In recent days I have been working through the 12 things you must do in order to ensure that your marketing to schools works.
Here’s points nine to 12.
9. Keep your name in front of teachers.
There is a continual argument about how often one might mail people or email them, before they get fed up with your emails. Invariably my estimate of how often you should contact people is much higher than most people’s – and some do say that my emails are boring and they don’t read them. But on the other hand I do get people who say that they always look at the top line on each one to see if it is relevant, and don’t mind if they end up deleting 9 emails if the 10th one says something good.
So I do believe in regular communication – but if you really can’t bring yourself to send out very regular items, you could instead consider staying in touch via shared mail and shared email. Both are very low price, (postal shared mail is generally 7p a school and shared email is around 1p per hit), and aside from the actual sales they bring in, they do remind people that you are there.
10. Do research
There are three reasons given for not doing research. One is that it is expensive and the second is that you can get research to tell you anything, so it is not worth it. The third is that one knows a number of teachers and one has asked them, and they all said they would love the product.
I don’t accept any of these arguments. Research can be done as part of the Velocity programme (www.velocity.ac) but if you want to do it as an item on its own it normally costs little more than the cost of sending out the emails. As for the results it brings in, these can be incredibly helpful in discovering (for example) the attitude of teachers, administrators and managers to the type of product you are looking to sell.
One example I have given before, but which I believe is of some validity and worth repeating goes like this. The company had a product which they believed to be unique in solving a particular literacy issue. We advertised it for them on this basis, but got few sales. We then sent relevant teachers a one question questionnaire saying “if you had this problem and wanted to achieved xyz what software would you use?”
Clearly if the client’s view that the product was unique was right, they would say, “well there isn’t anything much” and indeed when we have used this technique sometimes we have got that. But what we got was a list of products showing that in the teachers’ eyes the product was far from unique, and other products could solve the problem.
We then used that information and were able to re-write the advert with the client to emphasise a different aspect of the software, and had considerable success as a result.
Of course this is just one issue, and each firm has a different need, which is why having an open mind and an outsider to talk to about it can make one realise that some extra information is needed.
11. Do a blog
The simplest form of blog takes your email promotion and puts them on line, so that if at some stage in the future a person goes searching the internet for a product similar to yours, they might find your product.
To show how powerful this approach can be take a look at www.blog.schools.co.uk – an endless stream of adverts on a site which is never advertised. It gets around 35,000 hits a month – virtually all from people who are doing searches.
The adverts on the site are all adverts that have been sent out by our customers using our email services – so for them it is a free bonus, and in this way everyone does get their email up as a blog.
But you can take this much further by putting both your adverts and a commentary on your blog. Our most successful blog of all currently gets around 350,000 hits a month – a number built up over 3 years. It can be done – but you just have to get it running. Or of course have it put up as part of Velocity.
12. Take a look at the issues raised in the psychology of perception, and the theory of direct marketing. These items cover such issues as colour, the position of the headline, the use of the PS and so on. If you want to find a specific issue try the list of factors within the theory on http://www.theory.bz/factors.html – but otherwise, just go to www.theory.bz and take the tour.
The power of the psychology of perception can be shown in two simple examples. Using the wrong colour combination can reduce your sales by about 90% as opposed to when you use the right colour combination. Getting your headline in exactly the right position on the page can increase sales by several hundred percent.
Now, having done my list of 12 factors there appears to be a few left over, and I will come to these next time. Meanwhile if you want to talk any of them through do give me a call on 01536 399 000.
Tony Attwood
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.
