Education Marketing

One of the great benefits in selling into schools is the fact that around 70% of the advertising that reaches schools consists of little more than a statement of what the product or service is, rather than the benefit of using it.

In a further 20% of cases there is a benefit, but the benefit is so weak, or one that has been used so many times before, that it doesn’t work.

Perhaps the most common example of an overused benefit is “makes learning fun” (with all its variants such as “putting the fun back into teaching”). Another is “for teachers by teachers”.

The problem with phrases like these is twofold.

First they have been seen so many times in the past that they stop having any effect. For oft repeated phrases to work, they need to be original and either humorous or genuinely thought provoking.

Original phrases are good if you can find them, but you also have to be ready to use them over and over again in your advertising so that they become remembered and associated with your approach to advertising. That means you have to be ready for a long-term campaign.

The alternative is to come up with a benefit that is real, and which others are not using – and this is the bonus you get in selling to schools. Despite the fact that selling benefits works extremely well, most people aren’t doing it in teacher focussed advertising. Companies large and small, when selling to schools, tend to forget the first law of marketing and revert to selling by features rather than benefits. They tell us what is in the box, rather than what the box will do for the teacher.

Great benefits that can be used but are hardly used include, taking students up a grade in exam, enabling the teacher to teach a subject without recourse to any other material, reducing the time it takes to teach a subject, cutting the level of bullying in school within two weeks…

You can see at once the power of these statements compared with the power of the “making teaching fun” or “by teachers for teachers” statement. Both have benefits within them (if a lesson is fun, the children learn more; teachers ought to know what works in a school so their products should be good), but because the full details are not spelled out, the message is weakened.

What I do find sometimes is that people will say to me, “I can’t prove the benefits” and while I would never knowingly write an advert that the Advertising Standards Authority would object to, I know from experience that proof is not necessary in such adverts.

If you have an advert that is not benefit driven and you would like to know about ways of changing it, do send it to me (Tony@hamilton-house.com) and I will call you back with my thoughts. If you would like to look at an overall campaign that can change the whole way you advertise and bring in better results, you might want to look at our Velocity programme at http://www.velocity.ac/education.html – although we are also very happy to work on a job by job basis.

Tony Attwood

Option 1: you handle everything in house, turning to an outside agency (hopefully Hamilton House but maybe someone else) when you need something particular, such as personal email lists, copywriting, blog creation etc.

Option 2: you contract with Hamilton House (and in this case it normally is us, because I don’t think anyone else runs a service quite like this) and we do the work for you each month for an all-inclusive price.

This latter service is known as Velocity, and over the years the number of options within it have expanded dramatically. We now include

• Marketing review and consultancy
• Writing direct mail copy, email copy, website copy
• Emailing teachers directly to their own personal address
• Developing and promoting the company blog
• Researching direct mail and email lists of potential clients where these do not already exist
• Managing these lists and despatching direct mail and emails to potential clients
• Research into customer attitudes to your product
• Competitor research
• PR campaigns
• Search engine optimisation

Most companies pay a fee of £450 a month. Of course they don’t get everything on the list each month – but they usually get services which if bought in individually would cost £1000 or more.

There’s no long term contract, just a requirement that we get one month’s notice as and when you want to leave us.

There’s a lot more information on http://www.velocity.ac/education.html or if you would like to talk through you specific requirements please do call 01536 399 000 and ask to speak to one of the Velocity team.

Of course if you prefer, we can just become involved in one of these projects with you, and charge just for that. It is always a matter for you.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Tony Attwood

Tony@hamilton-house.com

I have started going through the email response rates for mailings to schools last term. I can’t give all the data yet, but here’s a couple of bits and pieces – along with some background.

Response rates in emails are measured primarily as “click throughs” – that is the number of people who having read the email then click on the link to your web site.

This is measured as a percentage of the number of people mailed.

To see the costs in all this, if you mail 1000 teachers using the personal email lists (these are the ones that go out once a week to individual teachers selected by subject) the cost will be £180 (18p per address).

So a 1% click through rate means you are getting 10 click throughs for your £180 which of course means £18 per person who gets to your web site. A 5% click through rate means you are spending £3.60 for each person who goes there.

Is this worth it? Everything depends on what happens next – but this itself is changeable. If you get a 5% click through rate but no sales what you know is that your web site landing page is simply not working for these people. You then know exactly what to do – work on the landing page of the web site in order to ensure that all these people who are landing on your web site are actually going on to engage further with you.

The best two results from last term (from different clients) using our personal lists were click through rates of 19% and 23.1% – but I must stress these were the best.

Clients of ours who work on their own, and just buy into our mailings get these figures from us as part of the package, and of course it is then up to them to work through the results, and adjust the advert or the landing page if they think that is what the figures show.

Companies that are part of our Velocity programme, will get recommendations from us as to what to do next, and if that involves making changes to the web landing page, we will re-write it for them.

There’s more about Velocity on www.velocity.ac – or give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Key educational reforms, including compulsory sex education for 15-year-olds, have been dropped from the Children, Schools and Families Bill going through parliament before it is dissolved before the general election.

Bills that were making their way through parliament when the election is called can become law but only when opposition parties agree for them to go through on the nod.  In the case of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, the Conservative Party withheld its support.

One-to-one tuition, a home education register and school report cards are among the other plans that have been abandoned.   Also out are the home school agreements, which give head teachers stronger powers to enforce parents’ responsibilities in maintaining good behaviour, have been dropped.

Reforms of the primary school curriculum, allowing schools greater flexibility to tailor teaching to their children, have also gone, along with catch-up lessons, one-to-one tuition and small group support for pupils needing extra support.

Plans for a licence to practise for teachers have vanished as well as well as a requirement that local authorities carry out parental satisfaction surveys on secondary schools.  The Children’s Bill will no also longer give local authorities powers to intervene in schools causing concern and it will not give powers to the secretary of state to intervene in failing youth-offending teams.

A spokesman for the Conservative Party said that they were in favour of making PSHE statutory, but wanted to support the right of parents of 15 year olds to withdraw their children from these lessons.

The School of Educational Administration is in the final stages of producing a course for heads, deputies, bursars, managers and administrators, on school efficiency.   The SEA is looking for products and services that can be quoted in the course as items that could lead to efficiency in a school. 

The SEA (which is a section of the Hamilton House group that runs this blog) has been running the Certificate in Educational Administration for five years, and this new course will be a continuation of its work.

The course focuses on ways in which ordinary schools can become more efficient.  Some examples given within the course include…

1.  Redesigning a room so that more students can fit in, or each student has more space

2.  Introducing an IT suite which has on line lessons for each subject, and then having students work on the on-line lessons in the IT suite if a teacher is away, rather than have a supply teacher for each absent colleague

3.  Cutting the cost of services (power, water, telephone) that are bought in by the school, or reducing the use of the services themselves

4.  Finding a way of raising significant sums of money for the school (we are not covering normal fund raising activities but instead are looking for more unusual activities that can raise significant amounts without much or any extra work by the staff.  For example, handing over the school playground at the weekend as a car park for the local shopping centre, or because the school is close to a football ground).

5.  Reducing the time taken to handle particular issues or problems.

6.  Using actors or musicians or sportspeople as supply teachers on occasion

7.  Changing the way teaching works in order to enable the students to cover a course more quickly

8.  Changing the way absences are checked and chased

9.  Changing the way parents are contacted to reduce the time it takes while improving the speed

10. Improving the light or sound in a classroom so that pupils may be able to see or hear better

These are examples – but this is not the exclusive list.  Indeed we are particularly looking for ideas beyond this list.

If you have a product or service that does offer a genuine improvement in school efficiency it could be quoted in the course, at no charge at all.

To be included what you need to do is to email me with an attached word file, and on the word file describe the product or service, and what it does, and how it makes the school or a part of the school more efficient.   The document must be in word (not pdf) because if it is used in the course, it will need to be cut and pasted.

The piece must not be a straight advert – it needs to be a reasoned argument and explanation of the principle, then citing your product or service at the end.  It can be any length – 50 words or 1000 words.  If we use it we will acknowledge you as the source and give full details of your web site, phone number etc, so it will be free advertising.   But please don’t just refer us to your web site – we need you to help set out the reasoning in the form indicated above.

If you want to talk to me about this, please do call 01536 399 013.   If you want to know more about the School of Educational Administration the details are at www.admin.org.uk

Tony Attwood

There are three things that I believe companies need to do to stay ahead of the game in the current market place.

 

And sad to say, my experience is that most firms are not doing these things – even though they are not necessarily expensive.

 

Here they are:

 

1.  Build an email list of your own customers and enquirers, and make sure you can mail it in accordance with current guidelines.

 

I am getting to the point of thinking that the second part of that sentence is more important than the first – because time and again reps of companies that I am working with tell me that they have such a list, but when I ask questions about it, a certain vagueness (if not downright coolness) reaches the atmosphere.

 

Typically I am told that “yes we have one” and that a certain other member of staff deals with it.  It is only later that I find that there is no such list, or it is not up to date, or it is being sent out without a proper “unsubscribe” button, or it is just being sent via a normal email program, and so ending up being blocked at half the addresses it reaches.

 

The fact is, having an email list of recent enquirers and past buyers is the single best thing you can do in marketing terms.  It is not hard to do, and yet somehow it isn’t done.

 

2.  Look at the stats when you do email marketing, and compare the number of people hitting your web site, with the number who then go on to order.

 

When emailing potential customers you should be able to see how many click through from your email to your web site.  The key issue here is…

 

a) is the email working in delivering a good number of people on to your web site? (if not, change the email)

 

and

 

b) are those people buying? (if not, re-write the landing page)

 

The fact is that many companies with whom I speak can’t or won’t change their web site, either because I cannot make myself clear in my suggestion that just one page is changed, or because the web site designer is a part timer who is currently working for the Venezuelan government and won’t be back for three months.

 

The point is that getting this information (that it is the email that is at fault or the web site that is at fault) is wonderful – it really takes you a long way forward.  If you then do nothing with it, it is a dreadful waste.  

 

Take this information and use it in the right way, and it can transform your business all by itself.

 

3.  Run a regular (at least weekly) commentary service via your email and/or blog (ideally “and blog”) which is not utterly sales based, but gives advice, guidance, or deals in a light-hearted way with the issues.

 

Blogs are not complex things to run, nor are email lists.  They are great at getting new customers, and at staying in touch with existing clients.  The only complexity comes with the writing – because a blog is only as good as the writing.  Screaming details about discounts doesn’t work – you have to talk with the recipient, and have an (admittedly one sided) conversation.

 

Blog writing is just about the fastest growing part of the Hamilton House workload at the moment, so I am more than happy to send on some samples to you if you want.

 

Finally, I am going to suggest a blog to read.  For several years I wrote occasional stories set in the Toppled Bollard public house – light hearted and silly tales about direct marketing.  I still get calls from people who remember them – to which I generally reply “do you get calls from people who can remember your promotions from two or more years ago?”

 

I am not in any way suggesting that you should write something as eccentric as the Toppled Bollard stories, but the fact is they are remembered by some of our potential customers, and that makes them read more.

 

If you never saw the stories, or if you remember them with a certain bizarre affection, a new series is appearing regularly at www.blog.toppled.info 

 

Tony Attwood

01536 399 000

I’m not going to answer that, because I am so obviously biased, but here are a couple of thoughts that you might consider if you are advertising this term…

 

1.  The new edition of Selling to schools, covering April to August 2010 is published and is available free of charge at http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/When.pdf

 

2.  The UK Education News rolling news programme has come through all its testing and will be fully advertised to schools this term.   You can read it at www.ukeducationnews.co.uk – and to be listed on the site call 01536 399 000 or see www.ukeducationnews.co.uk/ratecard.pdf   We are continuing with the free running of ads on UK Educatiion News for firms involved with shared, solo and email campaigns costing £200 or more.

 

3.  All the schools are back by the start of next week (a few went backon the 13th)

 

4.  There is a new issue around – that of email lists in which teachers are rewarded for clicking on links, even if they are not interested in the product.  I’ve done one report on this, but call me if you have any concerns (particularly open and click through rates that go off the scale).

 

5.  We’ve greatly expanded the Velocity programme through which we work closely with our clients on a pro-active manner, helping them find exactly the right media and message.  Details on www.velocity.ac – click on “Education”.

 

That’s about it for openers.  If last term is anything to go by the amount of advertising reaching schools (excluding generic emails) will be down by about 50%, which means much higher response rates for all those who do advertise.

 

Tony Attwood

 

I have written before about the tricks that are used in promoting email lists, and we seem to be in a new period of these.

 

A number of companies that sell email lists are encouraging recipients of emails to open an email or click on a link by saying that the individual will be entered in a weekly or monthly draw.

 

The net result of this is that people do tend to stay on the email list (rather than unsubscribe) and click on lots of emails, not because they are reading anything, but rather because they are hoping to win the regular lottery.

 

One other side effect of this approach is that it allows the company owning the email list the chance to mail the list over and over again – sometimes daily, sometimes several times a day.

 

The unsubscribe rate stays low, and the open or click through rate stays high, again because of artificial means – whereas normally heavy emailing results in people unsubscribing.

 

In other words, while we normally use the unsubscribe rate as a measure of reader dissatisfaction with the promotions, and we use the open and click through rate as a measure of interest, these connections are destroyed.

 

A really exciting headline which in a non-manipulated mailing might get a very high open rate and lead to a lot of click throughs, will now get a rate that is similar to every other email – because it is the arrival of the email that triggers the click (in order to enter the prize draw for free) rather than the content of the email.

 

I will fully admit to a bias in this matter because Hamilton House doesn’t use this technique, and we have always thought it an approach which distorts the effectiveness of the email.  Obviously those who do use the “reward for clicking” approach, will argue that it is nothing of the kind, and that it simply encourages people to open the emails.

 

Only a detailed comparison between a promotion undertaken with a “prize draw for clicking” list and one undertaken with a list not subject to this approach would give an answer, and I don’t think that this has ever been done.

 

My concern is the prize for clicking approach does tend to reveal a much higher number of email addresses than otherwise would be the case, since it encourages people to subscribe to the list many times over.

 

In the end sales are the only absolute measure of course.

 

There’s details of the Hamilton House email lists (all mailed without incentives to click) on www.emails.gs

 

In the USA there were 15.4 billion core searches in March 2010.  That means that on 15,400,000,000  occasions in 31 days people decided to do a search on Google, Yahoo, Ask and the Microsoft search sites.

I don’t have the UK figures for the same period but they will be about 12% of that – still a fairly big number.

Increasingly people use long and complex phrases when searching, in order to find what they want.  They don’t type “school software” they type “school admissions software program low cost”  or “biology GCSE software plants species” or whatever.

Which is why sites with lots of text on them tend to get picked up more often – quite simply because they are more likely to match whatever phrase people type in.

And yet, every day I am asked to look at sites which the owners are very proud of, and which have beautiful  design on them, but which are light on text.

I am sure the design will help people stay on the site once they are there (well, not always but sometimes – it all depends on whether the design follows the rules of the psychology of perception) but design never draws anyone onto the site.

If you would like me to suggest the sort of text that could help beef up the number of hits your site gets, send me the URL and I’ll let you know.  No obligation or cost.

Tony Attwood (Tony@hamilton-house.com)