28/10/2008 by Tony Attwood.

In one week’s time Hamilton House will release around 100,000 email addresses of teachers.  It will be the first time it has been possible to email teachers directly on such a large scale in the UK.

The list (known as the opt-in list) is analysed by the main interest area as given by the teacher in question when they opted in.  Thus a specialist music teacher in a secondary school will put down “Music” – which the primary school teacher who obviously teaches the same class through the week will be more likely to put down “Key Stage 1” or “Key Stage 2” depending on their interest.

There’s nearly 100 selections to choose, from media studies to maths, from science to business studies.   The complete list of lists is available on line at http://www.yesmail.org.uk/email_optin_teachers.html

The lists are available at 14p an address, and the minimum order is £100.  Because we are only releasing these lists for the first time next week and because it is vital that teachers do not feel they are getting too many adverts via email as a result of signing up to our list, there are strict limits on the number of lists we are going to run.  If you are interested please do book in as early as possible.

This opt-in list is just one of three educational email lists that we offer.   These lists are

The subscribers list: lists selectable by subject area of teachers who subscribe to Education Management News.   These lists are smaller than the opt-in lists, but they have the highest response rates.

The opt-in list: that is the list described above.

The schools’ list.  This list includes every school, with the email directed to the administrator, not a specific teacher.  The normal approach with this list is to put the title of the teacher (e.g. Attn: The Head of Science) in the subject line.   This list reaches all the schools, but has the lowest response rate.

There are full details of all three lists on http://www.yesmail.org.uk/Schools.html

Prices include sending out the email and giving suggestions and advice on the way in which the content of the advert can be developed to maximise response rates.

If you would like to discuss how you can make the most of your email marketing to schools using these three lists please call myself or Stephen on 01536 399 000.

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17/10/2008 by Tony Attwood.

When you’ve mailed teachers several times and they still haven’t bought anything from you, a simple question arises: should one remove them from the database, or go on trying with further mailshots?

Mailing again can work - but only if you change the message radically.  On this page I explain why this is so, and how one might do it. 

What’s happening in this scenario is that the individual seeing the advert thinks, “oh its, XYZ Ltd, seen that before,” and within a second it is in the bin. 

The only way to get around this is to show the reader at once that this time you are writing about something utterly different.  It is not a case of changing the offer part way through the text – for the chances are that they are by this stage not reading anything at all.  You have to grab them by the throat from the very start.

Throughout, the key phrase is “go somewhere else”.  Quite often this means not writing about the product, but instead discussing something quite different.

What made me think of this was the text I wrote recently for the theatre company Perform.   They had previously written to schools many times about their projects and always gained a good response rate.  But they still had a significant number of schools that had never replied at all.  In my latest letter for them I only mentioned them at the end of the piece… In most of the letter I covered a totally different topic.  

Today I got an email from their MD, Will Barnett, saying that schools ”which have been ignoring us for years are suddenly picking up the phone…”

I am confident that it is possible to sell to those who have resisted in the past - but it takes a bit of lateral thinking.  If this is a problem you are facing send me a copy of a recent advert (just email Tony@hamilton-house.com) and give me your phone number and I will call you back to discuss the issue and give you a solution.

Tony Attwood 

PS: This approach applies both to direct mail and email campaigns.  We can now email teachers directly to their own email address, or if you prefer, email the school’s office and ask the administrator to pass the email on.

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