Education Marketing

This news item applies to companies that hope to get repeat business from schools.  If you just have one product, and that’s that, it doesn’t apply.

At the heart of this approach is the generation of an email list of teachers who have either bought from you or have shown an interest.   You can generate this list through your normal sales and through the techniques I outline below.

However let me add one point here.  When I talk this method through on the phone with potential customers of Hamilton House I am often told they don’t have the email addresses of their clients.  So I suggest that irrespective of anything else, they should start developing an email list of past customers – by going back through past orders, by phoning, and by writing.

A lot of the time I find that this advice is ignored and six months or a year later the company is still without such a list.  Of course, there’s no reason why they should take any notice of what I say, except I do think this approach is right.   So, to encourage people along, we’ve now added a new service to our range – we’ll do it for you.  It can be done as part of Velocity (www.velocity.ac) or as a one off arrangement.   If you are interested, just call me and we can talk it through.

But let’s move on.  From this point, even if you don’t have a list of the email addresses of your past customers you now need to start building a list.  Record the email address of each person who calls, emails, writes or places an order, and drop it into a database.

Then you’ll either need to contract with Hamilton House, or a company like us, or buy in some software so that you can send out emails to these people.

But meanwhile you can stimulate sales further by a free offer approach.  You write or email (using a commercial list) and offer the teacher something free.  The cheapest thing to offer is a free report (but obviously it has to be a free report that teachers actually want and it has to be quite meaningful in itself.  If you want some ideas on how this can work give me a call).

To get the free report (or anything else you are offering) the individual teacher has to email you – and in that way you get the email address of the person applying.

A variation on the second approach is to offer a product for sale, but at a very low cost – so that you get a lot of sales.  You might make a loss on the project, or you might aim to break even, but either way you should pick up more and more email addresses as you go.  Once again you have to insist that the order is either made on line or via email.

Thus your email list builds with teachers interested in your services and then you email them.   How often you mail them is up to you, but if you are a subscriber to the Education-Marketing email news service you will know that it is possible to write to people five days a week with a mix of news and adverts and keep people’s interest.   (Most people find five days a week a bit much, but HHM runs a series of news services to teachers and they get an email once a week, and are certainly very happy with that).

Of course if you email them every week with a SPECIAL DISCOUNT OFFER !!!!! they are going to get a bit fed up, but if you keep the interest level up rather than shouting at them, normally very few leave.

It is a system that works wonderfully well, but which very few firms use. If you would like to talk about this, or about the writing of a suitable report, do give me a call.  01536 399 013 usually works.  We’ve done a fair amount of email address gathering using both methods and we’re very happy to help.

Meanwhile, please don’t forget – if you want to stay up to date with today’s school news, it is all on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

And you can subscribe to Education Marketing by sending an email to Education-Marketing-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Tony Attwood

If you are a subscriber to the Direct Mail Secrets newsgroup you might have noticed I have been exploring the fact that in the US the marketing headlines are all about “Email is Dead”.

To an extent that is true in the UK, although not so much in education where we have been researching and developing new lists of teachers own personal email addresses for some time.

But it is undeniable that around 20% of secondary schools do not hand out personal email addresses at all, and also do not ever pass on emails sent to the general school address.

So the fact is that if you only use email your secondary school target audience is 4000 schools not 5000 schools.

We’ve identified these “missing” 1000 schools, and now can offer to sell that list as a mailing list for £90.

We can also do a solo mailing to the 1000 schools that never look at emails.  Up to two items in a C5 paper envelope can be mailed for just £390 including postage, packing, labels etc etc.  The mailing can go out at any time.  If you are interested, please do call 01536 399 000.

I’ve argued before that the way forward with email marketing to schools is through Personal email lists – emails that are addressed to the personal email address of the teacher in the school.

Because of this Hamilton House is now expanding its list of teachers covered by personal emails.  The new lists now being researched include

Head of Travel and Tourism

Head of Sixth Form

Head of Media Studies

Head of Fashion and Retail

Head of Classics

Head of Careers

The Bursar

The research is on-going, but as with all our lists, once we have got the list running we will only use each list once a week (in order to keep up response rates).  So if you have a real interest in one of these lists you might like to book in a mailing for a few weeks time, to ensure you are one of the first users.

Thinking of the issue of emailing schools as a whole, the big issue continues to be getting the email directly to the teacher.  Where the email goes via the school administrator there is a chance that the administrator will simply delete it, rather than either forward it, or print it out and put it in a pigeon hole.

One way of improving the response rate on generic lists is to add the name of the teacher to the subject line – so instead of just saying “attention head of maths” one writes “Attention: Mr B Jones, head of maths”.   This approach is known as the “Preference List”.

But even the Preference List is outshone by the Personal List, which often has a success rate of 20 times greater than the generic list, not just for click throughs to a web site but also for direct sales from the email.

There’s a list of all the email lists that we have on www.emails.gs – or please do call on 01536 399 000.

I have long argued that many companies that face something of a downturn in selling to schools do so because they do not pay equal attention to both the medium and the message.

By medium I mean things like email and direct mail, and within that I suggest that the advertiser must have an awareness of the sort of level of sales he/she might get from each medium (shared mail vs. solo mail, generic email vs. personal email and so on).

For example, if you use direct mail to sell a product costing £25 you might expect to get a 2% or 3% sales rate or more.  If you use generic email you might get a 0.1% sale rate, or less.

In other words each medium has its own costs and its own response rates, and you need to be aware of them as you choose the right medium for you.  Mailing 1000 schools wherein you might expect a response rate of just 0.1% is going to give you 1 sale.  You might get 2, you might get 0, but you probably won’t get 50.

By “message” I refer to the way in which you choose to sell your service or product – the way you write about what you have on offer.  If you use the “announcement” technique in which you simply tell the reader who you are and what you sell, you will normally get a far lower response rate than if you start by asking an interesting open question.

Both issues have a huge impact on marketing, and in my opinion if you attend to one, but ignore the other, then the whole marketing process can fall apart.  You need to think, “which medium is right for this promotion?” and then “how am I going to convince the reader that this is the a product or service that will benefit this reader?”

Sometimes a medium is chosen because it is cheap – on the grounds that “we’ll see how this goes, and then if it works, we’ll try a more expensive one”, but the problem with that is, if your marketing stalls at this point then you might not know if it has failed because you have chosen a low cost/low response medium, or because your copy is not right.  It is better to start with a test run of a more expensive medium, because that way you have a better chance of getting a response.

One of the key elements of the Velocity service that HHM offers is this balance of medium and message.  Within Velocity you can choose if you want to focus on one, or the other, or balance both.  We suggest the latter, but if you already have your message sorted, we can work entirely on getting the message out through a variety of media.  Likewise if you have your own mailing list, we can focus on the message.

There’s more on Velocity on www.velocity.ac – but if you would like to talk to myself or my colleagues about the message, the media, or indeed Velocity, do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

I wrote the other day about how the number of students doing A level psychology had increased dramatically, to the point that last year it overtook biology as the third most popular A level.

Hamilton House has just done some research into the job title of the person in charge of teaching psychology in schools that do the subject.

The answers we got from schools where psychology is taught were

Head of Psychology: 64%

Head of Social Science*: 20%

Head of Science: 16%

The Head of Social Science answers included a small number that were Head of Social Studies and Head of Health and Social Science.

Where schools answered “Director of…” or “Team Leader of…” these answers were combined with “Head of…” answers.  So overall addressing mail to “Head of Psychology” looks a good bet, or if you want to cover all angles, “Head of Psychology, Dept of Social Science”

Hamilton House regularly carries out research into aspects of schooling, and teacher purchasing habits.  If you would like to know more about this, and have some research you would like carried out please do get in touch.  We can undertake the research as a one-off project, or as part of a Velocity programme (www.velocity.ac)

For more info do call, 01536 399 000

Tony Attwood

I was doing a spot of research on behalf of a customer the other day, and as a part of the background programme I needed to look up the number of students taking each subject at A level.

For years the most popular subjects at A level have been English, maths and biology.   But now it seems there is an interloper in this little group, for in the latest set of figures I have, psychology turns out to have more A level students taking the exam than biology.

This is interesting from a marketing point of view, because the amount of promotional material going into schools about psychology is tiny, when compared with the amount of adverts for items relating to far less popular subjects such as French or music or DT.

Of course, most of us sell what we have to sell, but for those companies that have the ability to bring in new products and services psychology – and indeed to a lesser degree sociology – look like being a key area.

Hamilton House regularly undertakes research for clients both in terms of background information, and in terms of specific projects.  For our clients who are on the Velocity programme (www.velocity.ac) this is generally undertaken for free – otherwise we are always pleased to give a cost for any specific job.

Tony Attwood

I have long felt that it is possible for a person to use the Hamilton House blogging system and get from no knowledge of blogs or how to use them, to having their own blog, in just 30 minutes.

This past week I proved this with a colleague, by setting up a blog for a client of ours who I think it is fair to say had a limited awareness of how the whole system worked.   Within half an hour of our setting up the site for her, she was up and running, and had published her first blog.

The whole setting up process, and running the service for a year, costs under £100, after which there is a very modest charge per year for keeping the site running.

There’s details of the technical set up side of things at http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs.  And if you are looking for an example of how your blog will look – well it will look a bit like this.

If you are interested, do give me a call on 01536 399 000

Tony Attwood

Marketing is a mixture of science and art.  The art is the creative bit – the insight into how to approach the selling of a particular product.  The science involves the knowledge of the psychology of perception, the question of how people actually see a page of paper or a screen of information, and which layouts and designs work best and overcoming the resistance many will have to reading what you have put out.

And because marketing is a mix of art and science it is a fact that one doesn’t always get it right.  Because one also has to take into account what teachers are thinking, what other companies are doing, how schools are responding to the current financial situation and so forth.

That’s why a combination of email and direct mail can help us, because each has its own benefits as a route to experimentation.

Here are three scenarios that we use all the time

1: Email:

When emails are sent to schools one can measure the open rate, the number of clicks through to the web site, and obviously the number of sales.  The trouble is, if one uses generic emails to do this the open rate becomes meaningless because the email is initially opened by the school administrator, not the teacher you want to reach.  So we use personal email addresses, knowing that each “open” has some meaning.

In this way email helps us see the progress step by step.  Did people see the subject line and open?  Did teachers read the text and then click through?  If both are yes, then if sales are disappointing it is something to do with the landing page.  In other words we use the information we get to great advantage even if there are no sales.

2: Solo mail

Solo mail doesn’t have a way of measuring anything other than actual sales or enquiries, but for both it is unsurpassed, since it always gets the highest response rates.  Thus it is often possible to mail just 300 addresses or so and find out what enquiry or sales rate one gets from the message selected.  Quite often we might try four or five different messages sent to different schools on the same day to see which one works best.

3: The subscribers survey

Often we need a bit more information – especially if a sale is not working well. In such circumstances we will mail a list of teachers who subscribe to one of our weekly news letters, and ask them to tell us.

In one case we had a client who had a literacy package that they believed was uniquely placed to solve a particular problem with poor readers.

At their request we advertised it in this way, stressing its uniqueness, but failed to get sales.   We therefore wrote to our subscribers and said, “if you were faced with this problem, what software would you use?”  The answer should have been “none – there isn’t any”.  But in fact we got lots of replies offering the names of three products that teachers said worked well.

Thus showed us how the teachers perceived the market place, and then allowed us to write a much better ad, that more accurately reflected the teachers’ perception of the product.

If you have a product or service that is not selling as well as you would like, and you would like to discuss this further, please do get in touch with Hamilton House, either by emailing me back, or by calling 01536 399 000.  We’re always pleased to hear from you.

Tony Attwood