Although response rates can be lower than during the school term, teachers do respond to these emails sent to their personal addresses either because they go into school, or because they can pick up the emails at home.

Next week (after the bank holiday Monday) is the last week the 50% discount is on offer.

However we only allow one email to go out each week to our opt-in subscription lists and our personal email lists – so not every list remains available for next week.

If you would like to book in to one of these mailings at half price please take a look at our list of subscription mailing lists at http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html#cost and our list of personal email lists at http://www.emails.gs/PersPrefLists.html and then when you have selected the list you want to mail, call 01536 399 000.

Do remember however that we do need several days to be able to set up a mailing – so we’ll need your booking on Friday 27th or on Tuesday next week to be able to get the email out in time.

Here’s a simple thought: you can create far better adverts to teachers if you know what they are thinking about.

Of course one way to do this is to talk to a teacher.  The problem is a sample or one or two doesn’t really give you a feel for what the generality of teachers is contemplating.

To overcome this we set up UK Education News – a rolling news service of stories about schooling that appear in the press day by day.

That doesn’t really tell you what teachers are thinking as such – but it tells you the next best thing – what teachers are reading – and that does lead to a deeper understanding of how one can write an advert that appeals to them.

So UK Education News is a constantly changing web page that gathers all the main news stories to do with schools and schooling in the UK.  If you haven’t seen it before, take a look at www.ukeducationnews.co.uk and you’ll get the idea.

This term we are not only reminding schools that the service is there, and once again encouraging them to link to us from their school web site, we are also offering two free bonuses to schools, to encourage enhanced teacher use of the free service.

The first is that schools can put their press releases on UK Education News, and the second is they can also advertise any school vacancies they have, on the site.  Our experiments last term suggest that both of these free services will enhance readership greatly.

Among the news stories on the site we also place occasional adverts from our customers.  These too can be placed for free, as long as you are doing an email, shared mail or solo mail campaign with us.  It is not uncommon for companies to get upwards of 700 people reading the story once it has appeared on UK Education News.

But if you prefer you can advertise directly on UK Education News – there is a rate card on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk/ratecard.pdf Adverts start at just £25 per insertion.

Even if you just use the service to keep up to date with education news, and to see what teachers are reading, I do hope you find it useful.  Email Tony@hamilton-house.com if you would like to know more or call me on 01536 399 000

Tony Attwood

First, the benefit

Shared mailings allow you to get printed material in front of teachers, for about 25% or 30% of the normal price of direct mail.  What’s more we can also run your advert at no extra cost on UK Education News, which normally brings in around 1000 extra readers.

Here’s how it works

Shared mailings are packs of leaflets that go to the school administrator, who is asked to pass the leaflets on to various members of staff.

A typical pack might include five to ten leaflets, and most participating companies put on the top right of the leaflet as phrase such as “Attn: Head of Music”.  The administrator drops the leaflet in the teacher’s pigeon hole.

The response rate

Typically a shared mailing delivers a response rate of about a third to a half of that of a solo mailing – so it can be a very good way of increasing return on investment, and of testing a leaflet.  Shared leaflets that we have produced, advertising CDs and books charged at £25 each, and sent to 5000 schools have regularly brought in orders of between 20 and 100 books.

The options

You can opt to mail any of these selections:

The 1000 secondary schools that rarely respond to emails

The 3500 secondary schools with sixth forms

All 5000 secondary schools

The 5000 largest primary schools

The 10,000 largest primary schools

All 24000 primary schools

The price

The price does vary from around 7p to 10p for a single leaflet weighing under 15g.  Heavier leaflets cost more.  However there is always a special discount for including a second item – and where you include two items (for example an advert to two separate teachers) the price can be less than 5p per teacher.

More details are on www.shared.org.uk – or to talk through anything please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

It is a simple fact that around 20% of school offices never pass on any commercial emails to teachers.  This means that when you email these schools you never get any response simply because your message never reaches the teacher.

Hamilton House has been working for some time to build a list of these schools, and now we’ve done it and we’re offering it for sale.

The list of secondary schools we’ve researched consists of 1000 schools across the UK, and you can mail these schools either as a postal shared mailing (just under 10p a school) or as a postal solo mailing.  You can also buy the mailing list for once only use.

One leaflet in our new shared mailing to “Schools where emails are rarely passed on to teachers” will cost just £99 plus VAT.  A second leaflet in the same mailing costs £25 (up to a weight of 15g total – call us for heavier items).

If you want, we can print your leaflets for you – one colour one side for £20.  Please call for other options.

The first shared mailing to the 1000 secondary schools where emails are rarely passed on to teachers is on September 23rd, with material required no later than 4pm the previous Friday.

We are also offering this list for sale for once only use at £80.  We can send it as an email attached list (no delivery charge) or as a set of labels (£10 delivery via courier).

If you have any questions or to book in to a mailing please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

This, I know, sounds very strange.  Almost bizarre.  So let me explain.

Every advert that we send out through the personal and subscription services, is also placed on UK Education News and one of our blog sites.   The average advert placed in this way is then read about 1000 more times either by teachers using UK Education News, or teachers searching for key words that are in your advert via a search engine.

Of course we can’t guarantee our “extra 1000″ – much will depend on the interest from teachers in your product, so the number is just an average.  But this extra free service when you email with Hamilton House will generally give you a bonus that is certainly worth having.

We’ve had a number of calls from companies asking if we might not be able to expand this service to term time.

Having had a look at the situation we have found a way of doing it – by using the “stand by” approach.  The new approach relates to our personal, preference and subscription email services.  (If you are not sure which one is which, you will find them all described on www.emails.gs – although there are some more details below).

What happens is that you send us your email and payment for the mailing (at a 50% discount) and then we will send out your email in the first available mailing in the next five weeks of term time.

The personal and subscription lists have email addresses that go straight to the teacher in question – they don’t go via the school administrator.  The preference lists go to the administrator, but have the name of the teacher in the subject line.  These lists are formed where the schools tell us they “prefer” the emails to be delivered in this way.

If you are ready to make a booking, please call 01536 399 000 or email Sales@hamilton-house.com

I do hope you find this new service of value.  If you are interested I would urge you to book in sooner rather than later, as we take the emails on a first come first serve basis.

Tony Attwood

These days when people think of direct marketing to schools, they think of email.  Direct mail – that is mailing via the post – is seen as old fashioned and hopelessly expensive.

And yet…

Direct mail is making a comeback.

This is happening for several reasons, and here are a couple that you might like to consider:

1: The volume of direct mail being received both by schools is dramatically down.  It is now around 20% of what it was five years ago.   So, as teachers receive less direct mail, the chances of each piece being read is much greater than it ever was.  Indeed while administrators previously had difficulty passing all the direct mail on to teachers, now it is not a problem at all.

2: Direct mail is uniquely placed for experimentation.   Because most campaigns are looking for a response rate of around 2% or 3%, it is quite possible to test the campaign by mailing out 250 items, to see what happens.   The cost of this is usually around £120 – which is far less than the average email campaign.

3: Direct mail gets much higher response rates that email.  So if we look at the £120 spent on a direct mail test run, we might well find that we get our needed response rate, and then can roll the campaign out to the full mailing list of say 5,000 or more, thus making a far greater profit than can be made through an email campaign.   Even when the trial doesn’t work, it is more than likely to get some response, so the actual loss goes down to £40 or £50 – and it is quite possible to try the experiment again.

4: While we now have many email lists which contain teachers personal email addresses, these lists are not, and never will be complete.  With direct mail however it is possible to reach all the schools.

5: On a cost analysis it is generally the case the direct mail gives a better return on investment than email.  Not always, but quite often.

If you have left direct mail behind, or it is no longer central to your way of thinking about marketing, you might like to revisit it.  One way to do this is through the article, “The 5 Ways of Doubling Direct Mail Response Rates by Being Different”.  It is free, and it is at…

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

If you want to talk about any of this, do call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000.

Most of our clients who use this service adopt the notion of three major events a month (for example a couple of email campaigns and a press release).

However I have been aware for some time that some firms don’t want such a commitment, and while welcoming the advice and support, only want one marketing event per month.

With this in mind we have now formulated “Velocity Lite” – a service which meets this exact need.

There’s details of this at http://www.velocity.ac/priceandservice.html – and the Velocity Lite programme is charged at £295 a month.  The normal 3 item a month programme is charged at £495.

There’s details of the whole Velocity programme on http://www.velocity.ac/education.html

If you want to know more please call 01536 399 000.

Indeed when looked at, the cost of a shared mailing can be considerably less than the cost of an email campaign.

For example, if you wanted to send one leaflet to all 5100 secondary schools in a shared mailing the cost is 7.3p per teacher reached.   The cost of putting two leaflets in (for example to two different teachers) is 4.6p per teacher.

Here’s how these figures compare with email.

Shared - two leaflets per schools – 4.6p each leaflet (about 6p per leaflet including print)

Generic email 5p per teacher

Shared – one leaflet per school – 7.3p per teacher (about 9p per teacher including print)

Personal email 18p per teacher

Subscription email 22p per teacher

Of course we do have to add in the cost of print to the shared campaign, and this depends on the level of colour used, the quality of paper etc, but even allowing for that we shared mailings are still going to be cheaper than personal and subscription emails.

The question is, which approach has the best response rate?

Certainly I would say that shared mailings do better than generic emails (emails addressed to admin@ and info@).  Although both shared mailings and generic emails go via the administrator the administrators tend to be much more likely to pass on leaflets than emails.  This is because all leaflets and letters (no matter how they are addressed) go via the school office.  Personal and subscription emails by-pass the office by going straight to the teacher.

A shared mailing to one person per school is going to cost around double the cost of a generic email.  The question is, does it get double the response?  In my experience yes it does, and more.

There are two other points to bear in mind.

One is that in a leaflet you can do and say things that can’t easily put in an email, and the second is that in a shared mailing, most teachers get the leaflet addressed to them .  In a generic email I think it is fair to say most teachers don’t get the email.

The first shared mailings of the new term go out on 31 August (primary) and 1 September (secondary) and we need your printed material one week before.   The number of places in each pack is limited, so it is advisable to book a space sooner rather than later.

If you would like more information, there’s a lot of background info on www.shared.org.uk – or call 01536 399 000.

However there is always a problem.  The more one experiments the more one has to live with failure – and that is what some firms don’t like to do.

The point is this: there are a number of things that we know will tend to make an advert work well.  If you make your potential customer feel good, if you supply your potential customer with what he/she wants, and if you sell benefits rather than features, you tend to increase your response rates from your advertising.

All that is well known: but that little list never tells us enough to ensure that we can get our advertising right each time.  We need to experiment.  And not every experiment works (if it did there would be no point to experimenting).

Last term I worked with a Velocity client of ours who was getting very modest response rates on both direct mail and email.  I re-wrote this email adverts using all the techniques I know and got only a minor improvement.  The following week I tried again and the response rates actually went down.

Fortunately the client didn’t give us the sack at once, and we went on trying.  Each time we failed to make the breakthrough we sat back and analysed what had happened – not just the open rate and click through rate of the advert, but also the way in which the offer was written, the way in which the headline was phrased. and so on.

By the end of the second month we were able to produce an advert that created the biggest level of sale that the client had had.   What’s more we knew exactly how it had worked, and why it had worked and after one further test (just to prove the point) we were able to replicate what we had done again and again.  Even better, any of our client’s rivals who were watching these various ads go out wouldn’t have a clue which one worked and which one didn’t and so if they felt like copying our client’s adverts, they were more than likely to get it wrong.

But my main point is that we would never have got to this success without analysing the failures in real depth, and looking at the slight changes we were making each time, and how the sales rates responded.

It is in fact a science – or rather a scientific way of analysing the art of copy writing.

The fact is that you can write an advert for Product X one way and get 0.01% sales, and write it another way and get 2% sales.  Sometimes you can do even better.

So my message is simple – you double response rates by experimentation over time.  And this is why we created Velocity.  Velocity means that Hamilton House takes on the experimentation and does everything it can to find the route that will greatly enhance your response rate.  Of course you can do it yourself – we would argue that working with us can not only be quicker, but also a lot cheaper, since the cost of sending out the emails each week is incorporated into the monthly Velocity fee.

If you would like to know more about Velocity please do call 01536 399 000 and ask for a member of the Velocity team, or take a look at http://www.velocity.ac/education.html

Tony Attwood