Education Marketing

It is interesting that the notion that the way in which an advert is written can have a major effect on sales, is one that is often resisted when companies sell to teachers.

For example, it is often said, “I know the product is great because when people see it at a show, or when I demonstrate it to them, they always buy. But with emails, post and the internet we don’t get sales.”

And then the explanation given is that emails and postal campaigns don’t work.

But the reason is not that emails, post and the internet don’t work when selling to schools – they do and it is proven every day – but rather the way in which the advert is written.

Of course I can’t say exactly what should be written in each case, because it does depend on the product or service, but if there is one thing that needs to be written about, and which is generally missed, it is the benefit of the product.

95% or more of adverts reaching teachers talk about features. They announce the product. They tell the teacher what the product is – NOT what the benefit is of having this product.

So if you want to make a huge difference to your advertising, you need to write about the benefit to the teacher of having your product or service. It doesn’t matter if you want to sell chairs, a one-man mime show that visits primary schools, software, whiteboards or anything else – there has to be a benefit.

Sometimes the reply to this is “everyone knows the benefit of a whiteboard” – in which case the reply has to be, “what is the benefit of this whiteboard.”

If you would like me to have a look at your advertisement and talk through with you exactly how I would change it to incorporate benefits, just send me a copy to Tony.Attwood@aisa.org.uk (not my usual email address, but I am away from the office today). Give me your phone number and I will call you back. Or if you prefer I will email you my thoughts.

Tony Attwood

For many people the benefit from a shared emailing is not the email itself but the free coverage on our Schools Blog and on UK Education News that comes with it.

Shared emails allow you to have 10,000 emails sent out so that each target teacher is reached twice, once through a personal email and once through a generic email.

Then they go onto one of our blogs where the advert stays for at least a year. Since the blog gets around 30,000 hits a month that is quite a benefit. And if that were not enough you also get listed on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk which is widely read in schools.

And all for just £99 – or put another way, just under 1p each school on the email (without counting the listing on the blog and in UK Education News)

The shared emails have a maximum of five entrants (you can see the format of the email at http://www.emails.gs/sample_shared.html )

Here’s a list of the forthcoming events. To book in please call 01536 399 000.

March
19th Languages
19th History
26th Music
26th PSHE/Citizenship
26th Primary

April
17th ICT
23rd Site Manager
30th Maths

May 7th English
14th Site Manager

June
18th Site Manager
25th English

July
2nd Maths

September
10th Maths
17th English

Tony

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

This morning my colleagues have told me of two clients who have reported having their best sales from schools. One the best in 3 years, the other the best in six years.

How, and why, and what can you do about it?

The how is simple – they have been using our postal shared mailing and personal email campaigns.

The why is in part because schools are spending the money they didn’t spend during the course of the year. Because budgets were cut at the start of the financial year, some schools held back on all spending. Then extra money was “found” by government, and now they have some left over, but it has to be accounted for by April 5.

I can also add to this that last month our publishing company First and Best had one of its best months in selling to schools for a number of years.

Personal emails continue to schools all the time – just call 01536 399 000 or see www.emails.gs

But we do have one final postal shared mailing with a free personal email campaign attached. The closing date is only two days away, but we have couple of spare slots. Call 01536 399 000 urgently if you want to be in it – and there are details on http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html

Tony

We have started to do research into the personal email addresses of heads of department in FE colleges. So far we have done just two lists – business studies and ICT. But more can be done.

Generally speaking the order in which we undertake the research for such lists is determined by the needs of our Velocity clients – those companies that pay us the monthly fee and then get their emails at around about the equivalent of 4p an address (plus all the marketing advice and discussion they want). There are details of the service on www.velocity.ac

But even if you are not a Velocity client, you can still have an input into the order in which this research is done. Just let us know what you want us to research, and we’ll tell you how quickly we can get the list. Then if you are happy with the time scale (which may only be a couple of weeks) you can place your order and we’ll do the research.

Here are the details so far for email addresses

FE Colleges business studies personal – 291

FE Colleges ICT personal – 281

Prices are the same as for school personal email addresses (see www.emails.gs for our complete list of lists) which means in this case just 10p each email including transmission.

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The importance of considering Scottish schools as a separate group was emphasised this past week when the First Minister in Scotland, Alex Salmond, opened the first primary school to be funded through the £1.25 billion Schools for the Future programme.

As BSF ends in England, so it seems in Scotland it takes off.
In another change Learning Minister Alasdair Allan confirmed that Scottish Studies should be an integral part of the Curriculum for Excellence.

Here’s some details of schools in Scotland

Secondary schools – 413, available as a postal mailing list (with the generic email addresses supplied free of charge along with phone numbers in many cases). Available as a file attached to an email for once only use: £19.95 plus VAT

For over 85% of these schools we have the personal email addresses of some teachers. These are available at 14p each including transmission by Hamilton House, with a minimum charge of £100 (so ideal if you are looking to mail two or three teachers per school.

Primary schools – 2125 available as a postal mailing list (with the generic email address of 1995 of the schools supplied free of charge. Available as a file attached to an email (along with phone numbers in many cases) for once only use for £99.95 plus VAT.

Other options are available such as having the list on a one year unlimited use licence (£59.85 for secondary, £299.85 for primary), or having the list already printed onto labels, or on a CD disk delivered by courier. Please call 01536 399 000 for details.

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

It is one of those questions that seems always to be around. People used to ask if the chalk board was doomed. And there must have been a time (although long forgotten) when people wondered why typewriter manufacturers would be doing in a few years time (presumably nothing).

At the moment the question being asked – at least rhetorically by Apple – is, is there any life left in the school text book?

There’s good reason to like the text book (it is generally cheap and doesn’t need any technology) and good reason to dislike it (it is fixed, it goes out of date quickly, it consumes valuable resources in its manufacture, and it is utterly non-interactive).

Quite whether Apple has brought about the end of traditional school book publishing is anyone’s guess – but what they have done is invented their own “ibooks textbooks for ipad”. That is hardly a good catchphrase, but the earlier one they used (a GarageBand for e-books) depended on you knowing what “garage” means in the Apple world. (It is a method of composing music using a computer).

So now we have a method of writing e-books without all the laborious programming and the like. If they have got it right then the world is about to go through another one of those major transformations that it now seems to go through every two or three minutes. Traditional class books will go the way of typewriters, shorthand and secretarial classes, and this will be the new thing.

Or maybe it already is the new thing. Maybe, by not writing about this for a couple of weeks I have missed the boat, the revolution has come and gone and Google is even as I write launching its own version which is cheaper, faster, better….

If have know more about this development than I do, please do let me know so I can pass on your thoughts to everyone. Meanwhile, here’s the Apple page on the subject.

http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/

Tony Attwood

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

UK Education News is the free rolling news service covering all aspects of news about schooling and teaching.

It is widely used by both teachers and by those supplying the education world – and you can of course access it at any time – or almost any time. I mention the service today because we changed servers this week and the site was down for a while. If you missed us – sorry – but we are back.

It is also possible to advertise in association with this service – you can have your news item appear as a topic on the news, and it will then be logged in the Schools Blog that we run – which means it will be available for a year.

The price of a listing is just £25 plus VAT – if you want to be in, just email Chris@hamilton-house.com with your text as you want it to appear (as an attached word file) and your headline that will appear on the web page, plus your address for invoicing and a note that you agree the £25 charge.

Meanwhile – if you just like to keep up with the news, it is rolling at www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

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

Shared postal mailings with free email campaigns

The obvious answer to the question, “What’s the point…” is that you can reach a lot of teachers for a very low price with a shared postal mailing. In fact the cost is less than the cost of a personal email.

To send one leaflet weighing under 15g to a teacher in each secondary school costs around 7.7p per teacher. To send two leaflets (for example to two different teachers) takes the price down to 4.7p per teacher.

Given that the lowest price available for emailing teachers through our personal lists is 10p per teacher (and that is with the discount for doing the whole list), this is a remarkably interesting option.

Which I suppose is why postal shared mailings have come back into fashion.

We run postal shared mailings throughout the school year and there are details of all the dates we offer here (http://www.shared.org.uk/SharedMailingDates2012.html).

On all these mailings we offer a free use of our generic mailing list – but with certain dates we offer an extra bonus – a free mailing using one of our personal email lists. (If you are not sure on the difference between personal and generic lists, please do call 01536 399 000 and we’ll talk it through).

The personal email lists are shown on http://www.emails.gs/Secondarynamedlist.html  and you can select an A list or a B list with your postal shared mailing at absolutely no cost. You can email the same people as you mailed through the post, or choose a completely different list.

Our next postal shared mailing to secondary schools with use of one of our Personal Email lists free of charge is on March 21, with delivery of materials by March 14. But don’t forget that all the shared mailings listed on our site now have free use of our generic email list.

For more details or to make a booking please call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

The issue of selling in service courses to teachers ran into some difficulty with the advent of the Workload Agreement through which it was agreed that teachers would “rarely cover” for their colleagues who were away.

This has been taken to mean that if it is known that the teacher will be away, the school must pay for a supply teacher rather than have another teacher give up preparation time to cover the class.

That in turn has made courses ever more expensive for schools – and numbers have in many cases dropped radically.

As a way of trying to overcome this, Hamilton House has been running an experiment for a number of years in which we have built courses, and created them as distance learning programmes rather than as attendance based programmes.

The result has been a significant success for us, with four courses now running, each with several starting dates each year.

Additionally we have now started working with other companies who have their own courses, either marketing courses that are already offered as distance learning courses, or taking courses initially intended as face-to-face sessions, and making them distance learning programmes.

Through this work the brand we have developed for the delivery of these courses has grown and is quite widely recognised as the deliverer of quality programmes. And of course we have access to all the Hamilton House means of delivery – and a validation programme, if required.

This is also a good time to consider the development of such courses as the work of the National College winds down, and their courses increase in price or are withdrawn.

If you offer any courses, or are thinking of offering them, and would like to discuss anything about them from the creation of the course, to advertising the course, through to the the delivery of the course, please do call 01536 399 000 and ask to talk to either Stephen or myself.

Tony

Was your last advert to schools just too original?

Or maybe it was too exciting?

Or too different?

If so, it probably was too successful as well, and you are finding it hard to cope with all the replies!

The fact is that the vast majority of adverts that reach school are of a type – and the reason so many emails are deleted within a couple of seconds and so many postal direct mail packs are thrown out without more than five seconds glance, is because they are of a type.

In short, the readers have seen them all before.

All of us get bored with the same old thing going round and around, and virtually all of us like to have a bit of originality from time to time.

And the interesting thing about selling to schools is that it is easy to be original in your advertising, because most adverts to schools simply describe the product or service, rather than actually focus on the advertising.

Taking this awareness of what goes into schools each day is part of our Velocity service – within that service we not only undertake your marketing, but we also give you as much input as you wish on possibilities and alternatives, using email, postal direct mail, the internet, word of mouth marketing, and indeed anything else within the direct marketing sphere.

There is more about velocity on www.velocity.ac and you can call us on 01536 399 000 to discuss any aspect of this service that you like.