There is only one way I know of doubling the response rate in marketing to schools: experimentation.
However there is always a problem. The more one experiments the more one has to live with failure – and that is what some firms don’t like to do.
The point is this: there are a number of things that we know will tend to make an advert work well. If you make your potential customer feel good, if you supply your potential customer with what he/she wants, and if you sell benefits rather than features, you tend to increase your response rates from your advertising.
All that is well known: but that little list never tells us enough to ensure that we can get our advertising right each time. We need to experiment. And not every experiment works (if it did there would be no point to experimenting).
Last term I worked with a Velocity client of ours who was getting very modest response rates on both direct mail and email. I re-wrote this email adverts using all the techniques I know and got only a minor improvement. The following week I tried again and the response rates actually went down.
Fortunately the client didn’t give us the sack at once, and we went on trying. Each time we failed to make the breakthrough we sat back and analysed what had happened – not just the open rate and click through rate of the advert, but also the way in which the offer was written, the way in which the headline was phrased. and so on.
By the end of the second month we were able to produce an advert that created the biggest level of sale that the client had had. What’s more we knew exactly how it had worked, and why it had worked and after one further test (just to prove the point) we were able to replicate what we had done again and again. Even better, any of our client’s rivals who were watching these various ads go out wouldn’t have a clue which one worked and which one didn’t and so if they felt like copying our client’s adverts, they were more than likely to get it wrong.
But my main point is that we would never have got to this success without analysing the failures in real depth, and looking at the slight changes we were making each time, and how the sales rates responded.
It is in fact a science – or rather a scientific way of analysing the art of copy writing.
The fact is that you can write an advert for Product X one way and get 0.01% sales, and write it another way and get 2% sales. Sometimes you can do even better.
So my message is simple – you double response rates by experimentation over time. And this is why we created Velocity. Velocity means that Hamilton House takes on the experimentation and does everything it can to find the route that will greatly enhance your response rate. Of course you can do it yourself – we would argue that working with us can not only be quicker, but also a lot cheaper, since the cost of sending out the emails each week is incorporated into the monthly Velocity fee.
If you would like to know more about Velocity please do call 01536 399 000 and ask for a member of the Velocity team, or take a look at http://www.velocity.ac/education.html
Tony Attwood