Archive for May 2009

Advertising to schools where you pay according to the number of sales you get

28/05/2009 by Tony Attwood.


Advertising to schools where you pay according to the number of sales you get

 

It is central to the Hamilton House philosophy that the way an advert is written affects the sales.  Indeed we often argue that some adverts greatly under achieve, because of the way they are written. 

 

Now we’re putting our money where my mouth is.   We are offering to take your advert, re-write it, and email it to schools - for free.  All you do is pay us for each sale you get.   

 

To join in the project you will need to have a system for tracking exactly where each order comes from.   The ideal approach is for the email advert to lead to a page on your web site from which orders can be placed by teachers and which is only used for this project.  (If you have an alternative tracking system, I’ll have a look at that - just let me know - but it does have to allow us to know exacty how many orders came from our advert.)

 

When the advert runs the orders will come straight to you, for you to fulfil in the normal way.   So this will look to the rest of the world like a normal straightforward advert.  The only difference in fact is that instead of paying up front for your advertising you pay us a commission on each sale.  If we sell none, you pay nothing.  If we sell a lot, you pay a lot of commission - but then you also get a lot of sales.

 

The service is only available for secondary schools at the moment.  If you feel that you would like to work with us on commission-only advertising just email me 

 

1.  Your own advert for the product (if we do the project, we’ll re-write the advert, but we need your ad as a guide to the product or service you are selling).

 

2.  The details of the web page that relates to this product

 

3.  The commission rate per sale that you suggest.

 

I look forward to hearing from you.  You can email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

 

Tony Attwood

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Can you replace direct mail with email?

22/05/2009 by Tony Attwood.

An article in Biz Report (full details below) predicts the end of direct mail and the complete take over of email as a form of marketing.   They say that ”direct mail efforts will decline almost 40% over the next five years from 2008’s $49.7 billion in annual spend to $29.8 by the end of 2013.”

That’s the bit that will make the headlines… but there’s a sting in the tail.

Borrell also says that, ”Managing large e-mail marketing campaigns require database marketing expertise, a savvy sales force, adequate e-mail management software, familiarity with the rules and regulations and a lot of patience.”

And this is where the issue is.

No one in their right mind would try and write, produce, direct and place a TV campaign in house - everyone knows it needs expertise.   Quite a few firms have tried to do the whole direct mail thing themselves - but over time have found that a) it is a pain in the whatnot to try and mail out in house, and b) the apparently simple act of writing a direct mail piece is not a simple act after all.

Now the same realisations are starting to appear with email.  Anyone can go out and buy an email list and get the list sent out for a few pennies an address - less with some of the very dubious lists.  But response rates, which are always low to begin with on cheap and cheerful lists, can deteroirate quickly.

In other words, it may be cheap to send out the emails but if you only get a tiny response rate, business declines quickly.

There are email lists however which can deliver response rates which are close to direct mail response rates - but even these lists can fail if they are overused, or if they are used to send out the same old messages over and over again.  Or of course if the messages sent out are poorly written (not in the sense of bad English but in the sense of being poor in terms of being effective sales items) then the results slip back down.

I think we are heading towards a more complex situation in which

a) some firms that have tried email are heading back to direct mail in order to get the bulk volumes up

b) there is a growing realisation that email lists vary in quality dramatically - and as a result the notion of buying cheap email and trying to run the business is running into the sand

I believe direct mail is already bouncing back (certainly at HHM our DM sales in June are heading back upwards) and will exist alongside email - with firms alternating postal and email sales in future.  There’s details of our direct mail postal lists on http://www.hamilton-house.com/gateways/lists.html.   There’s details of our email lists on www.yesmail.org.uk

Original article…

http://www.bizreport.com/2009/05/borrell_predicts_demise_of_direct_mail_rise_of_email.html

Tony Attwood

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All your marketing to schools for £350 a month

14/05/2009 by Tony Attwood.

I recently emailed my thoughts out on how there are seven steps to successful marketing.  (In case you missed them, I set them out again below).

I think I got more calls and interest on this than any promotion related email that I’ve sent out on this service for a year or more.   As a result my colleagues and I have come up with a system in which we’ll work with you to achieve the seven points and thus get your marketing going, for a standard monthly fee of £350. 

That fee includes writing your promotions, undertaking research among teachers to clarify specific issues, and emailing out promotions.  The only thing not included is solo and shared mail through the post.

There are details of this on www.velocity.ac    Or you can call me on 01536 399 013.

Here’s the seven factors again

The Seven Step approach is based on an analysis of what most companies that seem to be doing well in selling into the school market, are actually doing.

 

STEP 1:  Gathering data on teachers’ attitudes to the product, and the way in which the competition is promoting its products.

 

STEP 2:  Understanding teacher attitudes towards the product, pricing, and the competition

 

STEP 3:  The first round of advertising - trying out some new ideas via email.  

 

STEP 4:  Building the lists of people who have expressed an interest or just enquired for a catalogue

 

STEP 5:  Defining the market - marking up the database with which schools are likely to buy and which not

 

STEP 6:  Transferring the lessons learned to direct mail and testing this with a range of  mail shots

 

STEP 7:  Taking the knowledge gained and utilising it for other products. 

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A complete marketing programme to schools for £350 per month

12/05/2009 by Tony Attwood.

Continuing with my efforts to establish exactly what it is that firms that are successfully selling to schools do, I’ve come up with a simple seven-step analysis.  I believe this is  what a lot of firms that are selling well to schools do.   

 

STEP 1:  Gathering data on teachers’ attitudes to the product, and the way in which the competition is promoting its products.

 

STEP 2:  Understanding teacher attitudes towards the product, pricing, and the competition

 

STEP 3:  The first round of advertising - trying out some new ideas via email.  

 

STEP 4:  Building the lists of people who have expressed an interest or just enquired for a catalogue

 

STEP 5:  Defining the market - marking up the database with which schools are likely to buy and which not

 

STEP 6:  Transferring the lessons learned to direct mail and testing this with a range of  mail shots

 

STEP 7:  Taking the knowledge gained and utilising it for other products. 

 

There’s nothing too radical there - but we’ve now gone a step further by devising a programme that will achieve all this for our clients.  We will do the analyses and research, write the adverts, send out the adverts via email, display the adverts on our www.schools.co.uk web site, and give analyses and advice throughout - all for £350 per month.   

That’s everything from steps 1 to 5.  The only extras in the project are direct mail and any web site work needed.   Everything else (from copywriting to supplying the email lists and sending out the emails) is paid for in the monthly fee. 

I’ve set this programme up because I do believe this is the quickest, simplest and most cost effective way of discovering if your product will sell effectively into schools, and if so, to whom and how the advert should be written.

There’s no long term contract - you can leave with just one month’s notice.

If you are interested, please do call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000.   I’m not in on Monday, but my colleagues Stephen and Laura will be there, able to answer any questions.

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New syllabus for sex education

11/05/2009 by Tony Attwood.


The plans to make PSHE compulsory from the age of five, have been accepted by the  schools secretary, and are now moving to final consultation.  The proposals include the right for schools to apply their own “values” to the lessons.  This means that they may teach that homosexuality is a sin, a crime, or an illness, and that sex outside of marriage is wrong.   Parents to opt their children out of the lessons on religious grounds.

All secondary schools in England that receive payment from the state (which includes faith schools) will have to teach a core curriculum about sex and contraception in the context of teenagers’ relationships.   But teachers will be able to teach that using contraception (like homosexuality, and sex outside marriage) is wrong.  Schools will also be legally obliged to teach pupils about health and nutrition, safety, drugs and alcohol.

There is also a requirement in law for pupils will be taught how to stay safe from  cyber-bullying and gang culture, as well as how to manage their bank accounts.

A new curriculum for primary schools will include teaching five-year-olds about different kinds of relationships, managing their emotions and about physical changes to their bodies in childhood.

Currently 0.04% of pupils are withdrawn from lessons, usually on religious grounds.

This article first appeared in the free daily news service Education Marketing.  To join that service just send an email to Education-Marketing-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com 

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How to keep people on your web site

06/05/2009 by Tony Attwood.

According to Nielsons, the average American visited 111 internet domains in March.   He/she also went to  2,554 web pages in and spent an average of 56 seconds, on each page.

The problem is that the activity of each individual is very different - from the guy in the basement who is on the internet all day every day to the person up in the hills who doesn’t have mains electricity   What’s more, the type of site varies deeply from (for example) The Guardian to pornographic sites (not that I have any knowledge of the latter you understand).

But, it is interesting - this 56 seconds.   What the figures suggest is that people move around at high speed from place to place - and we still have that age old problem not only of getting them to the site, but also getting them to stay there.

There are all sorts of ways of doing this, and it does very much depend on the type of product you have and the type of audience you attract.   One way that works for my company involves the in-depth article written with a bit of personal input - but this is not relevant for everyone.

What does strike me as important however is that one should focus on the issue in relation to one’s web site.  I get the feeling that for many web sites no one has bothered to focus on them at all - that somehow they have evolved on the basis that “we must tell the reader this” - multipled by ten.

So my suggestion is that one looks at the web site and says:

What are we doing to grab the reader’s attention?

What are we doing to keep the reader here once he/she has arrived?

At least by asking the questions one starts to take a step forward.

Tony

This article was first published on Education Marketing - a free daily news feed for firms involved in selling into schools in the UK.   To subscribe to the feed you need to send an email - click here.

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