This summer I developed a series of articles on marketing to schools without a budget. As I mentioned at the start of the series “without a budget” is not strictly true as there are some costs, but generally they are low.

There’s a link to the whole set of articles at the end, but we are now close to the re-launch of one part of the low-cost campaign: shared emails.

In a shared email your advertisement of up to 100 words (plus web site and contact details) goes to 10,000 email addresses teachers of your choice (eg secondary head of science, primary heads…) for just £99 plus VAT.

Each shared email is limited to five customers so they can get full and of course we do just sell the slots as the bookings come in. Bookings are needed a week before transmission date. More details are on

The dates below show the earliest date on which we will start transmission. You can book in now, and the final date for receipt of material is five days before that date. More details are on http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html – and you will also see a link to an example of how a shared email looks on that page

Shared Emailing Schedule

September

5th Site Managers
12th ICT
12th Primary
13th Maths
19th English
21st History
26th Geography
27th D & T

Marketing to schools without a budget – the full report:

http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/Marketing%20to%20schools%20without%20a%20budget.pdf

Tony Attwood

We have now added yet more dates to our shared postal mailings this term, with mailings in the coming weeks scheduled for 13 September (Primary), 14 September (Secondary) and 28 September (Secondary).  In all cases if you book into a shared postal mailing you can also undertake an email campaign to schools free of charge using our personal email list.

A shared postal campaign involves a small number of printed leaflets going to the school in one envelope.  Each leaflet can be marked for the attention of a specific person, and the administrator then passes them on.  We’ve run this service for 30 years with some considerable successes.

The free personal email campaign (which comes free with the postal shared mailings listed below) goes to the individual email addresses of specific teachers*.  You don’t have to email the same people as you send the postal leaflet to – you just choose one of our email lists from www.emails.gs – more details below.

THE DATES

5000 largest primary schools.

Mailing date: 13th September 2011

Delivery of materials by 6th September 2011.

5000 secondary schools

Mailing date: 14th September 2011

Delivery of materials by 7th September 2011.

And…

Mailing date: 28th September 2011

Delivery of materials by 21^st September.  2011

PRICES (for each mailing – there’s a 10% discount on the 1 leaflet price if you do both mailings).

• ·        1 leaflet, £388, 2 leaflets £472 (price per leaflet 4.7p)
• ·        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,

The full list of personal email lists that we have is given on http://www.emails.gs/Secondarynamedlist.html for secondary schools and http://www.emails.gs/Primarynamedlist.html for primary schools.

Terms and conditions

The free email campaign can use any of our email lists, subject to availability, and does not have to be to the same teacher as the postal campaign.  With personal email lists where the list is divided into A and B sections you can use one of these sections; where there is no sub-division you can use the whole list.   Where schools accept advertising emails, but have not allocated individual email addresses for teachers the emails are sent to the school office with the name of the individual teacher added to the subject line.

To talk through the details, and to arrange a booking, please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony

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

It is interesting to note that the majority of companies that sell into the education sector do no PR work to accompany their products or services.  And yet PR can be a really useful tool in promoting a product.

The reason might be because the world of PR has changed dramatically in the last ten years,  and this can lead to some misunderstandings, so I thought I’d try and resolve this.

The traditional approach to PR involved sending out press releases to newspapers and magazines and hoping that either the publication concerned would run the story, or the editor or journalist would call you back and do an interview.

This still happens, but there are two issues here.

First most stories are sent by email – which means you have to find the email address that the paper or magazine uses.   Sending to the wrong email address invariably means the whole thing gets lost.

Second many of the smaller educational magazines now charge to run stories.  If you are not expecting that, it can come as a bit of a shock, but that’s how those magazines survive.

Of course in both cases you need to have a story that works well as a story.  Because Hamilton House runs its own PR service we get sent a lot of press releases and I have to say that the majority of them cannot be used simply because they are not news.   Just revealing that you have produced a new edition of something is not a press release – there must be some news in it.

Beyond sending out the stories to papers and magazines there is the UK Education News service which is read by a growing number of teachers.  On this service I am biased because the service is run by Hamilton House, but I’ve never let such situations get in the way of my writing about education marketing, so here goes…

www.ukeducationnews.co.uk is a rolling news service – just click on the link and take a look.  We get about 30,000 story views of complete stories a month (that excludes people just scrolling up and down the list of stories).

Each story stays on the headline service for about a week, but then remains for at least a year on the backup service where the story is held in detail – and many of our hits come from people looking at the historic list which they find through searches via Google and the like.   The basic charge for a listing here covering the whole operation is £25.

There’s also the Education Management News service that we run – there are around 10 editions running each week, each specialising in a separate area of school work.  These are emailed weekly to teachers twice a week with one edition being a news story and the other being a PR story.

There’s details of EMN on http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html

If you would like to discuss how your press release can be written, just send me a copy of what you are prepared and I’ll give you a call with some thoughts.  No charge, no obligation.  01536 399 000 if you want to discuss anything in this email.

Tony Attwood

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

Each term Hamilton House produces a summary report of the prospects for marketing to schools during the coming months.  This term’s report is now on our web site – the link is at the end of this article

After a number of years in which the amount of postal mail that goes into schools has declined dramatically, while email has risen exponentially, we are now in a period of reverse: emails on the decline while post is on the up.  The report looks into how we can respond to this change.

Postal mail into schools has made a comeback because the response rates are rising – mostly due to the lack of mail going into school (the classic circular development).

There’s no doubt that in an era in which everyone sends out emails all day long, and in which many emails are clearly irrelevant to the recipient, the firm that sends out something in the post instantly gains an extra credibility through the simple act of sending a letter.

Additionally such promotions tend to get to the desired teacher because administrators have far less mail to sort – and teachers tend to read them because they get far less mail.

The problem with email is the reverse.  For many people email is perceived as cheap – if not free.  That means that even a response rate of 3 sales from an email campaign to 5000 schools looks profitable.  And indeed in one sense it is.   But the problem is that next time around that three becomes two, and then one – and anyway, three is hardly enough replies to run a business on.

So the credibility of email has declined.  Worse, administrators are overwhelmed by emails to the general school address (office@ etc) and so often don’t pass it on.  Teachers, when they do get the mail, tend not to read mail that comes through this route.

All of which is why we have spent a fair amount of time researching the personal email addresses of teachers – a list which is now over 200,000 long.  Those emails really do work – not least because we only allow the use of each address once per week.  There’s no administrator between the teacher and the email, and we ensure that each email is relevant to the teacher in question.

To help our clients find their way through this complex situation we’ve developed a number of new services such as offering a free email campaign for all customers doing a shared postal mailing – as well as discounts for companies using personal emails for the first time.

Here’s the details of some of these services, and the link to the new edition of the marketing to schools report for the Autumn Term 2011.

Marketing To Schools Report

http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/When.pdf

Free email campaign with shared postal mailings to primary and secondary schools.

http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html

Personal email lists of secondary school teachers

http://www.emails.gs/Secondarynamedlist.html

Personal email list of primary school teachers

http://www.emails.gs/Primarynamedlist.html

Tony Attwood

About nine months ago I wrote an article called  How to increase your sales to schools by 10% in three months

Today I got an email from potential client who questioned me on part of an article with the title printed above which I wrote a while back.

Looking back at old articles can be embarrassing sometimes, especially where thinking has moved on.  But most of what I said there still holds true, and the message is still one I would want to put across.

In essence my answer to the headline was that most of the companies that are continuing to grow their sales are utilising at least three (and sometimes all six) of the positive factors listed in the article while avoiding six common negative factors that can creep into advertising.

The article is still available free of charge in the How To section of the Hamilton House site – the direct link is http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/How%20to%20increase%20your%20sales%20by%2010.pdf

It doesn’t take too long to read – I hope you find it helpful.

Tony Attwood – 01536 399 000

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

You are reading, as you are very aware, a blog.  The article here first appeared on an email news service, an hour or so before appearing here.

My purpose in mentioning this is here is to point out just how much impact having a blog and an email news service can have for your company.

We are currently getting between 500 and 2000 page impressions on the blog a day at the moment, with the added rather exciting piece of information that the average reader looks at 1.8 pages.

Now this is rather interesting because it means that having got a person onto our blog they are interested enough to go on and look at a second page.  That, I find rather encouraging.

However as I have suggested the point is that I am making double use of these marketing notes that I send you – once by emailing it out to the 1300 odd subscribers to the news service (such as yourself) and once as a way of picking up other people who might like to have a look at what is written.

Further, because blogs stay on line for all time, the blog is there, doing its bit each day.  I don’t mind if a reader stumbles across today’s blog or last month’s blog – they are reading something about my company, and might well get on the phone and book in a mailing with us.

If you don’t have a blog and would like one, we can help you build one at a very low price – or as part of the Velocity programme.  Just call 01536 399 000 to talk it through.

If you would like to read either of the other blogs here are the links:

For Direct Mail Secrets it is

www.blog.hamilton-house.com

For Creative Direct it is

www.GoodAd.co.uk

I do hope you find at least one of them helpful.

Tony Attwood

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

I have written about this topic a few time in the past, but I’m back on it because one of our Velocity clients was kind enough to tell me this past week just how well my approach to going up the Google rankings worked.

In essence the core of my advice is that one should put up lots and lots of articles about one’s subject.

In each case one should think about how people will search for information on your subject area – thinking particularly about the questions they might ask.

Thus when I did this for Hamilton House I thought of the question, “How do companies sell to teachers?” and wrote an article with that in the text.

These articles should be on the web site, ideally with no pictures in them, in very quick loading pages, and with links to and from other articles (Google likes both these things).

Then you write another and another.

The articles must be substantial – one thing Google doesn’t like is short and simplistic pieces as you might find on the content farms (where answers to complex questions are given in a couple of lines – and are often wrong).

One other point to make – Google doesn’t just find articles by title.  I know that sounds obvious but in the past one or two correspondents have written to me telling me that “I would never search for xxx” and then have just quoted me the title of the piece.   Titles are important, but in essence Google is looking for text that matches the search.

As I mentioned at the start the gentleman who was kind enough to thank me is from a company that is a Velocity client of ours.  With Velocity you get all this sort of advice, and if you wish, we’ll write the articles that will take you to the top of the rankings.  There’s details of Velocity and the way it helps our clients on www.velocity.ac

If you want news relating to schooling, that’s available on line 24 hours a day at www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

Tony Attwood

If you would like to see some examples of articles that work in this way do take a look at http://www.hamilton-house.com/howto.html and choose any of the articles that take your fancy.  There’s general and B2B at the top – school ones underneath.   You can also follow all the blog commentaries on education and non-education topics on Twitter @HHMailings

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

The report “How to sell to schools, September to December 2011″ is now available, free of charge on line.

It covers the latest changes and updates in education buying and government policy.

The report is available free of charge on http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/When.pdf

If when you follow the link you get to a previous copy of the report, just click on “refresh” and the new edition will appear.

Any questions, do call 01536 399 000

Tony Attwood

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

This summer the number of individual email addresses that we have of teachers has gone beyond the 200,000 mark.

This increase in numbers is due to two factors: an increase in the number of subject areas we have researched, and our constant work with schools that had previously refused to supply such data.

To mark this milestone we have reduced the cost of personal email addresses considerably, and for mailings this term we are undertaking emails to teachers’ personal email addresses from just 10p per address (even less if you use one of our three low cost services for new customers, stand-by services or school holiday mailings).

But, we only accept one booking per week on our mailing lists (which is why our response rates remain higher than those obtained with many other lists).  So it is worth booking a slot as soon as you know what date you want.  Last term we were often unable to accommodate bookings made at the last moment.

Details of our secondary school lists are on http://www.emails.gs/Secondarynamedlist.html while details of our primary school lists are on http://www.emails.gs/Primarynamedlist.html

Please do call 01536 399 000 if you would like to know more.

You can also follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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

It appears that some of our shared email dates for next term have booked up already.  As a result we have added some new dates – the most recent being a shared email campaign to primary schools on 3 October.  The price remains £99 for 10,000 emails.

We have also increased the number of words that you can write about your company to 100 – plus of course the web address, postal address, phone, fax, and email.

One of the key points that we found last term is that the more specific you are about what you sell the more enquiries you get.

I appreciate there is a temptation always to say “The largest range of music education resources available” (or whatever is appropriate) but the fact is that most teachers don’t respond to adverts such as this.  What they want is something specific.

So the best idea is to take one product or one small range, discount it if you can, and then attract buyers to that.   You will then get people clicking through to your web site because of that offer, and then they can see the offer and the fact that you also sell everything else.

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it really doesn’t work to say that one does everything.

Details of our email shared mailings (in which you get 10,000 emails for £99) are at http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html

Our regular education news service runs constantly at 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.