Education Marketing

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

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Sometimes I just don’t seem to be able to explain myself very well when a potential customer comes on the phone.   After several centuries of doing the job, I ought to be able to put across my sales pitch – but, well, sometimes….

I have just had such an instance, and I think I know the problem.   The caller was interested in mailing schools, but was only interested in one aspect of the issue – in this case the price.

Price of course is important, but for me there are always other issues, but the more I tried to go into those issues, the more I failed to convince the caller.

So, since I have failed in that regard, I thought I would try and convince you instead.  (Sorry about that, but if I am boring you, you can always press the delete button).

This is what I wanted to say….

First, there are many different lists of teachers, and as a general rule the more you pay the better the response rate.

Second, there are different media – solo postal mail (for example) is almost always the most responsive and even though it is the most expensive the solo postal mailing can often be by far the most profitable route to take.

Third, there’s the way that you write.  I have been labouring the point for years, but it remains true – the way you write emails and sales letters affects the response rate.  A change of just a few words or a slight change in the layout can make all the difference.

Last, the nature of the offer can affect the response rate.   Putting your price up or down doesn’t always have the effect you imagine.   Selling something as a subscription series may or may not work.  Giving something away might (but doesn’t always) open the door.

Much of this final point depends on what your competitors are up to, and it is always vital that your advert does explain

a) why the reader should buy this and

b) why the reader should buy this from you.

Of course you can deal with each of these issues separately yourself – and many companies do that often with some success.  But if you want to bring them together into one unified vision, then you might also want to consider having a chat with myself or my colleagues at Hamilton House.

If it is me that you get on the phone I will promise to try very hard not to bore you stiff with talking about all the stuff I have just written above.

Tony Attwood

01536 399 000

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If you haven’t see the regular HHM review of school marketing and school spending which we bring out each term, it is still on the web site at http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/When.pdf

But in addition to that report it is worth focussing on the situation for the second half of this term, particularly in relation to capital expenditure budgets.

While the non-capital budgets have been maintained, in England there is a cut coming in capital budgets.

Linked in with that is the fact that all money (capital and non-capital) allocated in the present year must be spent this year (2010/11) or else it will be lost.

That means that we should see a quite a flurry of spending during this coming final half term of the academic year.

We’ve already had one interesting development – the sudden awarding of an extra set of funding by the Welsh Assembly for small capital projects not already allocated – with the proviso that it has to be spent by April.   There might be more such releases of funds – as well as all the funding that is still out there in the schools’ coffers.

Unfortunately our special offer shared postal mailings with the free email campaign to coincide with this period are now all full (the next one is available on 27 April), but we do have spaces in our personal email campaigns, subscription campaigns, solo postal mailings, and shared email campaigns.   Also, we are continuing the promotion such that if you buy postal addresses of schools on line http://www.shop.firstandbest.co.uk/sch/ you will get the generic email addresses and the phone numbers of the schools free of charge.

If you have any enquiries, please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

I do occasionally find myself having a conversation with a potential client who has the view that he/she wants to do email “because it is cheap”, or wants to do postal mailings “because no one reads emails” etc.

I have a problem with such conversations because the views expressed like this are simple, and my answers are complex – and trying to offer a complex solution to a problem is never the easiest selling proposition.

So I have been trying to simplify the benefits of each of the different ways of selling to teachers – and here’s the list.

Personal and subscription email: highest email response rates.  If we can’t make it work here, email won’t work for you.  But an ideal approach if you can develop a good landing page with all the details of your product.  Between 11p and 22p each.  Half price during half term week.

Generic and preference emails. Ideal for use once you know that the copy of the email really works, after you have tried it on personal and subscription lists.  Around 4p or 5p each

Shared email. Low cost and can give high sales, but you need to be able to focus on an individual product or give a real reason for people to buy from you, not someone else, all in 30 words.  Under 1p each

Solo postal mail: Potentially the highest response rate of all – and ideal for testing.  Quite often it is possible to send out just a few hundred letters/brochures to test whether the approach is right or not.   Around 45p each

Shared postal mail: Ideal for selling products up to £50 or so, straight off the page.   We are now regularly offering dates in which all shared postal customers also get a free email campaign at the same time – which doubles the value.  Around 7p each.

Twitter / Blogs: Ideal as part of a broader campaign.  The only issue is that you have to do it regularly and keep it going.  Free of charge.

One final point – if you want to work with us across a wide range of media you might find the Velocity programme of interest.   www.velocity.ac

If you want any further information, please do call or email me.

Tony Attwood

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

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

When you have a new idea for a product or service to sell to schools, or when you find that a product or service that has been running for a few years but is now failing to bring in the sales, you need to be looking at two main issues.

One is the advertising, and the other is the offer.

Let me explain briefly by what I mean by “the offer”.  Imagine you have a series of books for sale – you might offer them individually at any one of a number of prices, or you might offer them as a collection.  You could offer them in print or as downloads.   You could offer them as a unique contribution to the topic, or as a low-cost option.  You could offer them on subscription.  You could offer them as photocopy masters or copyright protected.  You could even offer them online, free of charge, aim to get a big audience to your site and then sell advertising space rather than selling the product at all.

How you construct your offer is based on a set of beliefs and views, which may or may not be well-founded.   Unfortunately many companies only start considering whether the offer is a viable one or not when the advertising fails to get the results desired.  But in fact it can be cheaper to consider the offer itself very early on.  After all, others may have trod the road you are going down, and we may already have experience of the viability of a particular approach.

Thus where one does not consider the offer, in isolation from the advertising, what one can get is a situation in which a number of adverts are sent out, and none of them get much response.  It is not until later that we get the agreement of the client to look at the offer – and only then do we discover through research where the problem is.

Research of course isn’t everything – but it can be useful.  For example in one case our client was insistent that his software was unique in solving a particular problem.  We wrote the adverts based on this notion, and the adverts failed.   Later, when the client agreed to a little research, we asked teachers, “if you are faced with problem X what software do you use?”   Many teachers replied, and most gave us the name of one of three brands of software.

Our client then protested that those programs “were not the same thing at all”, to which we replied, “the teachers think they are.”  Between us we were able to resolve the matter and create completely different adverts which worked based on a completely different model of what was on offer.

Problems like this can relate to the pricing approach (ranging from free to an expensive long term commitment), or to who is going to authorise the purchase – and that’s all before we get to the notion of how the advert is written.

Unfortunately not only do some firms get the offer wrong, they then jump from one offer to another, still without research and planning, perhaps influenced by a couple of teachers who have said, “I’d buy that” (or the reverse.)   In my experience it rarely works well just asking a few people.

The solution, when things are not working well, or when a new product or service is being launched, is to look at the offer as much as one looks at the advertising.  It is something that exists within the Velocity programme – while some clients want us to get going with the advertising as soon as they sign up with us, others do give us a short while to consider the offer and debate it with them – and this can often lead to better advertising in the long run.

There’s more on Velocity at www.velocity.ac or please do call 01536  399 000 and ask for a member of the Velocity Team if you would like to discuss this further.

Tony Attwood

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

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

We are continuing the experiment of running half price email services in and around half term.     If you would like to use our subscription or personal solo email services between now and 27 February, then the price will be half that quoted on the www.emails.gs web site.

Couple of points: first these are solo emails – not shared – and each teacher only gets an absolute maximum of three advertisements in each two week period.   So, there’s a limit on the number of bookings we can take, and we have already booked up a substantial number of slots this week.  If you do want to make a booking please do phone and check what is left, and then be ready to sign up straight away, in order to secure your place.

I’m really sorry to say it is not feasible for us to send out lists of what we have left, as it changes so quickly.   www.emails.gs has the list of all the options.  Click on personal or subscription on the left hand side.

Second: these email lists go directly to the teacher or administrator in question – not to the school office.   There is quite a bit of difference between the way different companies use the terms “personal”, etc – our addresses are the individual addresses of the teacher – they don’t go via the administrator.

Finally, about emailing over half term.   This does seem to work because many teachers continue to access their emails at home, during the holiday, while others simply read the three or four emails they have on their system when they get back refreshed after half term.

Please do call 01536 399 000 if you are interested in the half price offer.

Tony Attwood

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

I have often given my opinion that writing to past customers each week is the ideal way to keep them, and the only way to stop them going off to another company.

And yet, and yet, I seem to struggle to put across the notion that this is the best way to solve this problem – or even to put across the notion that there is a problem to solve.

The simple fact is that if you send out a catalogue, leaflet or email say once a term, it might well find its way onto a shelf or into an intray.  But if you do nothing else, there is every chance that a catalogue, leaflet or email from another firm might come in just as the school is getting ready to order, and so you lose your chance of getting that order.  Most schools don’t go through catalogue after catalogue looking for the best deal.

There are several ways around this – and here’s one.  I would never say, “you have to do it like this” but this is one route that seems to work very well.

1.  Send out your catalogue or regular email promotion or leaflet to past customers and enquirers only – not to schools you have never heard from.

2.  Write regularly to these clients and potential clients by email – not endlessly making sales offers, but instead quite often giving background, ideas, information etc.  (If you don’t have an email list of their addresses, they are not too hard to get – but don’t put off collating such a list).

3.  Email non-customers regularly with information and if at all possible offers of free information or articles, or anything else that people might apply for.  Everyone who so applies goes onto the enquirers list and gets your catalogue and your regular email updates (as in point 2 above).

4.  In this way the number of catalgoues etc you send out is reduced (saving a lot on postage) but the number of people getting your regular emails goes up all the time because of the offers of free reports etc etc.  You also overcome the non-commuinication problem.

The simple fact is that companies selling into schools break down into these groups (these figures are only approximate).

Mail or email once or twice a term 85%

Mail or email every week or two with offers  10%

Mail or email every week with information and news  5%

And yet the only approach that really works is the last one – used by just 5% of companies.   As soon as you move into this area you are bound to improve sales – as long as you are generating copy that people are interested in.

If you would like to know more about this approach, just give us a call or drop me an email with details of what your company sells.

Tony Attwood

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

There’s no doubt that in selling to schools there’s the need to deal with a multiplicity of factors all at once.  The problem is, if you get just one of them wrong then the whole advertising project fails.

Here’s a brief checklist of most of the main factors (although I stress not all of them), and then after that, a brief note about the solution we have come up with as a way of ensuring that everything is in order.

1 – The list: whether you are using postal mail or email there’s always a multiplicity of lists of offer.  I often hear people say that they are starting off with a low cost list just to see how things go, and then if it is a success they’ll upgrade.   But the fact is, if you use a very cheap list to begin and the mailing fails, you don’t know if the list was the problem, or if it was something else.

2 – The message: most adverts to teachers are still written as straight announcements, rather than using one of the five methods of advertising that are proven to work.  Announcement advertising only sells to people who are ready to buy – it doesn’t convince anyone to change their thinking.

3 – The design: there’s a general view that colour and illustrations always help an advert, but it’s not true.   “But,” people say to me, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”   “Yes,” I reply, “and that message is given to me as a set of words, not as a picture.”   I am always happy to explain why pictures and colour often reduce response rates, just give me a call.

4 – The offer: just because a product doesn’t sell through one offer, doesn’t mean that the advert was wrong.  It might be the offer.   A cheap and cheerful product or service can be rebranded as upmarket.  A subscription product might become available as a single item.  A course that you teach in person might be made available on line, or by selling the course materials.  Changing the offer can often solve the problem.

5 – Grabbing attention: This is simple.  If you don’t grab attention you don’t make a sale.  Grabbing attention gets harder each day, and has become an art form in itself.

6 – The web site: If you are advertising via email your sales can often be increased by the use of a decent web site landing page.   Sadly many landing pages actually lose sales rather than grab them.

7 – The competition: It is vital to know what your competitors are doing, and to be different from them.  Generally the process of copying their style and approach is far less effective than coming up with something quite new.

8 – Nurturing past customers: The easiest way to lose a customer is by not communicating with a customer very regularly.  But just sending out adverts each week won’t work.  You have to find a better way to write.

9 – The style of writing. By far the best style at the moment is the conversational style.  Strangely very few people use it – but when you can use it you really can see a rise in response rates.

10 – The solution. The above nine points cover a vast area, and the list is not complete.   If you feel there’s a huge amount here to deal with, then you might want to think about our Velocity service, through which we work to deal with all these points and more, and present you with the solutions, and then put these into practice.   Basically you pay us a monthly fee, and we cover all these factors (including the emailing), or indeed just those that you want us to cover.  There’s details at www.velocity.ac or please call 01536 399 000 and ask for a member of the Velocity team.

Tony Attwood

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