Education Marketing

Newly appointed headteachers always receive additional budget so that they can make an impact on their new school.  

We’ve now co-ordinated the list of heads who were appointed in September this year, and can offer the list at a very particular price.

There are 607 primary heads, and 234 secondary heads in this category. 

We are offering the list (supplied on a spreadsheet) including the head’s name, full school postal address, age range of the school, school phone number and school email address, for one year’s unlimited re-use for 14p each address – even less if you buy both lists together.

For primary that is £84.98 plus VAT

For secondary, £32.76 plus VAT

For both together, £99.99 plus VAT

There’s no delivery charge, unless you want the list sent to you on a CD.

If you are interested, please call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

Starting 28 November, and continuing until December 31st, we are discounting emails to schools on slots that we have not yet sold by 50%.

To explain, on our personal email lists and our subscription services, we only mail out one advert a week.  When that “slot” is sold, that’s it.

Obviously we’ve sold quite a few of our slots on our lists right up to the end of term, and even a few into the holidays.  (Holiday slots work because these email go to teachers own personal email addresses, and so are accessed by many teachers from home, or upon return to school after a holiday – but the number of emails they get to these personal addresses are tiny).

We do however have a few email slots left, and we are now selling remaining slots from 28 November onwards at half price.  That means that personal campaigns to secondary teachers are down to 5p and 7p an address (depending on volume).  Primary are 4.5p and 6p.

Because there is only one slot to sell per week per list, we can’t publish a list of what we have left week by week – but all you have to do is look at our lists, choose any you are interested in, and give us a call.   If you are first to book that teacher for that week, we can book you in.

Here’s the links to the lists of email addresses

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

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

Subscription services (teachers who specifically ask to be sent emails) http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html

Please choose the list you are interested in and then call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

There are two ways of reaching teachers by email – through personal emails to their own email address, and via generic emails to the school, with the administrator being asked to pass the email on.

With the shared email service you get both – plus a free entry on the School Procurement Site (www.top5.org.uk) 

We email all the teachers via their personal email address, and then a little later, we email them again via the generic address.  And as a bonus for the mailings below we will also list you in the relevant section of the School Procurement site

There’s a maximum of five companies in a shared email campaign, each listed at the top of the email.  You can see the format on http://www.emails.gs/sample_shared.html

Here’s the dates of the forthcoming shared email services for this term.

21st November   Mod Lang

22nd November Primary Schools

22nd November PSHE

28th November Site Manager

December

1st Librarians

5th RE

There are dates for next term on http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html

If you have any enquiries or want to book in one of the limited number of spaces, please call 01536 399 000.  You can also stay in touch with our services on www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk and via Twitter @hhmailings.

Tony Attwood

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

What’s the most effective way of getting schools to spend money on your products and services?

 As you may have read, the government is starting to pump money into schooling once again.  (If you haven’t read this, you might like to follow us either through our education marketing newsletter, or the blog, or twitter… details of all are at the foot of this email.)

 So the question arises, where and how should one be advertising to make the most of these new developments?

 One of the problems in answering that question is that there is currently a greater diversity of options than ever before.  This has come about because during the last ten years all the emphasis has been on digital marketing, and this has resulted in many new services becoming available.

 Meanwhile in the last couple of years there’s been a renaissance in postal direct marketing.  It is all a bit hard to unravel.

 However my advice, for what it is worth, is this.

 1.  Have a web site and a blog, and keep adding pages day by day.  If you want to see an example of what a blog looks like and how it works, try www.blog.hamilton-house.com      In fact you can set up your own blog for under £100.  Details are at http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs     Every page you add to your blog brings in more enquiries.

2.  Experiment with postal direct mail.  Many people shy away from using the post “because it is too expensive”, but direct mail can give by far the biggest return – and it has the huge benefit of being a service that you can test in small numbers.   You might want to talk through the details with one of my colleagues at Hamilton House (call 01536 399 000) but tests for using direct mail rarely cost over £150, and most tests recover that sum.

 3.  Do a shared postal mailing, along with a free email campaign.  Our free email campaigns go to the personal email addresses of teachers for the most part, and with a shared campaign it is possible to mail teachers a leaflet at under 5p a person.   We’re running this offer again in January to both primary and secondary schools – there’s details on http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html    But please don’t wait until next year, as to be in this mailing you’ll need to get leaflets to us before Christmas.

 4.  Consider carefully how you are writing your adverts.  All adverts (both email and post) must have something at the start that grabs attention, and must talk about the reader and the reader’s needs – not about you, your company or your product.   Don’t just announce the product and expect it to sell.  If you want to send in a copy of an advert and ask for comments and guidance before it goes out, please do email it to Creative@hamilton-house.com and we’ll give you a call back.

 That’s the line I would take if starting again – but of course there are complications.  If you would like to talk through your product and your company, and how it can advertise to schools, we’ll be happy to hear from you.  No obligation, no charge, no door to door salesmen.  Call 01536 399 000.

 Meanwhile, if you want more information on selling to schools, here are the sources…

 For a regular update on education marketing email education-marketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com    Click reply to the confirmation and you will get the service free of charge.

 To read through previous messages and news items from the Education Marketing group visit www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk

 Or you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

 Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Retail sells products and services to schools, acting as any other retailer does – by taking a commission on each sale we get.

We are constantly looking for products that we can sell to schools, and if you have one, we’d like to hear from you.  We don’t charge anything – we just get the normal retailer’s commission.

In reality these have to be products that teachers will buy based on the information we can provide in an email and on a web site.  If the teacher is liable to phone or write for technical information or a demonstration, then we can’t really handle that, unless the questions are incredibly simple!

If you have one or more products that you think can be sold through ourselves into schools, with the assurance that there’s no charge to you (just the commission we get on each sale) please send details through to my colleague Stephen Mister (Stephen@hamilton-house.com)

Many thanks.

Tony Attwood

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

I’ve noted how shared postal mailings to primary schools are having a bit of an upturn at the moment, and how many of our packs are getting filled again.

Now it seems solo postal mailings are on the rise as well.  We seem to be seeing an increase of around 50% on the same period last year (and the year before that).

This doesn’t mean that schools are being swamped by post – the amount they receive overall is still something like 25% of that which they got around 10 years ago.   But this is a significant reversal in what seemed to be an ever downward trend.

Better still, we are receiving some good reports as to response rates from postal promotions.

One of the interesting options that you have with postal solo mailings is that you can test the mailing first, by just sending out a few hundred items to addresses selected at random (don’t do it geographically!)   Even if the mailing doesn’t make you a profit it can still provide good information, and may well bring in enough replies to break even.

You can buy school mailing lists on line and check totals at http://www.shop.firstandbest.co.uk/sch/

You can see the overall totals for the UK and regions here http://www.hamilton-house.com/gateways/education%20mailing%20lists.html

And if you want to check individual schools you can use the Schools Directory that we run to check on school details http://www.schools.co.uk/index.php?module=Php_01

If none of that gives what you want, do call us on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

One of the lessons of recent years in terms of selling to schools is that nothing stands still.  Just because an approach worked last year, it doesn’t mean it will work again this year.

So we experiment.  And occasionally some of our experiments work… and in this regard I believe we have just found something rather interesting. 

 We recently wrote to all the heads of business studies in secondary schools and said, “are there any particular products or services that you are looking for, but on which you find it hard to get information?”

(I should add that we just choose business studies at random, it could have been any subject area, and indeed we are now starting to work across all the subject areas for which we have teacher email lists.)

 We got a number of replies – and what was particularly interesting was the depth of information the teachers sent us.   We quickly realised we were not just looking at a set of want lists that could be forwarded to suppliers, we were looking at a list of ideas that might well suggest new areas of development for companies looking to develop new products.

 Having received this information from schools we have forwarded the comments to companies listed in the business studies section of our School Procurement Site (www.top5.org.uk).   If those companies are interested they can write back to the schools via ourselves.    Likewise we are telling the schools to have a look at the site to find a list of suppliers.

 It has all gone rather well, so we are now extending this to all the subjects covered in the School Procurement Site.

If you want to be included by being sent details of what the teachers in your subject area are asking for, and having the chance to reply to the schools that send in want lists, all you have to do is be listed on the School Procurement Site.  The cost is £25.00 plus VAT for a year.

 The standard format for entries on the site looks like this

• Company name: Short description of products
• Website address
• Email

You can do more (such as including a logo) – for an extra charge.  There are details on http://www.top5.org.uk/Suppliers.html

 If you have any questions please do call 01536 399 000 and we’ll be pleased to talk it through.

 Tony Attwood

In the old old days, (about 10 years ago) there were five companies offering shared postal mailings to schools.   Each did something slightly different, to appeal to different needs and tastes.

 Then everyone went across to email marketing, and the number of companies doing shared postal mailings to schools shrank to two.  (One was still HHM!)

Now, with the view that generic email marketing, although cheap, doesn’t always work (actually it is possible to make it work, but you have to be clever about it – but that’s a different matter) people are returning to shared postal campaigns.

And that means that there are a number of shared postal companies around again.

What’s interesting is that a lot of the old information about how to make a shared postal campaign work has been lost – and instead much is being made of prices and free offers.

I will be putting some guides to all the things we know about what makes one shared campaign successful and another one not – but here’s one thought…

If you are offered a free email campaign with your shared mailing, do find out what sort of email campaign it is.  If it is a generic campaign (as opposed to a genuinely personal campaign) that can be of value – but you really do have to be clear about how to write a generic email.   Give us a call if you want to know more.  01536 399 000.  No obligation.

Anyway, our next shared mailings to schools with free email campaigns, plus all the normal HHM advice on how to make the mailing work in terms of response rates, are right at the start of next term.  That means delivery of your material in December – which means doing some planning soon.   All the details are on http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html

Tony

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