Education Marketing

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From time to time we nominate a shared postal mailing date as being one in which everyone who participates will get a free email campaign to teachers of their choice.

To make that clear – once you have booked into the postal campaign you get a completely free email campaign.   There are of course a few minor restrictions on which emails can be used, and how many, but most of our lists (as shown on www.emails.gs) are at your disposal.  Please do call 01536 399 000 to find out the details.

The postal shared mailing is on 11 October, and we need your printed material one week before.   You can book into a postal mailing of the 5000 largest primary schools, the 10,000 largest primary schools, or all 24000 primary schools.

You can have the free email campaign irrespective of which one of these options you choose.

For the largest 5000 primary schools the charge is £388 for one leaflet to the school and £472 if you want to put in two leaflets.

The weight limit is 15g – if your leaflet/s weigh over this there is an additional charge of £20 per gram (although as a guidance, a sheet of A4 80gsm paper weighs around 5g, so most inserts don’t pay a weight charge).

For more information please call 01536 399 000.

We also have information on www.shared.org.uk

You can stay in touch with us via Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

On holiday I usually take a little note book with me, and as I sit watching the sea, or contemplating experimenting with a cocktail the likes of which I have never heard of, and whose contents seem extremely unlikely, I let me my mind wander.

Where it wandered to this past week when I was away was to a rather interesting place (well at least it seemed interesting to me).

This place suggested to me that with government cuts and the like all over the place, selling into schools invariably comes down to three areas:

The problems
The issues
The solutions.

Now I can’t really set all the problems and issues and solutions down in one article, but I can make a little start by explaining what I mean in each case.

The problems side of things focuses on the fact that there are many different ways of selling to schools, from mouse mat advertising to buying sponsored articles in magazines, and quite a few of these approaches simply don’t work.   The point is, which ones do work, and how can you tell?

The issues follow on from this. Imagine you have worked out the problems and know which media work and who to buy it from – you still have to choose what is right for you.  For example, having decided on your media should you go for the cheapest approach first, or the most expensive?  Then, should you sell on price or benefit, or something else?   And should you imitate the competition, or deliberately seek to be different?   To solve any of these questions you need some background knowledge about what works and what doesn’t – and that can be hard to come by.

Finally, the solutions. Once you have studied the problems, and then worked in detail through the issues, there can only be left the application of your answers in terms solutions.  Here we have to consider exactly what teachers want, and how they see your product or service (no point stressing a particular benefit if they don’t think it is a benefit!) and at this stage there is always a need to experiment.

I think that all the really successful work Hamilton House has taken on in terms of selling into schools has involved a journey through the 3 problem areas, the 4 issues and the 2 solutions.  We’ve used this approach to sell our own products and services (such as the Dyscalculia Centre – www.dyscalculia.me.uk – which Hamilton House runs) as well as for many of our clients.

I am going to explore some of these elements in forthcoming articles, but in the meanwhile if you would like to see the mechanism we use to help our clients proceed through the problems – issues – solutions approach take a look at www.velocity.ac Or call 01536 399 000 and tell us about your product or service.  We’ll take you through the approach that we would use – no charge, no obligation.

Testing a mailing to schools is always a good idea before you go in and do a full mailing.  But how big should a test be?

Here’s a few thoughts

Emails – using a personal list.  To help testing, we have cut many of our personal lists in half you can just try out one half of a list and see how the advert works.   If you want to go smaller you can, although there is a minimum charge of £100.

Shared mailing – most firms find that 5000 schools is a good number to try.  If you are doing one leaflet per school you will pay about 7p, but with two leaflets only 4p per leaflet.   Doing two leaflets is not a bad idea if you send differently designed leaflets to different teachers, so you can see if the results there are radically different.  Not a perfect test, but if can give an indication if one leaflet works better than another.

Solo postal mailing.

This is where you really do need to test carefully and in small number because the cost of each item mailed is higher – but then the results can be sensational if you get it right.

So with solo mailing a bit of maths is required.

First we need to know the gross profit per sale.  For example, imagine you sell a widget for £50, and it costs you £25 to make it.  You might have spent thousands on development, and it might cost you thousands of pounds a week to keep the office open, but the fact is, each time you sell one you make £25.   There is a postal element, but you charge that to the customer, so £25 is straight profit.

Second, we know that it costs roughly £45 to mail 100 schools.  This is the price when mailing big numbers, and your test will cost a little more than this, but we are trying to see if a complete mailing will work, so £45 is the price we will take.

It therefore costs £45 to reach 100 schools.  If you sell one widget you get £25 profit, and on the campaign of 100 you have lost money if you just sell one.  Sell two and you get just above break even, sell three and you are starting to find something interesting.

But how many should you test this with to know that you can get your 3 out of 100 sales.  Is mailing 100 schools enough?

I would say no, it is safest to work to getting six orders, just to account for odd variations you might find, so I would mail 200 schools, and see if I got my six.

The cost is £90 for the test, and six orders brings in £150.  Get that and I would mail 5000 schools.

(In case you want to know, the formula for this is 6 divided by the percentage response rate required, or 6 divided by 3/100.  The answer is 200.)

But what if you have a product where the profit is £1000 for each sale?

From the above we know that mailing 100 schools costs £45.  Mailing 1000 schools is £450.  So you could mail 1000 schools, and get 1 sale, and make a profit. In fact you could mail 2000 schools and get one sale, and get your promotional money back.  In a case like this, you might as well mail 2000 just to see what happens, because anything less is not really going to tell you much.   If you only mail 1000 and get nothing, you still don’t know if 1001 would have given the one sale and thus made you a profit.  It is not a big enough test.

One final point: I have had it said by firms that they can’t afford to test a lot because each test might cost £100, and “we don’t have lots of £100′s to throw away.”

None of us like losing money, but do remember, most tests should bring in some sales, even if not enough to warrant a full campaign.  In my experience quite a few tests actually get near to break even, which means you get your money back.  OK, that’s no good for a profit, but it does mean that the testing is not costing you anything.

If you would like to know more, please call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

Probably the most effective email list of teachers that there is that of teachers who actively subscribe to a list and ask to be sent emails on a topic.

Teachers will subscribe to a news service which contains occasional adverts if they find the news service interesting and relevant – and that is what we do with our regular weekly news features for teachers, managers and administrators.  It brings in excellent response rates, not least because we know if the service is providing the news that teachers want.  We can see how many people subscribe and how many unsubscribe – and we respond to those figures in terms of what we write.

We run 12 such lists, each for a different group of teachers, ranging from primary school heads through to ICT teachers, from teachers interested in fund raising, marketing and PR, to heads of English and Drama.

Each list gets two separate emails a week.  One is a relevant news item which we produce and the other is a sponsored product review.  These are sent out at separate times, so the product reviews are unique, and not mixed up with any other items.

If you would like to be included in such a product review, please do get in touch on 01536 399 000.  There is a list of the 12 different areas we cover, plus details of the charge for reaching teachers on http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html I would add that if you have not used the service before there are discounts for “first time users” and for companies that do not want their adverts to go out on a set date.

If you would like to see a copy of one of our news items, again please ask and we’ll forward one on.

Tony Attwood

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

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

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Digital marketing has been such a strong focus of attention for the past five years that the move back to postal mailing to schools has come as something of a surprise to the market as a whole.

Certainly a few years ago I wondered if postal mailing to schools was dead and buried – but it has returned and is generating good responses for those getting it right.

The reason for its renewed success is probably twofold.

First, postal direct mail to schools never really stopped being successful – it was just that many firms went over to email, because it seemed a lot cheaper.

Second, it is a numbers issue. With all forms of marketing if a channel gets overloaded people stop looking. If commercial TV stations only had one advert in each ad break, people would pay much more attention than with the current five or ten ads. So it is with postal adverts to schools.

Thus the number of adverts to the generic email lists of schools went up dramatically, the response rate went down. As the number of postal items to schools went down, so the response rate went up.

But although the level of postal mailing to schools has gone up this past six months, it is still under 50% of what it was at its height.

This means two things – one is that administrators are more likely to pass on advertising material that comes through the post, since there is less of it. The other is that teachers take more notice because they get less and (it seems) because the view now is that something in the post is more serious and more substantial than email.

This is not to say email doesn’t work – although I do think one has to use the right sort of email list, and write in the right manner. But it does mean that postal can be worth trying.

As to what to do there are two ways forward – shared mail and solo mail.

Shared mail can be very low cost (around 4.5p per teacher reached at the lowest rate when sending two leaflets to the school – around 7p if just sending one) and is effective (the HHM group uses it to sell books and to promote its courses, so we keep track of responses).

Solo mail is a lot more expensive but can have much higher response rates, and has the benefit of being something one can test – often with tests of just a few hundred schools, to see if it works. Generally if you look at solo mail costing around £45 per 100, and being able to make a profit on a 2.5% response rate, you could find solo is right for you.

If you would like to know more, please call. Details of shared mailings are on www.shared.org.uk while if you have not done a solo mailing before there are details of conducting a solo mail campaign on http://www.mailings.org.uk/

Details of our education postal mailing lists are on http://www.hamilton-house.com/gateways/education%20mailing%20lists.html

Tony Attwood

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

If you have been reading my ramblings on the topic of selling to schools for some time you might know that through this past few months we’ve been looking at ways of offering marketing to schools on a very modest budget.

This came about because we received a number of calls from firms that said that they had spent most of their money developing a new product or service, and now there was little in the kitty left for marketing.

One of the most popular products we have come up with in response to this is the shared email campaign, in which 10,000 emails are sent out highlighting up to a maximum of five different products – all addressed to one teacher. The cost is £99, or 1p per email.

You can see what one of these emails looks like at http://www.emails.gs/sample_shared.html – and we’ll be putting a new example up shortly.

In these emails you get up to 100 words about your company or product, plus the name and address of the company, the web site, fax, email, and phone.

What we have found is that the most successful campaigns are those which focus on a specific product or service, rather than on a general approach. So adverts which say “we sell everything to do with school science” for example don’t work as well as those which focus on a single item of school equipment, or a single service.

Two of the first three shared emails this term sold out very quickly, so it can be worth thinking ahead a bit if you want to join in.

Here’s details of some of the forthcoming shared email campaigns:

Shared Emailing Schedule

September
19th English
21st History
26th Geography
27th D & T
October
3rd Primary
3rd Science
5th Business
10th Maths
12th PSHE
17th Site Manager
18th Bursar
31st Primary
31st ICT

In each case we need your copy one week before the emailing goes out.

If you have any questions or would like to make a booking please do call 01536 399 000 or email sales@hamilton-house.com

A full set of details of shared emails is on http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html

Tony Attwood

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

Undertaking a solo postal mailing can be daunting – especially as a mailing to all secondary schools or the 5000 largest primary schools can set you back £2000 or more.

Which is why I have always suggested that one should trial a solo mailing to a few hundred schools first.

How many you mail depends on the response rate you are looking to get – but if (for example) you will make a profit if you get six schools to reply then you can be fairly sure that a trial mailing to 200 schools selected at random from your selected list will tell you if you are going to get that or not.

(And don’t forget the full mailing to schools will be cheaper per school than the trial mailing since you will get discounts on the postage, addresses, printing etc etc).

Some companies object that how many schools they need to sell to depends on how many products each school buys, and I can understand that – which is another reason for doing a trial to a few hundred schools. Do the promotion and see just how much each school spends.

Once you have done the trial you can then do the full solo – and here’s when the next bonus turns up, because we’ll give you a free personal email mailing when you do a solo mailing with us of 4,000 or more schools.

And here’s another bonus – if you do that 4,000 over several mailings we will still give you the free email campaign, providing the 4000 addresses are reached within one term.

If you would like to find out more, please do call 01536 399 000 or keep tabs on us day by day at Twitter @HHMailings

Every day there are numerous news stories concerning schools, teachers, school materials and so forth.

These stories are recorded on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk – you can see them roll through as they come in, and you can click on any story to read it as it happens.

Thousands of schools use this service to keep up with the news and see all the latest stories – and of course many businesses use it to see what is happening in the world of education, and so adjust their sales pitches to the current events and current educational thinking.

But this also raises the question: how can my company become part of this continuing rolling news story?

This is actually very easy, and very low cost. For just £25 your story can appear on the UK Education News site. But then there’s a bonus, because your story will also appear on the Schools Blog at www.blog.schools.co.uk

Together these sites get around 30,000 hits a month, almost all from teachers, and with the addition of the Schools blog to the mix your advert will stay on line for at least a year.

If you would like to participate, just send an email to myself, Tony@hamilton-house.com with the text of your advertisement, plus the headline you want to use, as a Word file along with a note saying that you agree to the £25 plus VAT fee. We’ll run the story exactly as you put it in the Word file, and drop you a line to say when it is up. (Most stories go up within a day or two).

Meanwhile, do have a look at www.ukeducationnews.co.uk if for no reason other than to see what is going on in school’s today.

You can also follow all our postings from Hamilton House on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

Today 24 free schools open their doors for the first time – and we have the list of schools, with emails and phones, all ready to go.

These schools obviously have the basics in place, but they will have done it in a great rush to get ready to be there today.

And they certainly won’t yet have spent all the money that the government has been giving them.  Which is why we have separated out our list of free schools and are offering them as a spreadsheet list with postal address, email, phone and head’s name, for continual and eternal re-use.

These schools are state-funded, have far more freedom than comprehensives and academies, and are independent of local authorities.  They don’t have to follow the national curriculum and have flexibility over who they employ as teachers. They can’t make a profit, and although they are supposed to be in the poorest areas of the country or those that are short of school places, these first 24 are actually mostly in middle class areas.

Our database has all 24 free schools, all with named heads, 20 with their email addresses and 17 with phone numbers.  You can have the database for eternal use for just £18 plus VAT.  There’s no restrictions on use apart from the fact that you can’t resell the list or give it to another company or individual.

To order the database you will need a credit card (sorry we can’t invoice for this amount).  Just call 01536 399 000, we’ll take the details and then we’ll email you the list as a spreadsheet.

Tony Attwood