Shared, solo, email - which works best?

In terms of selling direct to teachers there are three main options: solo mail, shared mail and email. So which one is best.

In my experience a fair number of companies make a choice on emotional and cost grounds. As in the firms that don’t use shared mailings because “we would never want our products to be advertised alongside items from other companies”, and the companies that go for email rather than shared on the grounds that email is cheaper.

A much more reasoned way of working out whether to use solo, shared or email is to look at the return on investment - how much profit you make for each £1 you spend on advertising. But this is a complex issue, and I know from experience that discussing ROI is one of the easiest ways to lose an audience. So I am going to try another approach with a set of basic rules which although not complete are, to my mind, better than the emotional response

Solo mailing is ideal for testing - it gets the highest response rates so the number you have to mail is often small. Doing a trial mailing to 400 schools in this way will cost you around £150 or so - and that shouldn’t break the bank. All you need to work out is how many sales you need to recover your £150 and make a bit of a profit. If the answer is less than 3% its worth a try - over 3% and it is maybe possible, but getting harder to achieve. (I am talking here of response rates from a list of schools that include many or all who are not established as your regular customers. Mailing customers should result in higher response rates).

So you mail the trial mailing, it gets the percentage you need, and then you quickly do all the other schools on your list, certain in the knowledge that you will make the profit you want.

Shared mailing is ideal for getting people interested, and regular reminders about products. Most firms selling products up to £50 in value tend to find they get fewer sales with shared mailings, but they earn more for each £1 spent. This is a reflection of shared mail’s pricing structure - you can send a leaflet out for anything between 5p and 10p per school (depending on weight etc) - which is about a quarter of the cost of solo. Selling books and reports I found the best way to use shared was with a one colour two side leaflet with up to six books advertised, and a simple order form at the end.

It is no longer a fact that shared mailings cannot be used for heavier items - price changes in recent years have meant that items up to 100g or even heavier can be worth putting in a shared mailing.

Finally email. Here the matter has got very complex by the fact that there are a number of different approaches to email. For this comparison I am just going to take “generic email” - email that goes to the school’s main email address which is usually “admin@” or “info@” or “office@”. Such emails go to the school administrator who then passes it on - often by printing the leaflet out (since many schools still don’t have email addresses for each member of staff). The price of email addresses can be anything from 1p to 10p each, and generally speaking you get what you pay for. Only a handful of companies guarantee the delivery of their school email addresses - and non-delivery on non-guaranteed lists and lists culled from CDs can be fairly useless.

Emails are ideal for a promotion in which your main interest is in taking senior managers (the head, deputy and the like) to your web site via a live link, or getting them to send in an email requesting information. It is possible to get sales of up to 1% for products (we tested on products costing around £20) where the teacher has the choice of ordering on line, by fax, by phone, by post and by download. Email is much harder to make a profit from when trying to sell without the web site, and when selling to a head of department (eg the head of maths).

I hope that helps clarify things a little - do call me on 01536 399 000 or write to me (Tony at schools.co.uk )with comments. If anyone asks me to I’ll follow this with a more detailed look at the rules we’ve evolved on how to get the highest response rates from email marketing, and the various forms of email to schools that have exploded onto the market in the place year.

Information on shared mail: www.shared.org.uk Email: www.yesmail.org.uk Solo: www.directmail.org.uk

Tony Attwood

This entry was posted on 19/06/2008 at 09:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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