertising campaigns, and analysing the results. 

By looking for patterns in the way companies have sold, and noting where problems have arisen and what solutions are available, we have discovered a range of activities which really do make a difference in terms of sales.

What we found was that the work of generating the best approach to marketing a particular product or service divides into four different areas of activity.  It doesn’t seem to matter what the company sells, these four factors are invariably the factors that determine whether the company makes a profit or not.

So without more ado, here are the four points:

  1. 1.       The product or service

If you are selling something that is irrelevant to teachers then (fairly obviously) no one will buy it no matter what you do.  So if you produce a new on-line approach to teaching reading to seven year olds who have no interest in books, you might find no one wants it, because everyone who needs such a program already has one.  But if your approach has a feature that no other approach includes, then you might be back in business, but getting a sale still depends on the remaining three factors.     

  1. 2.       The Offer

All products and services are offered in a particular way.  They might be offered as being the cheapest, the best solution to a particular problem, the easiest to use, or the most reliable, or in any one of 100 other ways.  But the point is, if the offer does not ring true with teachers, then the offer will fail, no matter how good the product.  So if you offer something as a unique solution to a problem, and the teacher looks at the advert and thinks, “but I have seen several other solutions to this problem” you won’t be believed and your promotion will not work.  The offer has to be good within the context of what teachers already know and believe.

  1. 3.       The creative

You might have the best product and you might be offering it in a way that is attractive to teachers, but if no one reads your advert, your campaign dies.  So you have to generate a creative approach that really grabs and holds teachers’ attention.  Unfortunately most companies that create their own advertisements simply copy the style and approach of other companies, and as a result most firms get their creative horribly wrong.

Writing and designing an advertisement (be it a postal, email or web based campaign) is not common sense.  For example, the phrase “a picture is worth 10,000 words” suggests that every advertisement  needs an illustration – but that is not so.  Illustrations can on occasion harm pictures.  You might think that colour is always a good idea – but in some circumstances colour can seriously reduce response rates. 

The creative approach has to gain and hold attention for teachers will not read your advert just because you have sent it to them.  Gaining and holding attention is the hardest part of creating an advertisement.

  1. 4.       The mechanisms of sale

This final part of the process is the most complex and most commonly ignored part of gaining sales from teachers. 

Over the 30 years in which we have been operating our services we have identified 12 major mechanisms that relate to getting a sale.  It is also our conclusion that 95% of companies that advertise to schools fail to appreciate what these mechanisms are, and how they should be used. 

I can’t readily describe all 12 mechanisms here not least because many of them only apply to certain companies, but I will give an example.

Imagine you sell to primary schools and you promote your goods to all primary schools each year.  You might argue that it is important to promote to every school because there is no telling where the next order will come from.  It might be from a school that purchased from you last year, or from a school that has never purchased before.  It might be from a rural school or an urban school, a big school or a small village school…  They all buy, so there is no telling.

However it is often possible to produce an analysis that shows that promoting to certain schools will always cost more than the income you generate from them.  In short, the company would be better off not promoting to them at all and instead using the money elsewhere.

Here’s one other very common observation.   A company advertises by email, and its emails get large readership and good click throughs to the web site.  But the number of orders is small.  It is fairly obvious that the problem is with the page that teachers are directed to after reading the email.  And yet few companies actually change their “landing page” and fewer still experiment with different landing pages.  Yet to do so can radically raise the number of orders received. 

As I have said there are 12 mechanisms, alongside the issues of product, offer and creative, and it is rare to find a company that is able to pay attention to all of these factors at once.

But it is possible, and if you would like to know more about how Hamilton House might apply its four phase approach to your work, please do call 01536 399 000.  There is more information on velocity at www.velocity.ac

How do people find your company?

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Posted on 9th May 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

If I ask you, “how do people find your company?” then you will probably answer – by advertising.

But there is another way of getting potential customers to your door – or ringing your phone, or emailing you…
 
And it is not just a little extra – but it can in fact be the most effective way of advertising that you will ever find.   However most people don’t use it – even though I write about it constantly.
 
Let me give a practical example.   If you were to advertise with Hamilton House by using a text advert on one of our personal email lists, we would automatically put your advert on two of our web sites, as part of the service.
 
UK Education News (www.ukeducationnews.co.uk)
Schools News (www.blog.schools.co.uk)
 
As a result of this about 700 teachers who will see your announcement – and that is in addition to the people we email.
 
Now I have heard it said that this is the equivalent to us mailing an extra 700 people for you – but it is not like that.  Because these 700 or so, have found you by putting in a phrase into Google or another search engine which turns up on your advert.  So they have found their way to you – unlike the emails where your announcement finds its way to the teachers.
 
In a real sense, this is the best bit of the service – and yet we give it away as an extra.
 
I discovered the power of such advertising when I started the Hamilton House blog (www.blog.hamilton-house.com) some years back.  Now over half the people who phone us for the first time say, “I have been reading your article on the internet”.  
 
If you would like to get extra exposure free of charge, do try our personal email lists.  Details are given on these pages:
 
 
If you would like to talk about setting up your own blog, please call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000.

Free email campaign with solo postal mailing

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Posted on 30th April 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

Until the end of the summer term in the third week of July Hamilton House is offering a free email campaign using one of our secondary school personal email lists with every postal mailing that goes to over 3000 addresses.
 
To qualify for the campaign all you need to do is book in a solo postal campaign that will go out this term.  Once the postage has been paid on the mailing, you can then book in your free email campaign, using any one of the lists shown on http://www.emails.gs/Secondarynamedlist.html
 
Because we restrict the use of these lists in order to stop teachers being bombarded with emails, we can’t guarantee to give you the date you require, for despatch of the email campaign, but obviously the sooner you book it in, the more likely you will be to get the date you require.
 
If you have any enquiries please do call 01536 399 000.

Payment by results extended to free copywriting

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Posted on 29th April 2013 by Tony Attwood in Uncategorized

When you undertake a trial postal mailing to schools, if you don’t reach the desired sales level, we won’t charge for writing the sales letter.

Postal mailing continues to bring in the highest response rates of any form of marketing to schools – but it is of course also the most expensive approach.

Companies generally overcome this problem by doing trial mailings – usually involving mailing around 300 schools selected at random from the target list, to see if the response rate reaches the desired level.

The cost of such a trial mailing to 300 schools is generally around £145 (although it does depend on the number and size of the items enclosed).    Most companies find that even if they don’t hit their response rate target, they do get some sales, which generally pays off much of the cost of the trial.

Companies that are particularly successful in this field are constantly undertaking trial mailings, always looking for exactly the right sales letter that will bring in the percentage response rate that they require.

Obviously if you pay a proven copywriter to write a sales letter and then only send out your item to 300 schools that can make the cost of the trial very expensive.  Which is why we offer the copywriting on a payment by results basis.

If you do a trial postal campaign with Hamilton House we’ll help you work out the percentage response rate needed, and the cost of the trial.   Then, if you wish we will write the sales letter for you.  There will be no charge unless you get the desired response rate.

Next, if you get that response rate required you can do the full mailing.  Because the cost of promotion comes down so much when moving from a trial mailing to a bulk mailing you will still be charged less per school than for the trial mailing – even though you’ll now pay for the letter.

Every promotion is different, so the best way to see how you could bring in significant sales through a postal campaign, and have access to a payment-by-results sales letter, the best idea is to call 01536 399 000 and talk through the campaign as it could work for you.

We’ll work out the number of schools you need to mail in your trial mailing, the number of sales you need to make, and then if you agree to go ahead, we will also write the sales letter for you, without any charge.

To find out more and see how this could apply to your business, please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood