Education Marketing

This financial year ends 5 April – almost coinciding with term end, which is handy.  Some firms are finding there’s already an upturn in purchasing – and a new review in the termly series on school purchasing will appear on our site shortly.  Meanwhile here’s the services and special offers.

Shared emails continue apace: £99 to reach 10,000 email addresses.  Copy is required 3 working days before the mailing date (which is given below).

PSHE March 21

Head of Sixth Form March 21

Maths March 24

PE/Sport  March 24

Modern Language March 28

Senco March 28

Primary March 30

Music March 31

Art March 31

ICT April 4

Deputy Head April 4

Free solo email campaign with a postal shared mailing – next date for secondary schools is 27 April with delivery of materials to us by 20 April.

Solo email campaign – some dates left between now and end of term.  Full details on http://www.emails.gs/PersPrefLists.html for the personal lists and http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html for the subscription lists.

Solo mail campaign. Still time to get these out before Easter, but if you are planning a summer campaign we’ll give you 20% discount on labels, envelope and labour if we can do the work during the period 4 April and 21 April.

Bookings and more information please call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

School budgets for consumables are more or less held in tact for 2011/12 – but the money schools get for capital projects has been cut for next year.  The Harnessing Technology Fund will also go from April (although that was always the plan, from the moment it was introduced, and schools and Grids should have planned for it).

So what are schools going to do?

In fact it seems they have an archetypal cunning plan.  The government has introduced retrospectively the English Bac which means that a prime measure of a secondary school’s success has moved from being five good GCSEs including maths and English to an analysis based on on maths and English, a science, humanities and a foreign language.   But there are twists.   In effect the science is two GCSEs (the double science that has been around for years), and the humanities subject is primarily either geography or history (music, art, religion etc don’t count).

OK, the school heads now seem to be saying, if that’s how you want to play it, we are downgrading all the subjects outside the Baccalaureate.   The national curriculum is still there so they have to do other subjects up to KS3, but the extra subjects that schools have introduced to meet the demands of society and the needs of the individual pupils are being cut, and the schools are making their savings by cutting staff.

Staff cutting is exceedingly effective for schools since around 60% of the secondary school funding is spent on salaries.   And they can justify all this on the grounds that it follows government diktat.

Of course there are ludicrous contradictions in all this.  I wrote recently about the government’s new music report and its recommendation that music in schools be beefed up.   As an ex-head of music in a comprehensive school obviously I am all in favour of this, but when it comes to a battle over costings in schools I can hardly see how music can put in demands for more, when it is not on the Bac list by which parents will generally measure the school’s repute.

So does that mean that people selling equipment that is related to non-Bac subjects are going to be in trouble?

I suspect not – what the schools are doing is reducing the staffing, not the funding of the subject.  For the first time in 100 years the notion that “the smaller the class, the better the teaching” is being thrown away, and the emphasis will be on how we actually manage to run a school with fewer teachers.

The fanaticism of more teachers has in fact been a very English thing.  When the banking crisis hit France, they cut the school budgets by 7% by cutting the staffing in schools by around 10%.  And they did this by increasing the number of pupils per classroom.

I was in France at the time the announcement came out, and the papers carried the story very clearly – there is no proven link between class size and educational success.   This is quite true – and when the argument breaks out in this country no one quotes any facts and figures on this.  In fact the only thing the union leaders ever say is “Parents wouldn’t pay a fortune to have their children in private schools where classes are smaller if they didn’t believe small classes make a difference.”

That may or may not be true – but even if it is, it is just a belief.  No one has tried this out as an experiment.  And in my experience most parents who pay for private education explain their decision on completely different grounds.

So, I am not gloomy at this moment.  If schools do save money by eating into the biggest part of their expenditure (salaries) then they can make the cuts quite easily and not go round chopping the expenditure on consumables and capital equipment.

It does mean however that we are all going to have to be clever with our advertising from here on, and as always I’ll be experimenting with styles and approaches.  But if I had to make a guess now, I’d say that anything that can be sold on the basis that it makes teaching more efficient, especially with larger classes, is going to stand a good chance of success.

Tony Attwood

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

With the arrival of shared emails to schools which deliver messages to teachers at under a penny each, and with postal shared mailing (which come with a free email campaign) at around 7p each, why would anyone ever bother with a solo postal mail campaign?

The answer is that solo postal campaigns have two huge advantages and several minor advantages

The first big benefit is that solo postal campaigns can get the biggest response rate of any sort of campaign when it comes to sales.  So you can get your product or service purchased by many more teachers with a solo postal campaign than any other form of activity.

The second of the big benefits is that because of the large potential response rate, you can use postal mail to test responses with small mailings.

For example, if you know that a solo postal campaign will cost you £45 per 100 items sent out, and a 3% sale rate will get you a profit on a solo mail, then you can mail out 200 items at random as a test to see if you get the 3% you need or above.   You can also try mailing different people in the school, and you can experiment with different letters, to get the best response.

Of course you can argue that it is still costing you just under £100 per test mailing, and that is not money you can afford to throw away.  That’s a reasonable approach – but what you must also remember is that the tests rarely come back with zero response.

So you might mail out 200 (cost £90) and get 2 sales (1%).  Nowhere near enough to make a profit, but it has reduced your loss down to maybe £50.  At two sales you might well break even.  Not enough to warrant a full mail out, but enough to mean the process has cost you nothing.

Solo postal mail therefore remains an ideal medium for getting big responses and for testing.  But more than that, it has several other advantages.

First, the lists are complete so you can pick and choose the exact schools you want.  Second, the level of solo mail into schools has declined greatly in the past five years and therefore response rates have gone up – especially where the mail has a fresh look and is written in the contemporary conversational style.

If you would like to talk about solo mailings, test mailings and the like, please do give us a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

21% of the school population in England in January 2010 were identified as having special needs. However in recent years the proportion of children with SEN but without statements has nearly doubled, from 10% of all pupils in 1995 to 18.2%, or 1.5 million children, in 2010.

Department for Education green paper has proposed that  the health and care plans for special needs children could be contracted out to “the voluntary and community sector” rather than local authorities.

The care plans will also now include a new section detailing children’s ambitions for their education. The proposals aim to give parents more ability to direct the care of their children.

It looks like school action, school action plus and statements will be replaced by just two levels of action.  Part of the aim also seems to be to reduce the number of children classed as being with special needs.  Schools will also be required to publish a broader range of information on their provision for children with special needs.

Pilot programmes of the new system will begin in September. It will be introduced nationally in 2012.

There will be assessments to monitor how many pupils with special needs are excluded.  But the new education bill already has provision so that headteachers cannot be compelled to reinstate excluded children under the education bill currently going through the Commons.

The free school programme will also be used to encourage parents to set up their own special needs schools.  The government has also encouraged special schools to become academies; 10 have applied so far.

Under the Labour government the number of special schools in England dropped by 7% between 1997 and 2005 as children with special needs were integrated in mainstream schools.

Tony Attwood

Unless you joined this news group in the past week or so (and an average week does see about 10 new members so that is possible) you’ll know that I regularly rave on about the fact that there are in essence only six ways of selling to teachers, and that one of them doesn’t work very well.

But, at the risk of boring you to tears I’m going to cover this point one more time, for the simple reason that the approach which doesn’t work at all well still dominates adverts that pour into schools each day.  Indeed 99% of the adverts which readers send to me, asking for my comments and some sort of explanation as to why they didn’t work, are in the field of ANNOUNCEMENT ADVERTISING.

The problem seems to be that even when firms are using announcement advertising in selling to schools they often claim that they are not doing this at all.  But I beg to differ.

An announcement advertisement simply tells the reader what the product or service is, without giving any reason why the school can benefit from the product or service.

Let’s imagine you are selling a product to school and you create an advert that says you are the local supplier for certain products in Cornwall, or Powys, or Northumberland or where ever – that to me is an announcement.

The argument is put back to me that no, it is a benefit – “because we are local.”  But my argument is that being local isn’t of itself a benefit – one can ask, “what is the benefit of being local”.   There is only a benefit if you do a same day delivery because you are nearby, or same day call out again because you are close, or something like that.  After all, my company buys its computers from Ireland – hardly local to us.  We get people saying “we are your local computer centre” but they don’t ever tell us what that might mean in terms of benefit.   The fact that the firm is in Ireland never seems to cause us a problem.

The same applies to firms that say that they have been established for 30 years, or that they are a small friendly business.   The problem is 30 years is of itself no benefit.  Being friendly is what everyone says.  It’s standard, it is what we all expect.  It might be amusing to say “call us for abuse” – but only do that if you can make the whole advert funny.

So my argument is never start with the product.  Start with one of the five alternative approaches and then build in the advert.   These approaches are

Sell a benefit

Ask an interesting open question

Sell on emotion (hard to do in this market)

Sell on humour (rarely done but stunningly successful)

Sell on price (the most common alternative but difficult to make work).

If you would like to talk about these different ways of writing adverts, do give me a call: 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

Of course no one can do a complete summary of what schools are buying – all we can do is gather what our customers tell us, and combine that with the information we get from our own sales to schools through our subsidiary companies.

Hamilton House has two subsidiaries – one that runs courses for senior management and for administrators, and one that sells reports for school managers and teaching materials.

Both have been buoyant this term, with the publishing side reporting a particular upturn this past week.   Not everyone we are speaking to is reporting the same, but the general feeling is that the expected rise in sales is now happening where the advertising is of itself positive and benefit driven, rather than announcement driven.  (We’re always very happy to talk about this concept of avoiding announcement advertising – please do call 01536 399 000 for a chat).

There is still space in some of the forthcoming shared email campaigns, but the postal shared mailings for this term are now all sold out.  The next postal shared (which comes with a free email campaign) is on 27 April.   A full list of our email lists is given on www.emails.gs

Here’s the forthcoming shared email campaigns…

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

You can stay in touch with us via Twitter @HHMailings

We don’t shout a lot about UK Education News and its associated blog, but the chances are that if you have done an email campaign with Hamilton House you’ll have benefited from them.

The fact is that all solo email campaigns that we run not only go out to the list agreed, they also appear on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk which is read by a growing number of teachers each day.

But that’s only the start.  Because you’ll also have your advert appear on www.blog.schools.co.uk where it will remain for at least six months.

This latter site is rather interesting, in that we don’t publicise it at all to schools – and yet it gets around 40,000 hits a month.   These hits can only come from one source – teachers using search engines to look for specific texts that turn up in the adverts reprinted on this site.

The reason we have never publicised the site to teachers is that it is there to prove an important point: that having an ever changing web site full of interesting content is itself a matter of some value.  Indeed if you go onto Google and type The Schools Blog in, our blog comes up second at the moment, one step behind Microsoft.

This is another big point for us – it shows that our model of how sites can rise up the search engine listings depends largely on interesting regularly changing content.

I do hope you find these two sites of interest.  We are now offering the chance to appear on both without actually doing an email campaign (the cost is just £25) but do remember, if you take an email campaign you’ll get listed on both free of charge.

Tony Attwood

01536 399 000

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

There are six main ways of selling things to teachers.  Five of them work, and one is very hard to make work.   And that one which doesn’t work continues to dominate promotions to schools.

The six ways of advertising to teachers are

a) Through highlighting benefits

b) Through asking an interesting open question

c) Through highlighting a low price

d) Through emotion (the product makes you feel good)

e) Through humour

f)  Through announcing what the product is.

It is method f) that still dominates and method f) that invariably gets the worst results.

The argument I mostly hear about announcements is that “you have to tell the person what you are selling”, and of course that is true.   But simply doing that, with a list of features and/or some lovely photos doesn’t actually work very well.

What you need is a way of attracting the reader in, and getting the reader to be interested or even excited by the product.  Simply telling people what it is that you sell, doesn’t work.

Imagine that you sell a literacy computer program.   It is unlikely that this will work if you just announce what it is and what it does (maybe with a bit about your company), since most of the teachers will have seen other such programs.

The problem is that most announcement adverts tend not to answer the two questions the teachers will have…

Why should I buy this?

Why should I buy this from you?

Answer those through one of the first five methods above and you will enhance your chances of making the sale.

If you would like either myself or one of my colleagues to have a look at one of your adverts and let you know how we see it (in perfect confidence of course) just email it across, with your phone number, and we’ll give you a call back.

Tony Attwood

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

Quite why the total volume of adverts reaching schools appears to have declined in February I am not sure – but this decline is almost certainly part of the reason for the increase in the response rates, where our analysis shows them growing.

As a simple example of growing interest, the shared email on 14 Feb to ICT teachers moved to another milestone, as it included one advert that gained the highest ever click through rate – 311 click throughs to the web site from relevant teachers (i.e. Heads of ICT) for £99.

Some advertising to teachers was up in February – the postal shared mailings all sold out in February, but the two areas of marketing that get the highest response rates from teachers (solo postal mail and solo personal emails) appear to be down in total.

Certainly response rates do have a link to volume of email and postal mail arriving at school – and indeed the success in getting postal mail beyond the school administrator and on to the teacher is related to volume arriving.   Now the number of firms doing shared postal mailings is about a quarter of those working in the field five years ago, the success of the promotions (as measured through our own advertising leaflet in each mailing) is up.

I still retain the view, from my informal talks with teachers and administrators, and the information published by BESA, that schools have a fair amount of money left to spend before Easter.  Of course I can’t prove that some of them won’t try and hold it back for the next financial year, but that is a high-risk strategy (given the claw-back rules) and I am not convinced that they will all take that route.

If you would like to discuss any of this, please do call 01536 399 000.  There’s also more on…

Emailing to schools: www.emails.gs

Postal shared mailings: www.shared.org.uk

Solo postal mailing: http://www.solo.ac/

Tony Attwood

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

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Of course like anyone running a company I love orders.  (OK, I love my three daughters more than I love orders.  And my friends come pretty high up on my list of things I like, but orders are still part of what makes my world go round).

And if I have to put orders in order (as it were) I like big orders rather than little orders.

But beyond all that what I really like are orders where people say, “I was reading that piece you wrote on your web site…”

The reason I like this is because “that piece” could well be an article that I wrote months or years ago on some topic of postal direct mail or email.   At the time I would have publicised it, and got a few comments – and some orders – but since then it has just sat there, and sometimes people read it.  When they do, and then phone, I feel I have got an order without any advertising expense.

There’s all sorts of facts and figures around about the number of orders firms get by filling their web sites with information and articles which go way beyond mere descriptions of their products and services.   And no where is this more so than in the field of education.

To give just one example, some years ago my company created a handful of books on dyscalculia, and alongside that we put up a web site.  Initially the web site described the books, but over time we added articles about the special need, about causes, tests, background, and so on.  Each article attracts more attention, and can lead to an order.

Checking this morning I see we are fourth on page one on Google if one just enters the single word “dyscalculia”, and we’re top for many combinations of words such as “dyscalculia tests”.   Which means we get orders every day, just from being there.

This sort of approach can be developed for any company selling into education – and the more articles and background notes you put up, the more you will get orders – not just this week, but for years to come.

I am happy to talk about this sort of work – and indeed the way that we can help as a one-off project, or as part of our on-going “Velocity” project (www.velocity.ac).    Do give us a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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