Education Marketing

What did we learn this year about selling into schools in 2011?

In terms of selling into schools I think we not only learned quite a few things during the year, we were all fairly surprised by what happened.  Here’s a summary of the three big lessons I am taking away from this year, and will be using in my own marketing in 2012.

First, and most importantly, we saw the return of postal direct mail as a profitable way of selling to schools. 

With so many firms having pulled out of postal marketing, the approach now appears to many teachers to be unusual, with the result that a higher percentage of the advertising material now gets read by teachers than for many a long year. 

What’s more, postal promotions are now perceived as being more important, more significant and more likely to be about products and services of quality.  

This doesn’t mean email can’t work – we are still getting some terrific results from personal and subscription email.  But in sending out emails you do have to work particularly hard on the copy, to overcome the doubts that now seem to surround emails.  (If you want to see some do’s and don’t concerning email marketing, take a look at our regular blog, www.goodad.co.uk which contains reviews of lots of such adverts.)

So the first thing is that postal marketing is working again: I’d make that the big finding of the year.

The second big surprise was just how big was the bonus that regular advertisers accrued towards the end of 2011.   A lot of firms did cut back or even gave up on their advertising during the course of the year, feeling perhaps that the cut backs from government made it too difficult to sell anything.

But during the last six weeks we have had four separate companies write – not in response to questionnaires, but simply because they wanted to tell us what had happened.  Each said that they had just had the most extraordinary response to a promotion that they had seen in years.  One even cancelled a regular meeting with us because they were struggling to cope with the response!

The firms came from utterly different areas: one promoting theatre in education, one offering a service collecting up old IT equipment for safe disposal, and two selling resources.   Two of the firms used email, two used the post. 

But all four had been advertising regularly, and knew exactly what they would normally get in the last couple of months of the year.   The evidence suggests that  they got it right through regular advertising, and good use of the medium they chose.

My final point in terms of what we have learned must relate to blogs.  The vast majority of companies selling into schools are not running a blog, or are posting to it rarely, or are just posting adverts.  But the few who are posting informative interesting pieces about their area of interest are getting readers and sales.  And (and this is the big point) this is just about the most cost effective form of advertising that there is.

If you want to see a blog other that the one mentioned above take a look at www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk   If you want something to amuse you over Christmas when there’s nothing on TV and the family isn’t full of conversation, try www.blog.toppled.info

So taking these points, this is where I would start in 2012:

Do both postal and email marketing – with maybe some short run postal test mailings that usually pay for themselves.

1. Keep running the adverts – especially next term when it looks as if many schools will be anxious to spend all their money before April 5
2. Start working on a blog – it is the most cost effective approach to marketing there is.

I do hope you have found some of these thoughts during the year helpful, I hope you’ll have a lovely Christmas/New Year holiday, and I do hope you will continue to read my ramblings in 2012.

Very best wishes

Tony Attwood and everyone at Hamilton House Mailings

If you have any spare time this holiday season, and you want to spend it doing something that will benefit your business then, if you don’t already have one, start a blog.

If you don’t know how to do it, type “how to set up a blog” into Google.

If you have a blog but don’t write something on it each day – then use the holiday period to write some more blogs.

And finally, contemplate this challenge.  Drop me a line telling me what you sell, and I will come back to you, without any charge or obligation, with a set of details of articles you could put on your blog.

(If you would like us to set up a blog for you, we can do that.  Details are at http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs 

If you are looking for someone to help you write the blog we can do that to as part of a Velocity programme – see www.velocity.ac)

Tony Attwood

Follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

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

Local authorities have a habit of blocking emails into schools.  Some do it vigorously, some do it haphazardly, but one way or another they all do it.

As a result, it is more than likely that in some parts of the country your emails might not be getting through.

To give an example of just how this happens, last year we undertook emailings to schools for a group of local authorities, sending out the LAs own newsletters.  All was fine until one of the authorities started blocking all the emails.  They were in fact blocking their own promotions!!!

It actually took us two weeks of hard slog to get the blockage removed, with someone who always signed themselves “Administrator” claiming that he/she had standing orders to block any email sender that sent bulk email.  That person got a severe reprimand for a senior exec of the authority in the end, but it was very frustrating for us in the meanwhile.

Tests we have done suggest that at any time most email senders will have some of their mail blocked by LAs unless they constantly monitor where emails are not getting through, and then work personally with the LA to prove that they are a reputable firm with the interest of the schools at heart.

For HHM this work is easier than for some firms since many of the emails we send out are to teachers who have requested our subscription newsletters (and they get very irate if the LA stops them receiving their twice weekly update), and because of credibility we gain in running the School of Education Administration (www.admin.org.uk)   

But we have seen situations in which 30 or more LAs are blocking a sender at any one time , and because they don’t check, they don’t know.

I’m thinking of this today because we have just managed to unblock one LA that has been causing us a problem for the past three weeks, and that is a relief for us.  But I know we’ll have someone else starting it again next term, and we’ll be on the case at once.

I would always suggest that you check your responses to see that they come from across the UK, and that you are not getting a situation in which some areas bring you in no orders at all.

No one can achieve 100% penetration of schools across the UK all the time, because of the way LAs operate their blocking systems, but you should be aiming for 98%, with work going on to unblock those that are causing you grief.

There are details of our email lists on www.emails.gs

You can stay in touch with our newsletters and read past items on www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk and follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

And you can call us on 01536 399 000.

Tony

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

My favourite email today.  From Jo Brown, the clothing catalogue.

“So Christmas is quite literally around the corner.”

Err… no it isn’t.  Christmas is a date, and dates don’t go round corners.  Christmas is metaphorically just around the corner.

What next?  It is literally raining cats and dogs?

Tony

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

We recently did a survey of teachers who are subscribers to our Education Management News service (a free email service akin to this newsletter, but one that takes adverts).

In it we asked about the use of You Tube in schools.  We asked particularly, as of late we have had a number of clients who have put You Tube type videos on their home page in order to draw customers in.

What we found was that only half of the teachers who replied felt they could always view You Tube videos without hindrance at school.

About a quarter said that some You Tube links are blocked.  A quarter said ALL You Tube type links are blocked.

In a separate part of the survey 10% of teachers indicated that although they can see You Tube they can’t get sound on the computer that they use at work (mostly because it is in an area such as a staff room, with no headphones available.)

Given that such a significant proportion of teachers might not be able to see your video, it does suggest that making it a central part of your on line publicity might not always be the best move.

If you would like to know more about Education Management News and how to advertise within it please go to http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html

Footnote: if you are interested in wider aspects of postal and email marketing you might also enjoy our regular email via the DMS news group.  To subscribe free of charge send an email to Direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Tony Attwood

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

I wrote a little while ago about a company that seemed to be claiming to have the personal opt in email address of each and every teacher in the UK.

Apart from the problem of doing such research, and the minor detail that huge numbers of primary school teachers don’t have or use their own personal email address at school, there was the problem of “opt in”.   How could anyone convince virtually everyone on a database to “opt in”.

Now we’ve got another funny number coming up – although at least this time I’ve been able to resolve the issue.

According to the Department for Education there’s 1,463 Academies in England, and yet I have seen one company advertising closer to 1,500 schools of this type.

I naturally checked our database – and we have 1,463 exactly as the Department does.  So where did all the other ones come from.

The answer I suspect is via annexes.  Some schools, when they become Academies, merge a couple of schools together, and then make one of the original schools an Annexe of the new Academy.

Add the numbers together and there are 1,522 school addresses.

OK – it is a small difference, but worth knowing because if you were to mail the annexes without knowing, you would be wasting maybe £20 on mailings which you don’t want to do.  Not much, but still….

Anyway, you can buy the list for one year’s unlimited re-use for £195 plus VAT, including within it all the usual things – school name and address, headteacher’s name, generic email address, type of academy that it is, phone number.

We normally supply without the annexes listed, but if you want them included, just say so and we’ll pop them in for no extra cost.

You can have the list as an email attachment or on CD (that means an extra £4.95 courier fee).  Email us an order with your full details any time up to mid day on 22 December to have the list at this special price.

If you want to go follow us day by day we are on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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

It seems like years since not just one but three customers called my offices in the space of a month to tell us that a mailing was a huge success – but that has just happened.

Of course many of our clients don’t tell us just how much they have sold as a result of a promotion (perhaps assuming that we might put the price up next time if we think they are doing well), but we’ve been doing this mailing to school’s thing for over 30 years now, so some of our long term customers do know that underneath all the razzamatazz we are jolly nice chaps.

There are two interesting points about these improvements in response rates which show a return to the sort of response firms were getting before the last general election. 

One is that they have all come from postal direct mail - which backs up the change in response rates we have seen in the past year.   Email can still work, but it is postal mail that is developing the real growth.

The other is the fact that the format that is working is the classic letter plus catalogue format.  Nothing, it seems, has changed.

Solo postal mail has two great benefits.  One is that it can deliver high response rates – far higher than email.  The other is that it can be tested.   Let me give an example.

Let’s imagine that you produce a catalogue to send out to your established customers each year.  Maybe you have 2000 printed.  What you can do is have 2,300 printed and use the extra 300 to send out as a trial solo to potential customers.  The cost of such a promotion might be £150 – and true if you get no sales you have lost £150.  But if you get one or two sales you will get some of that money back – and maybe with five sales you will break even.  If you get eight sales you will know that mailing out the catalogue to people from your prospects list is worthwhile, you can get a reprint done, and do a mailing.

The risk therefore is very small, but the rewards can be very high.  And that is probably why people are coming back into solo direct mail.

We’ve got lists of all the schools, colleges, nurseries etc etc, in the UK, selectable by postcode, specialism, local authority, age range, finance etc etc.  For counts, mailing prices etc please do call 01536 399 000.

And of course we are still offering the 20% discount if we can do the work in December, for posting in January.

You can follow these thoughts and ideas on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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