Education Marketing

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

I have written of late about the fact that academies can now be seen as a different type of school to which products and services can be sold in different ways.They have different funding, different financial years, are completely free of local authority control, most have sponsors and their numbers are growing fast.   They can amend teachers’ contracts, and indeed some have reduced teaching numbers when they find that they can replace teachers with digital systems.

Over 600 are already open and another 700 are in the pipeline – with not a single application having been turned down by the state.  What’s more new funding has just been put in place – see for example my article at  http://www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk/2011/05/19/another-800m-for-schools/

And, as we reported in another story, the government pours money into academies that fail to live up to expectations…

http://www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk/2011/05/09/more-government-money-for-schools/

Already we have one local authority in which most schools are academies, and the government has made it clear that it wants academies to be the norm.   At present, one in five of England’s 3,300 secondaries is an academy. It will soon be nearly one in three.

If you are sending postal direct mail to schools and want a small group to experiment with, academies can be the answer – and of course our mailing lists (both postal and email) can select out academies only.)

Tony Attwood

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

The half price email campaigns return next week (following Bank Holiday Monday) for the school half term.

Any email promotion using any of our lists will go at half price during this week.

Experience in the past two years has shown that increasing numbers of teachers access their personal email accounts during half term, as they prepare for the next part of the school year.  Some will go into school, others will access the accounts from their home email.

Those that don’t will pick up their emails during the half term, do pick them up once they return to school.  But when we look at subscription email lists and personal email lists we can see that this does not mean an overload of emails – since very few people have these email addresses.  A typical head of department in a secondary school who has not accessed his/her emails during the half term will return to school after half term with perhaps four or five emails in the in box.

To qualify for the discount the email must be sent out by Friday 3rd June – which means you will need to book the email in this week.  Please call 01536 399 000 to talk through the options.   Lists are our email lists are on…

Personal and Preference email lists http://www.emails.gs/PersPrefLists.html

Subscription lists http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html

Generic lists http://www.emails.gs/generic.html

Tony Attwood

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

The next available shared mailing is that on 1 June with the delivery of materials by midday on Friday 27 May.

Below are the details of the next campaign…

Postal shared mailing to 5000 secondary schools in the UK
Delivery of materials by 27 May; materials despatched 1 June.

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

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

There’s more information on http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html or please do call 01536 399 000.  (Just one note – the web site currently says, delivery of leaflets by 25 May.  I can extend that because we do have a couple of places left, but most of the other leaflets are all in place).

I have been suggesting for a couple of weeks now that Academies make good places to advertise to, especially if you only want to advertise to a small number of schools, rather than the whole lot.

Now it seems I was more right than I knew.

Adverts have been appearing on the British Council for School Environments website advertising the fact that Academies have just been given another £800m.

The ads say,

“There will be 71 schemes and they will be tendered to the 15 contractors on the existing Academies framework. The remainder of the projects will be tendered over the next 18 months.

“The schemes will be divided into £250m worth of work (28 schemes) in the North, and £550m (43 schemes) worth in the South. The first two schemes to come to market, worth £25m, will be in Bolton and Brighton.

“It is expected that work on the University Technical Colleges and studio schools would also be procured through the framework.

“The Government are looking for the procurement process on the schemes to be as fast as possible. This would be in line with recommendations in the Sebastian James review. They are looking to the recent Campsmount Project in Doncaster, which halved the usual procurement process, as the target.”

Here’s a summary of the Academy list…

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

There are currently three main ways of marketing to teachers:

1.  Through the post

2.  Via emails

3.  Through web sites and blogs

Each approach has its own pros and cons, and its own costings, and here’s a very quick summary.

1.  Through the post – much more expensive than emails and web sites, but can produce much higher response rates.  Has the benefit of enabling simple tests – quite often it is possible to send out just a few hundred sales letters to see if the approach is working.  This can be very handy since if you can make postal mailing work you really can bring in the sales.

2.  Via emails.  Lower cost, and if you use the cheapest lists the cost can be incredibly low.  But, response rates can be very low too, so it can be hard with the cheapest lists to make the business grow.  But there are now some very sophisticated lists available, and these can generate sales rates as high as postal mail at times.

3.  Websites and blogs can be very responsive – but you do need to drive traffic to them, and that can take you back into the issue of postal mail or email, to get people onto the web site.

Of course these are just the three types of media.  Much also depends on what you say within the media.  I have often written two different emails or postal sales letters and sent them out in a split test and found that one out-performs the other by a factor of four or five times.  The same applies to web sites – the layout and text can have a huge impact.

Through Hamilton House you can buy into any of these approaches – and of course you can use our services to help you write and design your copy or web site, or you can develop the copy yourself.

We also have a package in which we work with you to use all the available approaches to your best advantage (details at www.velocity.ac).

But if you are unsure of the best approach for yourself, please do get in touch with details of your product or service, and we’ll try and give you our thoughts on the best way forwards.  There’s no cost and no obligation – and the answers we give will be related to what you sell and how much funding you have available.

Do give us a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

We’ve been collecting the personal email addresses of teachers, administrators and managers in schools for a couple of years now, and in terms of secondary schools we have collected data on around 25 categories.

We’re about to start a new phase in our research, and that raises the issue – have we missed anyone you want.

A list of all the titles we have researched by phone in secondary schools in the UK is given below, with the number of validated email addresses currently on each list.  If the email addresses you want are not here, please do let me know, and I’ll ensure that the research is done in the near future.

These addresses all go directly to the teacher’s own in-box (not via the school administrator) and are available for use at 18p each.  Companies that sign up to our Velocity service (www.velocity.ac) get access to them as part of Velocity, without any further cost.

If you have any questions please do call 01536 399 000 or if you would like to see our full list of email lists and services, these are on www.emails.gs

Tony Attwood

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