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
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Tony Attwood