21/11/2009 by Tony Attwood.

A new rolling news service for teachers has been launched at www.UKEducationNews.co.uk under the title UK Education News.

The service picks up virtually every news story to do with schooling in the UK and puts it on a rolling list.

If you find any story that you like, then you can just click upon it, and you get directly to the full story.

Better still, there is nothing to pay and no forms to fill in.  The service is supplied free of charge by Hamilton House Mailings plc.

The service was launched on Friday 20th November 2009 and the aim is to modify the way the service works over time to meet the needs of the readership.

If you have a story that you would like to have carried on UK Education News there is an email address at the top so that you can forward it to us.

We are open to all discussions and ideas on this service - please write to Hamilton House at Tony@schools.co.uk - but most important of all, please do take a look at the site, www.UKEducationNews.co.uk and tell us what you think.

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11/11/2009 by Tony Attwood.

Text or html?

The School of Educational Administration has recently undertaken a survey of 2300 primary and secondary schools to find out if they view their incoming email advertisements as HTML (that is with layout and links) or as text-only, where all the design features are stripped out.

Around 25% of those we asked replied - probably the largest proportion of respondents we have ever had for one of our surveys - and 88% confirmed that they were reading in HTML, with 12% saying they could see the text only. This means that there are still issues around the inclusion of images as they cannot be viewed in the text-only version - and that it is advisable to include full email and web addresses as where they are hidden (eg click here) they may not be accessible in the text only version.

The overwhelming majority confirmed that they were reading the email through Outlook or Outlook Express.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the survey. The message I believe that comes out of this is that if you are restricting staff in your school to text only emails you are restricting what teachers and others can see on the messages that they want to get - and the vast majority of schools are not finding moving across to HTML as a problem.

Tony Attwood
Hamilton House Mailings plc  

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09/11/2009 by Tony Attwood.

Marketing to schools made phenomenally easy

Oh if only that were true. In fact thirty years ago it was true: write a page of text, get it printed, put it in a shared mailing and the orders came pouring in by post. No fax, no email, no internet, no blog. Just paper, post and orders.

Last year we tried to return to these easier times by opening up a system that covered most of the complexity of selling into schools in one package.

For a monthly fee we would do any necessary research (what competitor products are schools using, and what do they think of them, etc), writing in various ways to find out exactly what message worked best, and then emailing – checking that the results worked, and moving on from there.

That has been fine – but then we started to be asked: what about websites? So we included writing new copy for the websites within the monthly fee.

And now, we’ve got another issue: what about blogs?

In part this is my own fault because I have spent the last few months boasting that one of my blogs is now read by over 100,000 people a month. I should keep my mouth shut.

What we have done so far is to include all our clients’ emails in a blog that we run which gets 20,000 readers each month – and that number is rising fast.

But now we’ve gone a stage further. For all our clients who take the monthly marketing service with us, we offer to write their own blog for them. Where they have a blog facility, we provide copy. Where they don’t have a blog set up, we’ll set up the site and manage it too – and we’ll work on building up the audience.

And for the moment we’re doing that without changing the monthly fee.

There’s more about the service, known as Velocity, at www.velocity.ac - although there is nothing about the Blog part of the service yet because we’ve only just added that. You’ll have to call me for more on that idea if you want the details.

If you are interested in making your marketing easy so you can focus on your product, please do give me a call. I’m mostly harmless, and will occasionally let you get a word in too.  01536 399 000 – and if I am not available please ask for Laura or Stephen.  Alternatively email Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

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07/11/2009 by Tony Attwood.

To try and ease matters through the postal strikes Hamilton House has extended its normal December discounts back into November.

If you do a solo mailing between now and the rest of this year we will give you a 30% discount on

• The cost of the envelopes
• The cost of the labels
• The cost of the labour

In fact everything, except the postage, over which we have no control anyway.

What’s more we’ll put a page about you on the Schoolsco Blog.  After a trial run we launched the School Blog in September and got 10,000 readers in our first month.  The October figures show 19,000 individual readers - not bad for a second month of operation.  You can see what you will get by looking at www.blog.schools.co.uk  

And there’s even more - if we do the work in December we will (if you wish) hold it until January before sending it out at no extra cost - and you don’t have to pay the postage until you are ready to let the job go.

For more info, do give us a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings plc reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

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