Education Marketing

There has been a lot of debate recently concerning the idea of sending out emails twice. The plan is either

a) send the email and then send it again to everyone a couple of days later
b) send the email and then send it again to people who have not opened it.

I am very wary about both approaches, and have some evidence (although I must admit not based on a huge sample) that people can actually get fed up with receiving the same email twice.

Of course the argument with b) is that people won’t have seen the first email, because they did not open it, but our research shows that most teachers still use programs that are like Outlook and which do not require the recipient to click on anything to be able to read an email. So the majority of the “not opened” have actually seen the email. (There will also be those who didn’t get to their emails on the first day, and so might be getting two copies within moments of each other).

The other side of the argument is that adverts on TV are often repeated, and people quite happily watch them several times over, so repeating is good – but this is, I believe, a misleading argument.

TV adverts are often only half-seen and heard – a background coming as they do between the programmes. What’s more they are out of the control of the viewer (unless the viewer is watching a recording and can fast forwards).

Emails are quite different. The reader has to engage with the email to read it, and can press delete at any time. By sending the email twice one is trying to get around this, and that is how it can feel to the reader, who can then become annoyed if the email arrives again. (If you ever get annoyed with pop up boxes on web sites you might know what I mean – the most annoying of all the pop up boxes are those that pop up twice!)

Consider also telephone selling – there is nothing more annoying that having told a telephone sales person where to go, only to have the same company phone you again the next day with the same script.

So, I think there might be a danger of alienation from running the same advert again. However, running a different advert just a few days later is not necessarily a bad thing. In a sense the adverts then become a bit like this news service – an ongoing exploration of a topic.

Which puts the emphasis more on the creative side than the technology. Yes, send out emails twice – but do make them different, seems to be the answer.

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

It is, I know, tempting to take this week easy. Only a four day week, and then a glorious break.

To suggest you might fancy doing a spot of extra work this week therefore seems churlish, but I’ve never been known one to curry favour, so here goes…

The summer term is a period when sales can pick up – as the academies come to the end of their financial year, and the LA schools start with their new budgets.

Which is why we have both shared postal and shared emails on offer at the start of term. And we have two dates on which we are giving a free personal email campaign if you do a shared postal campaign.
Schools return after the Easter break on 17 April and we are doing postal shared mailings on 18th April and 25th April. Delivery as normal, one week before (which is why you have to plan your printing now). http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html

The shared email service (which costs just 1p per email sent out) starts as the schools go back. Here are the April dates…

17th ICT
17th Primary
23rd Site Manager
23rd PE
30th Science
30th Maths
Full details of how to have 10,000 emails sent out for just £99, http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html

Incidentally if you have a solo postal mailing that you want to get out as the schools go back and you have the materials ready in the next couple of days, we have our regular 30% discount service available. Please call for details.

Tony Attwood

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

How to make emails work for you – free report

Recently I have been writing about the different types of email list (generic, personal and subscription), and how to maximise the response rates on each one.

Some articles I write get only one or two emails back – but that little series generated a lot of interest, so I have pulled them all together and put them into one report.

The report is called “How to make an email campaign to schools work for you,” and it looks at the prime difference between the personal and generic list, and shows how each one can be made to work.

If you would like to get a complete copy of the report on emailing teachers at schools, the merits of each type of list, and the best ways of getting the highest results please email Chris@hamilton-house.com or call 01536 399 000.

Tony

Why some promotions fail, and what you can do about it.

I mentioned the other day that the success of all adverts generally comes down to three things:

The means of promotion
The way the advert is written and designed
The nature of the offer

and I wrote a piece about the means of promotion (contrasting generic emails with personal emails).

But what about the second point: the way the advert is written and designed?

All the adverts I write for customers are focussed around the notion of “grabbing attention”, and taking into account the state of mind of the reader.

Many adverts are simply announcements. They say “this is what I have for sale” and allow the reader to decide if he/she wants the product or not.

This can work if the reader is keenly interested in the product or service or actively needs it. As I have mentioned before, offer me a book about Arsenal FC, or a concert with Bob Dylan appearing, and I will read the piece, no matter how it is presented. Likewise if I am interested in going on holiday to Italy I will read a brochure on it, and give it my fullest attention, even though the juxtaposition of pictures and text requires a complete focus from my brain. I give that focus because I am interested. My supermarket doesn’t have to tell me how good its grapefruit are – I buy them each week because I like a grapefruit for breakfast.

But most emails and postal direct mail adverts that come in don’t reach us in that state of mind where we are bound to read or bound to buy. We need to be persuaded to give attention. If we are not so persuaded within five seconds (for a postal campaign) or one second (for email) we move on.

Attention is generally grabbed in two ways:

First by having a great exciting and original headline which is placed just where the reader’s eye rests, and secondly by making the whole piece easy to read.

Now the easy to read issue is, perversely, complex, and carries a lot of issues within it, such as NOT putting pictures and text next to each other, having short paragraphs with catchy openings, and having a PS that sends readers back into the text looking for a solution.

This is part of the discussion we have with our Velocity clients (www.velocity.ac) but I am always happy to chat through these points in relation to an actual campaign. If you would like to, please call 01536 399 000 or alternatively email me a copy of your advert and I’ll call you back to talk about it.

Tony

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

Has the cost of postal direct mail really gone up by a third?

Most of us were taken by surprise with the size of the price rises imposed by Royal Mail this week. But a quick look behind the headlines shows a very different story.

Consider these prices that will apply under the new pricing schedule:

Postal system 2nd class C5 40g 2nd class C4 40g
Using stamps 50p 69p
Business mail 31p 53p
Advertising mail * 21p 29p

* Advertising mail usually takes four working days to arrive.

That very simple guide shows just how heavily Royal Mail has loaded the price of stamps. As you can see Advertising Mail is now under half the price of using a stamp.

In case you are not familiar with the terms, a very rough and ready guide is that business mail basically means mail put through an account. Advertising mail is sorted and has a minimum requirement of 1000 C4 items or 4000 C5 items.

There are actually many other forms of postal service available, and if you have a particular requirement, please do call 01536 399 000.

I can confirm however that our postal shared mailings to schools are not changing in price, and the special offer services in which we also provide a free use of our personal email lists, are going ahead as previously noted. There are details on http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html

Indeed solo and shared mail has really taken on a new lease of life in the past year – perhaps because there is now so little of it compared with the level of mail reaching schools 10 years ago. Fortunately the new prices won’t affect this style of promotion.

If you would like to talk about doing a postal mailing with Hamilton House please do call 01536 399 000. And if you can provide us with the material to work on before April 10th, we’ll be offering a 30% discount on envelopes, labels and labour.

Half price emails & the answer to: “Do teachers read emails that reach them at the end of term or during the holidays?”

The answer is yes – we know they do because we have tested this – although they don’t necessarily read the messages at once. (I’ll explain when they read them in a moment, but first, the important issue of discounts).

There are a number of discounts that are offered on our personal email services – one of which is a 50% discount on emails sent out in the school holidays.

We are starting that offer now – any advert booked in from now on for despatch on or before April 13th will be at 50% off the normal advertised price.

Many teachers who have personal email addresses at school are also able to receive those email at home – and some read their emails that way. Others read their emails by going into school a day or two before the start of term.

As for the rest, they read their mail upon their return. But this should not lead you to think that they then have thousands of emails. While the generic school email address (which often starts office@) does get swamped, the personal email addresses are mostly used for internal communication. Very few ads are sent this way, and so teachers tend to read them at the start of term, if that is the first moment they see them.

To be clear – we have already taken quite a few bookings for this period, and as always we have the restrictions on use so teachers that restricts the number of lists available – but there are a few spaces left simply because we now have so many different personal email lists.

Secondary, and FE lists http://www.emails.gs/Secondarynamedlist.html

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

Local authority advisers http://www.emails.gs/Primarynamedlist.html

If you have any queries please call 01536 399 000 or email Chris@hamilton-house.com

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

This week I have on my desk a recent promotion sent by a client of ours in a shared postal mailing which, the client says, brought him no sales. Also I have details of four promotions that did exceptionally well. How can this be?

Although not everyone agrees with me, I still believe the success of all adverts generally comes down to three things:

The means of promotion
The way the advert is written and designed
The nature of the offer

I won’t go into the details of the second and third point here – I’ll come back to those in another email (although you can always call 01536 399 000 if you would like to talk the matter through), but in terms of the means of promotion, there is no doubt in my mind at the moment that emails sent directly to teachers (rather than via the school office) combined with postal campaigns via shared mailings, can do particularly well

Which is why we occasionally offer shared postal mailings which combine with a free campaign using our personal email lists. Just to prove the point.

We’ve now planned two for the start of next term: one on 17 April (delivery of the printed materials by 11 April) and one on 25th April (delivery of material no later than 18th April. There is no restriction on when the accompanying emails go out – nor indeed who they go to. There are full details of our email lists on www.emails.gs

The prices are as before: one leaflet in the postal shared pack up to 15g weight is £388, two leaflets for £472. No extra charge for the email campaign.

There are two dates this time because of the popularity and success of the campaigns we ran last term. So if you are interested it is worth booking in now, rather than leaving it until April.

There are more details on http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html

To book in please email Chris@hamilton-house.com or call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

There are three types of email addresses available in education – the personal, the generic and the subscription. And as you might expect they each have their own uses and their own benefits and disadvantages.

In this short piece I write about generic addresses, the problems with them, and the way in which you can raise response rates dramatically. But first, a definition…

Generic email addresses are those which the school itself places on its web site – an address such as office@stjohnsleatherhead.sch.gov.uk

All the mail that goes into these schools goes to one person in the school office. That in box will get mountains of utterly irrelevant adverts, begging requests, statements telling the reader that she is offered the chance of getting millions of pounds if she’ll help move money from the vaults of a corrupt African politician, notices about sites where games can be played and so on. .

It will also get emails from parents and prospective parents – which is why they tend to look through the emails, (although some schools are moving across to telling prospective parents to phone, and giving parents whose children are at the school, a separate address, which is not listed on the site.)

Beyond that the address gets adverts aimed at teachers. The list of generic email addresses is sold by many companies – Hamilton House offers it for under £50 for example – and so thousands of firms send out thousands of emails trying to sell thousands of products, day after day after day.

The problem is therefore both the volume of emails and getting the email to the right teacher via a system that is horribly overcrowded..

Emails for teachers usually carry the line “Attn: Head of Maths” etc on the subject line. The problem is that this slogan is akin to saying “this is an advert” and so reduces the effectiveness of the transmission even further. Many such emails don’t get forwarded.

One reason for non-forwarding is the issue of where the email should be forwarded to? Most secondary schools have allocated personal email addresses to all staff and so emails can be forwarded. But… a large secondary school can have over 100 staff, and remembering everyone’s email address is impossible. Looking up the email address takes time, and so it is not done.

In primary schools the matter is worse, since many teachers don’t have their own email addresses, or if they do, simply don’t use them because they don’t have their own office with a computer in it.

Of course it can be argued that the email should be printed out and forwarded, but this is rarely done since schools are trying to reduce paper use, not enhance it on behalf of an advertiser who is sending emails to the general school address.

So even when you start out there is only a limited chance that your email will get through to the teacher you want to reach. So what to do?

Faced with this problem many companies have resorted to bombarding schools with emails, on the basis that since they have the list they might as well use it. Who cares if a mailing to 5000 schools brings in only 1 sale, if there is no cost in sending out? We can do it again, again and again.

But even this approach brings in problems – and in fact the problems are fourfold.

First, if you are using your normal email program to send out bulk emails you probably won’t be able to put the school address in for each email. If you ever see a person emailing you and the “to” address they are sending to is blank, or themselves, or indeed someone else, you know that they are doing bulk emailings through Outlook Express or something like that. It doesn’t look good.

Second schools and local authorities are tending to block senders. You might not notice, but the chances are that after a month or two of sending you will probably be blocked by several LAs. After three months the number rises and keeps on rising. Of course if you are only getting a handful of replies to each mailing you might not notice that you never receive an order from a school in Powys or Aberdeen – but the fact is increasing numbers of schools won’t be accepting anything from your IP address. And because you won’t be getting back block notices, you won’t know. Your low response rate just got lower. (This is also the origin of the “schools are just not buying” myth. A person who used to get 20 replies per mailing now gets 2, and blames the schools, when in fact the emails are simply never arriving).

Third, unless you are running a system through a service provider that accepts that you have a legitimate reason to be sending out these emails there is a chance you will ultimately be blocked by your internet service provider. Many systems will do this without warning and you can lose all email capability.

Fourth, if the school has set its “in box” to block pictures, much of your email might appear blank if you use pictures. While it is always possible to unblock pictures on an individual email, and while an individual teacher might do this, the person in the office won’t. A blank email (blank because pictures don’t show) never gets forwarded.

So is generic email marketing pointless?

The answer is no. It can work, but apart from sending through the right software and removing pictures from your design, you need to focus on a key question: how can I get the administrator to think “this is important”?

Putting the phrase “Vital information for the Head of English” does not work – lots of firms have done it and everyone knows it is still an advert. But you can do it with an offer of something that is free, and you can enhance the chances of success by putting the name of the teacher in the subject line, rather than the title, or as well as the title.

Thus a subject line: “Attention Head of Drama,” with the bold headline “Free list of regional educational theatre companies” can work well. When we tried it over 6% of the secondary schools emailed through our generic list replied. If you don’t have something free, invent something, or work with Hamilton House and we’ll help you find something. You are going to collect email addresses this way, and can use them for your subsequent selling campaign.

“Attention Head of Maths: free teaching resources” sometimes works better as a subject line

“Attention Mr Attwood; free music education resources” in the subject line works better still.

In my next article I will continue with the theme of how to build up your own list of teachers, how to email them, and the specific benefits of the personal email addresses you can build in this way.

If you want to buy our complete list of generic emails for you to mail out, of if you want us to mail them out for you, you will find details on http://www.emails.gs/generic.html

You can go back and read past emails on education marketing at www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk or follow us on Twitter @HHMailings.

Tony Attwood

In the old days (say 20 or so years ago) it was common for companies to send out a promotional catalogue to schools once a year, and to follow up with a supplement half way through the year.

That was it: two postal promotions. Dead simple.

The world started to change when a survey was done around that time in which school administrators were asked what could be done to make their life better. The most common answer was, “stop sending us all these catalogues”.

In fact what had happened was that the notion of the annual catalogue had become so much the definitive way of promoting that no one thought about how many catalogues schools received each year. The idea that anyone would sit down with half a dozen catalogues or more and compare prices was fanciful. Teachers and administrators might indeed compare one or two volumes – but little more than that. For most people there just wasn’t the time to go any further.

So the idea then evolved of sending out promotions for individual products, selling each product at a discounted price, and then putting the catalogue in with the product when it was sent out to the school. That resulted in a lower print and distribution price for the catalogues – and that money went into regular promotions of individual products. For most firms, sales then rose while promotional costs remained the same.

Today of course things are easier: one can promote via email as well as through the post, and the catalogue is often replaced with a web site.

But what has not changed for some companies is the notion that one should only promote occasionally. Quite often I hear the view that a promotion once a term should be the norm, with once every half term being seen as a bit racy.

However some companies have gone way beyond this and are promoting every week – and these are the people who are bringing in the most interesting sales in my experience.

This approach is therefore radically different from that of 20 years ago. It starts with a regular stream of emails with very attractive offers on them (quite often one a week). Each sale then results in the buyer’s email address being added to a growing data base of past buyers, and they get a different email from the non-buyers email, which directs readers to selected products at the regular price.

Those teachers and administrators who like to browse can browse the web site – or can request a printed catalogue if the company likes to keep one in print. But they are stimulated to action by the regular stream of emails (perhaps with occasional printed supplements sent out through shared postal campaigns).

It is a system that works very well for firms with a range of products or services on offer, and is one that we have explored for a long time with our own publishing company. If you would like to talk about how it might apply to your company, please do call 01536 399 000, or drop me a line.

Tony Attwood
PS If you want to get an overview of our education marketing services there are details on www.educationmarketing.org.uk
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

The Education Show last week seemed to be very busy, with a feel of buoyancy and excitement in the place – which is what our own companies and some of our customers are currently reporting.

So, if you were there and exhibiting you will have collected details of the people who visited your stand – either through swiping people’s badges or through getting visitors to fill in a form.

But what now? You have the list of email and/or postal addresses but how do you use them?

A list of potential customer email addresses is invaluable because you can email these people regularly in order to turn them from potential to actual customers. But there are a couple of rules to obey, in order to make the process work.

First, you need a program through which to send out the emails – don’t try and use a standard package like Outlook. You can buy a program of this nature on the internet, or you can buy into another firm’s package. (The latter approach still allows you to be sending emails from your own address – they just travel through third party software).

The benefit of using another location to send out your emails is that you don’t have to keep up to date with all the blacklisting and the like that goes on – they do all that for you.

Second, you need something to say. Just pushing sales all the time doesn’t usually work. Much better if you can talk about things that are of interesting to the reader – which with teachers means supplying them with interesting ideas and thoughts on education.

I’m always happy to talk about what can be said to teachers – just call 01536 399 000 or drop me a line (Tony@hamilton-house.com). Also our Velocity customers can have such a transmission service built into their monthly marketing work. (www.velocity.ac) for more details).

There are details of how you can access the Hamilton House transmission program for your own list at http://www.emails.gs/ownlists.html

Tony Attwood

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