No matter which way one looks at it, there are three elements in every email campaign that one has to get right:

a) the list of teachers

b) the communication itself

c) the offer

The problem is that historically these three things have been completely separated, and that has resulted in promotions that could have worked very well, not working at all.

In this email my aim is to bring these three factors together…

a) the list of teachers

Obviously you need an email list – or rather two lists.  One is a list of past customers and the other is a list of potential customers.   It is still true that many firms don’t have an accurate email list of the teachers who have bought before (and yet it can be obtained fairly easily), while others do use the lower-response “generic” lists for their new promotions (a list which really should be used as a final top up, not as an initial list.

My view is that with a modest amount of work a list of personal email addresses of teachers who have bought can be built up, and that for new promotions, personal email addresses should be used first.   Personal lists can get ten times the response rate of generic lists, and in my view if you use a generic list first and it doesn’t work, you’ll never know whether that was just the list, or the communication itself, or the offer.

If you have not used personal email promotions please do call 01536 399 000 and we’ll be happy to talk this through.

b)  The communication itself

There are some key rules in writing the communication – such as the need to grab attention with the “from” line, “subject” line and opening headline within the email.   After that the key thing is to use a conversational tone, and to write to the individual teacher about the teacher’s needs, not about yourselves.

In other words the teacher should be introduced to your product or service as a solution to his/her problems.  An advert which primarily focuses on the product or service, tends to work far worse than one that focuses on the teacher’s needs first.

In this regard if you have an email that you are thinking of sending out, or have sent out, and you would like to have a chat about it, just send me a copy, with your phone number, and I’ll have a read and call back with my thoughts.

c)  The offer.

Marketing is often defined as having a product or service that the customer wants at a price that the customer is willing to pay.   Which means that quite often you need to amend the pricing or the whole notion of the product to get sales at the right level.

Indeed you may have previously come across my oft-repeated tales of how with different products we’ve failed to sell them, but then taken the price up, or down, or presented the product in an utterly new way, in order to get the sales.  It can be done – and again, if you want to talk about your product, do give me a call.  01536 399 013 is my direct line.

But let me conclude with a unifying thought.  To make a marketing campaign work you need to have all three elements firing at once: the list, the advert and the offer, all have to be right.

Which is why I believe it is best to start with a personal email list, because these lists get the best response.  That way, if the opening email fails to get the high sales you can look again at the message and get that just right.  And if you are using the personal list and a teacher-focussed (rather than product focussed) message, then you will need to change the offer.

But do remember that changing the offer is not just “3 for the price of 2″.  That’s a simple way of changing an offer – but there are many other and they can be much more sophisticated – and much more successful.

Of course you can deal with each of these issues separately yourself – and many companies do that often with a lot of success.  But if you want to bring them together into one unified vision, then you might also want to consider our Velocity programme, where we specialise in doing exactly that.    There’s details on www.velocity.ac Or call myself, Laura or Stephen on 01536 399 000 and we’ll be pleased to talk it through.

You might also want to join our free daily news bulletin on Education Marketing.  Just email: education-marketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com No cost and you can leave at any time.   And you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Actually that headline is a little misleading – I don’t mean that you can buy teachers for under 1p, but rather reach them for under 1p a go.  (But you knew that anyway, and I am just being a bit “Friday”).

EShared is not only the lowest cost service for reaching teachers that we offer (£99 to reach 10,000 teacher email addresses) but also an extremely effective approach with the average customer getting around 100 clicks to the web site (and of course some phone calls to).

We’ve now extended the list of eshared mailings to late March, and the list into April will be added to the web site very shortly (in fact it may even be up there now).

The web page http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html also contains a link to a page showing exactly what a shared email looks like.

And there’s another bonus – as we have now been running this service for some months we have got a much clearer picture of which headlines and text work within this context – if you want us to have a look at your copy before the eshared goes out, and give some advice, we can do that.

There’s no extra charge for the review service – but obviously we do need to do it before the deadline for receiving the copy.

Please do call 01536 399 000 if you have any questions about the E-Shared service.

All today’s news on education and schools in the UK is on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

Tony Attwood

Follow Hamilton House on Twitter @HHMailings

Occasionally one has a good idea.  Not that often, but occasionally.

A system of promoting to schools which companies want to use, and which gives really good results in terms of click throughs defines itself as a good idea, and so we’re expanding it.

Eshareds are subject based for secondary school (ie one goes to the head of maths, one to the head of English etc) and school based for primary schools (so that deputy heads, and heads can forward information to the relevant colleagues).

Each one reaches 10,000 addresses using our personal, preference and generic email lists, meaning that two attempts are made to reach each teacher.

Results are generally high – 150 click throughs have been recorded and some have got even more.  In the case of a couple of clients who have received poor results we’re trying their advert again (free of charge) with a different text to learn what went wrong in their specific cases.   But for the majority of people we are sending the right message out and getting results – all for just £99.

There’s a full list of all the e-shared mailings until early April, plus a sample to show what teachers are receiving, at http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html

Tony Attwood

One of the unexpected developments we’ve found as we have moved into the world of emailing to schools is an ability to track the number of emails reaching schools each week, and to make fairly accurate predictions as to the number that will arrive in the weeks to come.

This flow of emails into schools seems to be based more on generalised views about when one might email (for example, “at the start of term wait for week three”) rather than any detailed analysis.

What is happening therefore is that schools are getting a very lumpy supply of emails.

Now even if the throughput of emails is based on a realistic view of when the best results might occur, the result of this bunching is that the expected best results from emailing in the best week tends not to happen – because so many people are hitting schools in the “best week”.

We’ve sought to overcome this in two ways.  First by having Personal and Subscription email lists, which go directly to the teacher.   Most teachers only get a handful of emails each week on their personal email list, and so bunching hardly gets noticed.

The other is to start making predictions as to when a week is going to be very light in terms of emails.   I mention this today because next week is one such week.

Obviously I leave it to you as to whether you want to jump into emailing next week, when the number of emails that will be received is low, but while you are contemplating this you might like to glance at these…

Our personal email lists – as you’ll see there are quite a few emails added since last year http://www.emails.gs/PersPrefLists.html

The regular HHM guide to school buying habits and how to sell to schools – which is on the internet at http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/When.pdf

Tony Attwood

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

The postal shared mailing to secondary schools, for which materials are required by 16 February has just about sold out – even though the mailing is a month away.

I’m rather surprised – shocked even – by this.  I’ve known that direct mail is making a come back, and I know this is a good offer, but it has been several years since a postal shared mailing reached its maximum 15 items.

Anyway, since the second half of this school term is clearly going to be when schools are going to be spending remaining money for this year, we are putting a second postal shared mailing on – again with the offer of the free email campaign alongside it.

Here’s the details.

Postal Mailing on 22 Feb, delivery of materials 16 Feb (only one or two spaces left)

Postal Mailing 9 March, delivery of materials by 2 March (just announced, 15 spaces available).

Prices: 1 leaflet, £375, 2 leaflets £472 (price per teacher 4.6p)

Weight charge: £20 per gram after the first 15g.

If you are sending more than one leaflet the leaflets do not have to be to the same teacher, but we do recommend that every leaflet has the teacher’s title top right (eg The Head of Maths).

The free email campaign can use any of our email lists, subject to availability and the rules relating to the list, and again do not have to be to the same teacher as the postal campaign.  So you can use the email campaign to boost the postal campaign, or to promote a separate product.

Any questions, please do call 01536 399 000.   More details on shared mailings on www.shared.org.uk and on emails on www.emails.gs

Tony Attwood

As always, today schools news is on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

We are on Twitter @HHMailings

As you may have realised, my view is that generic emails to schools (i.e. those that go to the office@ or admin@ addresses) tend to produce poor results, especially when compared with emails that go to teachers’ personal email addresses or the addresses of teachers who have subscribed to newsletters.

It is possible to improve these results by adding the name of the teacher to the subject line (rather than just saying The Head of Maths or whatever) – and in these cases the list is called a “Preference” list.  But even so, the results are not as good as a Personal list.

But the question is, when one has used the Personal, Subscription and Preference lists, is there any point topping up the campaign with a generic email?

To answer this I’ve tried an experiment.  We constructed a list of school theatres throughout the country, with their email addresses, web sites etc etc, and offered to give it away to teachers.

We then sent an email, using our generic list, to around 4000 secondary schools, with the subject line “Attn Head of Drama”.  To get the free data the teacher had to email us back.  We didn’t ask for any form to be filled in.

One interesting point is that although all schools have to teach drama as part of the English curriculum, they might not always have a “Head of Drama” so we were deliberately making life difficult for ourselves.

145 teachers replied – a response rate of around 3.5%.  I suspect that this is about the best that can be achieved with a generic list (and I repeat, we were simply giving away something – there was no sale).

That not only gives what is probably the maximum level of response on such a list, it also gives a method of getting in touch with teachers.  If you have a free report, you can offer it, and then when you write back to the individual teacher (most of them reply from their personal email address) you can then offer something else, send a link to your web site, or whatever you want to do.

If you would like to talk about how a report can be constructed, or you would like to know about our report, do call me on 01536 399 013, or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

You can read more about our research projects and other work we do through our daily education marketing news service.  To subscribe email education-marketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com When you get a reply just reply to that and you are in.   There’s no charge and you can leave at any time.

Tony Attwood