- Uncategorized (42)
- 30/12/2008: Government announces new peer mentoring programme
- 23/12/2008: Buying Patterns in Schools: Free Report
- 14/12/2008: What has happened this term in schools
- 25/11/2008: Government announces more money for education
- 19/11/2008: How are schools responding to the credit crisis?
- 05/11/2008: The 3 activities that generate the greatest success
- 28/10/2008: Emailing teachers direct: 100,000 new addresses announced
- 17/10/2008: How to get teachers to read your ad, when you've mailed them 10 times before
- 17/09/2008: Getting higher response rates through emailing schools
- 11/09/2008: Do blogs really work in a business sense?
Selling to schools via email
Below is a quote from the Email Marketing Journal, http://emailmarketingjournal.com I print quite a bit of it because it seems to represent where we are on the issue of using email as a marketing tool. It says that…
“More than 50% of internet surfers use email every single day, making this a very effective method of reaching them…. Email marketing is eco-friendly since there is no paper to waste….
Tracking is far easier with email marketing than it would be with direct mail. You can add special codes to let you know exactly which email is leading to which sales, even…. Even on a budget, email marketing can reach millions of people for a fraction of the price of direct mail.
With email marketing, your message gets to the potential client within seconds, rather than days or weeks.”
Now my problem with this is simple. There is not a single reference to response rates.
Email marketing response rates are the issue - who cares if half the planet reads what you write if no one buys anything. Who cares if you have saved a forest or two (given that the EU is self-sufficient in paper anyway). If you don’t sell nothing, nothing happens.
But somehow advertising like this does work, and does attract attention and does encourage people in to email marketing.
Now I am not saying that email marketing does not work - but I can say that it took me 18 months to move from getting a 0.2% response rate selling a £20 product to a generic list, up to 1.2%. Doing this I didn’t mail more people (obviously) - what I did was change the style and approach, modified the copy, and above all learned.
I am bemused as to why the message such as that put out above, continues to flourish, but it does.
If you would like to talk about raising response rates via email rather than just reaching more people, please do give me a call on 01536 399 000. There’s more about Hamilton House’s approach on www.yesmail.org.uk