- Uncategorized (38)
- 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?
- 02/09/2008: Shared mailings at lowest prices for 20 years
- 26/08/2008: Imagine a teacher who might want to buy your product.
- 28/07/2008: If you can answer this question, you can double your response rates
- 08/07/2008: A guarantee of coverage in the media every month
Shared mailings at lowest prices for 20 years
02/09/2008 by Tony Attwood.
In order to show you just how effective our shared mailings can be, Hamilton House Mailings plc can offer you a special low price on shared mailings. The only qualifying clause is that you have not undertaken a shared mailing with us during the past 12 months.
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Imagine a teacher who might want to buy your product.
26/08/2008 by Tony Attwood.
In this scenario the teacher will have one question. If you can answer that question to the teacher’s satisfaction then all will be fine. If you can’t then the teacher is liable to drift away and buy elsewhere.
Which makes the question rather important.
In fact if you were to analyse the promotions to schools that have worked particularly well in the past few years you’ll find that most of them deal with this one simple question: why should I buy this product from you?
When that question is answered very clearly at the very start of a promotion it pushes the promotional material in a particular direction. However it is a fact that many companies struggle to provide an answer to that question which speaks directly to the teacher’s needs rather than the features of their product or service.
Fortunately there is a very simple way of finding out what sort of answer to this question will really impress teachers.
What you do is ask a few hundred teachers which product or service they use to teach a particular issue, or solve a particular problem. As in, “what products are you currently using with KS2 children who have dyslexia?”
Then, as a follow up question you would ask, “Do you have any problems with this product? Is there anything you feel that is missing, or which could be done better? Or would you recommend it wholeheartedly?”
You then take the results of this survey, and look for two things. One – search for ways in which your product is different from those highlighted by the teachers you questioned. Two – look at the areas where teachers note that the competitor products fall down, but where you think your product scores. For example if the respondents say, “the only problem is that after a few weeks the children tend to get a bit bored – there’s not enough variety” you can then stress the high level of variety offered by your product.
Put all that together, and you have an advertising campaign that can be at least twice as effective as a campaign built without such research.
The cost of such research is normally around £400 – a fee that includes not just undertaking the research, but also guidance on the questions to ask, a full analysis of the answers, and suggestions on how the results can be turned into sort of copy that will transform your next advertising campaign.
If you would like to take this idea further, please do give myself or my colleagues a call on 01536 399 000 – or you can email me at tony@hamilton-house.com
Tony Attwood
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If you can answer this question, you can double your response rates
28/07/2008 by Tony Attwood.
This is not a point I make lightly. The companies that do know the answer to this one question, normally do far better than those that don’t.
The question in question (as it were) is delivered to teachers and is…
in two parts.
Part one says, “When you are teaching topic x what resources do you currently use?” Part two says, “Can you tell me briefly the major benefits and draw backs of this product?”
OK, you are saying to yourself (if you are the sort of person who says things to yourself), what is so magical about these questions?
The point is you get to ask a random sample of teachers to give their opinions on the rival products avaialble when teaching a particular topic or subject. They tell you the positive and negatives of using those products in the classroom.
Then…
You create adverts which focus on the failings of your competitors’ products and the way in which you overcome those issues. I am not saying you mention your competitors by name or denigrate what they do. Rather your knowledge of how your potential customers see the products in this area becomes the most important factor there is in creating successful advertisements.
There’s one final point. Sometimes I’ve heard people say, “we don’t have any competition – no one does it like us,” and I am sure that is true. But that’s not quite the point here. The key issue is not what you think – but what the teacher thinks – and that is often quite a different issue.
Tony Attwood
PS: We undertake research to find out what teachers think about products avaialble to schools. The average cost is around £450, which in terms of the marketing benefit you can derive is rather a tiny amount. Call me before I put the price up.
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A guarantee of coverage in the media every month
08/07/2008 by Tony Attwood.
Hamilton House PR Agency now offers a guarantee: it guarantees that your company will be mentioned positively in at least three papers or journals every month.
Getting positive coverage in appropriate media three times each month sounds a tough call – but with the right approach it is possible.
We can guarantee to achieve this every month because we are (probably) the only PR and Marketing Agency that specialises exclusively in reaching teachers.
So we know the market, and we know the journalists, and we really can deliver.
Thus we can give an absolute guarantee that you will get coverage in at least three different magazines, papers, TV stations or radio stations, every single month. (Sometimes of course we get you more than three media appearances, but when we do we don’t charge extra. We just let you have that as a bonus).
In the extremely unlikely event that we fail to get you the promised coverage, we don’t charge you a penny for that month’s work.
But that’s not all. As part of our package we also work developing separate longer-term projects with you (call me if you would like to have some examples). We also undertake regular research for our clients into teacher attitudes, buying habits, competitor activity and the like. It is all included in the monthly fee.
Of course sometimes a smaller, more specialised type of campaign is required and we can always tailor our work to meet such needs. For example, some companies do not need the guarantee of significant coverage every month and obviously that reduces costs. In other cases the research into teacher attitudes and activities is not needed very often, and again that cuts down on our expenditure on your behalf. Where this is so we can cut our monthly fee dramatically.
In other cases the key issue may be marketing – analysing response rates, evolving new approaches, comparing email with direct mail, devising new incentives and so on. Obviously here our fee can be lower than might otherwise be the case.
We’re happy to discuss the marketing and PR coverage we’ve achieved in the past, and come up with ideas for a campaign for you, without charge or obligation. Do give us a call and we’ll talk it all through.
Just call 01536 399 000
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Email & shared unite in new approach - and the emails are free
01/07/2008 by Tony Attwood.
As an experiment for 2008/9 Hamilton House Mailings is offering a free email campaign direct to teachers with every shared mailing campaign - at no extra charge.
Shared mailings are mailshots sent through the post, in a pack together. Usually there are about 10 items in the pack and the school administrator passes them on to the relevant department. In 2008/9 academic year you get the bonus of your advert being featured in Education Management News – our email news service that goes directly to opted-in teachers.
When considering emails it is important to note that there are two types of email lists in education: lists of schools (that is emails that go to the school administrators) and lists of teachers (which contain the teachers’ own email addresses). We’re talking about the latter – email addresses that are specific to each teacher.
All the teachers on our lists are there because they opt-in and the reason they choose to opt-in is because we send them interesting and stimulating news once or twice a week. Your announcement will be linked to one such news item. Obviously not everyone opts in, but those that do tend to read what we send them – hence the higher response rates.
When booking your shared mailing you need to email us a copy of the text you want on the email. We can’t run the free email advert unless you send us a copy of your text in Word or RTF format. Because of the stringent nature of school firewalls we don’t include any pictures, but we can include a link to your web site, and your email address as well as your phone number and postal address. If you want to change the text from that in your advert, there’s no problem, and there’s no limit on the size of the advert (although if you go on too long, the teacher might stop reading!)
There’s an extra bonus too. You know the bit that says you can’t combine two offers at the same time… this time you can. You can take the 10% extra free offer (which means we’ll send out your overs through the shared mailing system a few weeks after the main mailing, up to a maximum of 10%) along with the free email to teachers offer.
To book in your shared mailing in the normal way, and then email us the text you want in the email advert, along with a note of the date of the shared mailing, and who you want to reach. We’ll do the rest.
There’s more about shared mailings on www.shared.org.uk To find out more you can call on 01536 399 000, or you can email sales@schools.co.uk
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Shared, solo, email - which works best?
19/06/2008 by Tony Attwood.
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
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