- 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?
How to get teachers to read your ad, when you’ve mailed them 10 times before
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.