School Email lists with a Guarantee

0 comments

Posted on 11th May 2011 by admin in Uncategorized

I was tempted to put an exclamation mark after that subject line, but I don’t really do exclamation marks…  so you’ll just have to imagine it for now.

However I do think this is probably the first and currently only email list of school addresses that comes with a guarantee, so maybe it should have an ! to announce that.

The guarantee is…

With the Hamilton House list of generic email addresses of schools (the ones that begin info@ and office@ etc) we guarantee a 99% delivery rate.

In detail: If you buy the list from us and email it within two weeks of arrival we guarantee that 99% of the email addresses will be deliverable to the school.   If you get bounces of over 1% we will confirm the email addresses with the school, and where we have errors we will refund you twice the cost of each email address that bounces.

To clarify: if the email address is completely wrong, we’ll give you your money back times two.  If however when we call the school they confirm that the email address is right (and that the fault was, for example, a full in-box, or a temporary outage on a server, or a rejection due to the inclusion of unacceptable words etc) then we’ll report that to you – but that doesn’t count as a “wrong” address.

For details of the Hamilton House generic email lists of schools please take a look at http://www.emails.gs/generic.html The guarantee is not on the site at the moment, since this is the first announcement, but will be there shortly.

Details of our other email lists (such as the personal email addresses of teachers) are on www.emails.gs

Tony Attwood

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

What is click through and why is it important

0 comments

Posted on 10th May 2011 by admin in Uncategorized

The most commonly used measure of the success of an email is the “click through” rate – the number of people who have seen your email and then clicked on the link through to the landing page that you provide.

We’ve been tracking the results that companies get when using the four different types of educational email list available, and have put up a report summarising our findings.

The four types of list available in email are given below (but just one word of warning – some firms selling lists do call “generic” lists “personal” lists, on the basis that the administrator is asked to forward the email to the teacher.   We think this is a bit misleading – so here’s our definitions…

Generic – (goes to the school administrator with note to say, “please forward to head of history – or whoever)

Preference – (goes to the school admin but has the name of the teacher the email is aimed at, in the subject line, rather than just the title of that teacher)

Personal – goes directly to the personal email address of the teacher (eg J.Smith@myschool.sch.gov.uk)

Subscription – the teacher sends us an email asking to be on one of our news groups.  These teachers receive one news email a week and one advertisement a week (written as a review of a product or service).

Click throughs and open rates (also listed in our report) are really good measures because they help you trace how the whole campaign is working.

For example if the open rate is low, then the email subject line or headline is poor as people have not bothered to look.

If the click through is low, then it means the text of the email is poor as it has not encouraged people to seek out more information.

If the click through is good but sales are poor, then it is the landing page that is failing – a re-write will normally do the trick.

So, with this technology it is possible to look at any failing campaign and see exactly why it is failing and put it to rights.

There’s more details on http://www.emails.gs/tracking.html If you need any further elucidation do give us a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

More government money for schools

0 comments

Posted on 9th May 2011 by admin in Uncategorized

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian which shows that the government injected an extra £7m last year into academies, with the funding coming from beyond the education budget.

One academy – Richard Rose Central in Carlisle – got nearly £5m. Four others – Gloucester, Manchester Enterprise, Paddington and Westminster academies – received between £850,000 and £250,000.

LAs also give extra funds to their own schools, but academies operate outside of local authority control and the Young People’s Learning Agency – gives them extra funds if they are in urgent need of them.

Ofsted said Richard Rose Central academy was failing in 2009 and put it in special measures. The school came out of special measures this year and was deemed “satisfactory”.

The YPLA’s total budget for academies in England is £1.9bn.  A spokesman from the quango said many academies had taken over schools that were in “long-term educational and financial failure”. “Putting this legacy right will take time, often several years. During that period, the YPLA, on behalf of the Department for Education, works with academies to support them in their recovery.” He said academies were not allowed to run with regular deficits, unlike state schools under local authority control.

There are 629 academies open in England.  Of these 272 are schools that were previously “failing schools” and 357 are “academy converters” – schools that were doing well, and simply wanted to get out of LA control.

If you want to mail these schools you can not only select “academies” but each of these subgroups, if you wish, for an email or a postal mail campaign.

Please note also that numbers of academies can be quoted differently because of the “annexe” issue.  Annexes occur particularly where schools have merged to form academies, and different sites are still open (and will remain open due to the end of the BSF programme).  If you include the annexes in a mailing (and we can do this if you wish) the number of academies rises to 681.

This 681 is then made up of 323 failing school sites, and 358 academy converter sites.

If you would like to use our list of personal email addresses, generic email addresses, or postal addresses for academies please do call 01536 399 000.

We will of course continue to update this list as new academies come on line.

Tony Attwood

You can follow us on the Education Marketing news group – email education-marketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com = it is free, just click on the email you get back from yahoo and you will get our daily news feed.

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

Free email campaign to schools

0 comments

Posted on 6th May 2011 by admin in Uncategorized

There’s a growing amount of evidence that we are picking up from our own campaigns to schools (selling books, reports and courses) that when one uses postal direct mail and email in combination, the combined results of the campaign are greater than the sum of the parts.By which I mean if you undertook a campaign individually you might get 60 sales from a shared postal mailing and 40 sales from a personal mailing.  But do both within a week of each other, and with somewhat different messages (although advertising the same thing) then both figures could rise by 10% – occasionally more.

It was because of these findings that we introduced the idea of the Shared postal mailing to secondary schools with free email campaign of your choice.   Quite simply, our customers in certain postal shared mailings then get a free email campaign, so that they too can see if they can get enhanced sales in this way.

The next available postal shared mailing that has a free email service attached is that on 1st June  with the delivery of materials by 25 May.

Below are the details of the next campaign…

Prices: 1 leaflet, £375, 2 leaflets £472 (price per teacher 4.6p)
Weight charge: £20 per gram after the first 15g.

Multiple leaflets: 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 Literacy Co-ordinator).

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.

To talk through the details, and to arrange a booking, please do call 01536 399 000.  But please do note, we only arrange this type of shared postal campaign with a free email campaign very occasionally – and this offer is only available on these dates above.

The full list of personal email lists that we have is given on http://www.emails.gs/PersPrefLists.html and although this now covers most teachers and special areas of work there are still one or two that are missing.

But if we can’t meet your exact requirement we will offer you a range of alternatives, such as emailing on a different date, or using an alternative list.

Whatever the outcome, the cost of the email will be zero to you – you just pay the cost of the shared mailing.

Please call 01536 399 000 to book in or with any enquiries.

As always education news appears on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk and you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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

__._,_.___

Test postal mailings at lower cost

0 comments

Posted on 5th May 2011 by admin in Uncategorized

It has long been my view that all mailings should be tested before going into a full run.

Generally speaking a mailing of 500 addresses can be adequate to find out if a larger mailing is worth doing.  If you get a good enough result from that test, you know it is safe to continue with the full mailing.

With this in mind we’ve now set up a new TEST MAIL system for use when testing a mailing to schools.

The new price is 36p each envelope, based on one A4 item folded over in half to fit in a C5 envelope.  The price includes the use of the schools’ mailing list, the postage, envelopes and labour.

What this means is that for £190 you can mail 500 schools and see the result.  Of course if the whole mailing is a flop you have lost £190 – one can’t hide that.  But most mailings (even ones that you ultimately decide don’t get a big enough response rate to make it worth sending out in full) get something.   So the chances are that even with a poor mailing you are going to get a few sales – which will reduce your loss on the test considerably.

In other words with the new low cost testing facility you can try out all sorts of postal mailings that you might not have ventured into before.  The overall cost is small and of course you only need one to work really well, and you can then mail all the schools relevant to that mailing.

The selection we use on test mailings is normally a random selection from one of the lists (eg a random selection of secondary schools in England), but we can do other selections if required.

Additional items can be enclosed at 0.7p each up to 100g – but please do note that this is only for a C5 white envelope.  If the item/s you are sending don’t fit within that envelope then there would be extra envelope and postal charges.

If you would like to enquire further about the test mailing of schools at 36p each, please do call 01536 399 000.  We’ll be pleased to get it organised straight away.

Tony Attwood

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

10,000 teachers for £99

0 comments

Posted on 4th May 2011 by admin in Uncategorized

A brief reminder, if I may, of the fact that most schools are now back, and teaching, although from the amount of promotional material they are receiving you would hardly believe it!

Certainly if you do promote now you won’t be swamped by the level of email and postal mailings campaigns reaching teachers.

In case you are undecided where to go next with your marketing to schools, here’s the forthcoming shared email schedule.  You can see details of the service, and an example of what a shared email looks like at http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html

In essence you reach 10,000 teacher email addresses for £99.  The emails go to heads of department in secondary schools, apart from the ones for “Primary” (rather obviously).

These are the despatch dates – we need your booking and copy before these dates.

Maths May 4

Science May 4

Primary May 4

ICT May 9

PSHE May 11

PE May13

English/Drama May 16

Senco May 18

Primary May 19

Design and Tech May 23

Geography May 25

For questions and bookings please call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

Half price emails throughout this term

0 comments

Posted on 3rd May 2011 by admin in Uncategorized

This term we are introducing a Stand By system for booking in emails to teachers using our personal and subscription email lists (the most responsive email lists we have).

In essence this allows you to book email campaigns on the Subscription lists or the Personal lists at 50% discount – but with one caveat.

To gain the discount you need to book in your e-mailing, sending us your copy and your payment for the e-mailing and tell us the list you want to have mailed.  We will then send out your mailing in the first available mailing in the following five weeks (excluding half term week).

The only restriction is that the lists involving deputy heads are not normally available on this service as they are generally fully booked throughout the school term.

If you wish to check the details of the exact price etc simply call 01536 399 000, but please do say that you are interested in a stand by emailing - or you won’t be given the 50% discount rate.

We’ve added a lot of new lists of late, and increased the number of teachers on each list, so it is worth checking the web site.

For a list of Subscription email lists please visit http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html#cost

For a list of Personal email lists please visit http://www.emails.gs/PersPrefLists.html

Please call 01536 399 000 for more.

Tony Attwood

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

Newer Entries »