Tony Attwood's Blog

My answer to this is fairly straight forward. The most cost effective media for advertising direct are…

1. Postal campaigns – especially where a trial run is undertaken to ensure that the campaign works at the level required.

2. Email campaigns using the direct email address of the person you wish to reach (i.e. going straight to a named person, not to “sales@” or “office@”.

3. Blogs, in which one writes a regular commentary on the issues surrounding the products or services one sells, which conclude by linking to your own sales site, and which and which also invite the reader to write in or phone, to discuss issues further.

However I have often been asked whether one should not also use Google Ad Words – particularly in situations where options 1 and 2 are difficult to explore because of the lack of a good mailing list.

Hamilton House has worked on list creation, experimented with a wide variety of blogs and web sites, and used Google Ad Words for a range of products and services. I’ve no doubt that as a result of this experimentation one can say that pound for pound spent blogs out perform Adwords every time.

Of course part of the issue relates to one’s ability with each medium. Google Ad Words are so small that it is hard not to get them right, but this is not the case with blog campaigns. With this in mind we have researched extensively what makes some postal, email and blog campaigns work, and others fail. Many of our results now appear on the Direct Marketing Theory site – details below.

But back to this experiment. We created our lists and blogs, experimented with Ad Words and reached the conclusion that for every pound spent we got far more sales through emails, the post and blogs than we did with Ad Words.

And that is where the story stayed until in one of the most excellent pieces of research I have ever seen relating to selling on the internet MarketingExperiments.com produced a report in which it compared hiring an employee to blog and create content, with the much simpler approach of using Google Adwords to drive targeted traffic to the web site.

The research took place over 12 months and in summary the research showed that the blog approach yielded more than 93,207 unique visitors at a cost of $3600 (the salary of the employee who wrote the blogs).

This was compared with a 30-day test of Google Adwords, bidding up to 75 cents per click on a variety of keywords related to the test websites which drove 2,047 users to the site at a cost of $1,250.

Thus we can see that each visitor to the web site sent via Google Adwords cost around 61 cents, whereas each visitor to the site via the blog cost just under 4 cents.

Or as Marketing Experiments.com points out, the blog approach yielded a 1427% greater return on investment than the GoogleAd approach.

As the report says, however, pay-per-click advertising was a much easier to run and was much quicker, to produce results, but it was much more expensive and gave a much lower return on investment.

It is probably because Ad Words seems so easy and will deliver results within an hour or so of starting that it continues to be so widely used. But that should not mean that one does not address the issue of running a blog at the same time. If you need customers today, and you don’t mind how must you want to pay, start the Ad Word process running. But meanwhile what you should do (in my opinion) is start working on the blog.

The key point here is that Google Ad Words and blogs work in very different ways. Ad Words only work when you are paying for the contract – the moment that you pause the campaign, clicks stop. But with blogs, each blog article can stay on line for as long as you wish. Indeed I know that on one of my blogs, an article I wrote four years ago still gets around 2000 hits a month. The cost of my writing that article was paid for four years ago (as part of my salary) but it still generates enquiries to the Hamilton House office each month.

Thus the Hamilton House research and the Marketing Experiments Journal research both clearly show that blogs are a far more cost effective way of getting the potential customer who is searching the internet for information to go to your site. Not only does it cost a fraction of the Ad Words cost, it also delivers far more readers.

To show you how this works in practice, here are some links to blogs we have created, with a brief note in each case.

www.blog.hamilton-house.com – a blog about direct marketing. Five articles a week on direct marketing. 17,000 hits a month.

www.blog.emiratesstadium.info – “Football from an Arsenal perspective”. About 10 articles a week. Between 500,000 and 750,000 hits a month. Although one can argue that football (and Arsenal) are popular topics, the fact is that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Arsenal sites with whom this blog is competing. So we made some specific editorial decisions early on. Call me if you would like to know more.

www.blog.schools.co.uk – a blog which reprints advertisements from our customers that are transmitted by email. Despite its lack of original content or editorial, it gets around 50,000 individual readers a month. The site is never advertised or mentioned elsewhere – all the hits arrive through people searching Google or similar sites, and then clicking on the link to this blog.

www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk – a blog about selling to schools – 33,000 visits a month.

www.bob-dylan.org.uk – one post a week, each of which reviews a Bob Dylan song. Around 30,000 visits a month. As with the Arsenal site specific decisions were taken to differentiate this site from other Dylan sites (of which there are many).

www.blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk – a blog which focuses on the history of Arsenal FC. No contemporary news, so it is described by some of my colleagues as “geeky” and “nerdy”. Fair enough, but it gets over 120,000 visits a month.

These figures take time to grow – which is why I suggested above that using Google Ad Words initially to help drive people to the sites may be worthwhile. But – and this is the big point – even if you use Ad Words you should still start work on the blog now.

Marketing Experiments – who undertook the detailed research mentioned above are at Digital Trust Inc. 412 First Street North Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250, USA

If you would like to know more about blogs, creating them and writing them, please do call 01536 399 000 or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

My view of direct marketing (be it via email, the post or on a web site) is that what you should do and how you should do it, is not common sense.

Rather there are a number of factors that are related to how the brain works as well as factors in relation to gaining attention, that take us into the world of the psychology of perception.

One of the most common areas where what works in direct marketing is NOT common sense is the question of pictures and text. It seems logical to assume that pictures are good and that pictures will always enhance response rates. But this is not true at all. In fact the opposite is true. Sometimes.

The whole theory is complex but if you would like a very quick summary it is on our Theory of Direct Marketing web site, at http://www.theory.bz/factortext.html

Do hope you find that helpful – and of course if you would like to take the issue further, please do give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

The 10 Best USPs for companies selling through email, websites and post.

One of the most wonderful things about working with Hamilton House on direct marketing is the fact that I spend a lot of time looking at adverts, and talking with clients about which strategies work and which don’t.

Mulling all this information over I have come up with a list of Unique Selling Points that people use, and have put them into an order of effectiveness.

Every company should have a unique selling point, and indeed most firms do.  The problem is not so much that people don’t have USPs but rather than their USP tends to be either similar to other companies’ USPs (and so are not really USPs since they are not unique) or that the chosen USP is something that is very hard to express in a way that will excite the potential customer.

So here is my list of USPs.  They are placed in order with what seems to me to be the most effective USPs at the top of the list, and those which are the most difficult to use effectively at the foot of the list.

But I want to add one word of caution.  I am not saying that having a USP from the top of the list automatically brings success, any more than I am saying that a USP from the foot of the list means failure.   Once you have your USP you still have to tell people about it, and there is no doubt that a USP from the foot of the list can still work wonders for a company providing you know how to use it.

1.  Inside Knowledge: showing the potential customer that you really do know all there is to know about your industry sector, product or service.
2. Style.  While the giants know all about style (or in consumer terms, “image”) many smaller firms, particularly in the B2B area, don’t think about style or know how to project it.  It is possible however to make your style brash, exciting, sexy, hilarious, knowledgeable, clever, quirky, exciting…  And if you can do that in an industry where everyone else is dull, worthy and boring, you’ve got a very workable USP.
3. Quick delivery.   This really can work if you can get it right – but if you are using a third party for the delivery, beware, because the customer will blame you.
4. Free.  If you regularly offer something free, that can be your USP.  Only problem is that once you have started offering something free you have to keep going.
5. Guarantee.  Come up with the best guarantee in the market place and you’ve got a good USP – providing it is a guarantee that is meaningful to the customer and which people want.
6. Huge choice.  If you’ve got everything in your sector, and you’ve got it in every colour, then that’s what you proclaim.
7. Low cost/cash back.  If that’s what you are then that’s what you proclaim – but it is hard to do in a market in which everyone else offers discounts.  Every variant such as buy one get one free is being used in most markets already.
8. We do it well.   You choose what “it” is and do it well.  The problem is that the customer already expects this so you can get into the negative area of comparisons with other firms.  So this USP only works if you really do perform better than everyone else.
9. Reliability.  Trouble is everything should be reliable, so it is hard to put over this as a USP unless you really are streets ahead of the opposition
10. Friendly.   There’s one simple difficulty here – half the companies in the Kingdom claim to be friendly.  You might be the friendliest, but why should anyone bother to find out?

So there it is – a list of USPs from 1 to 10.  If you would like to talk about how your USP fits in, or how to make any of these USPs work via email, the post or on web sites, just email me at Tony@Hamilton-House.com or call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Why are more and more people undertaking solo postal campaigns at the moment?

Last month saw the largest number of solo postal campaigns being despatched by Hamilton House Mailings for six years.

This is quite a thought, because six years ago was the time when the use of the post as a marketing tool began to be overtaken by the use of email as a marketing tool.

So, I ask, what has happened?

From talking to customers it seems to me that two things have happened recently. Firstly, the notion of doing a test solo mailing to about just 300 or 500 organisations or individuals on a mailing list, has become firmly entrenched. This is what people do as a matter of course.

Second, some firms that stopped putting out catalogues and instead went over to email and web site marketing, have returned to catalogues. That does not mean that they have necessarily started to pull out catalogues of the same size as before, (although some are doing this) but instead many are retaining their web site but putting out printed catalogues containing some of their best selling lines and special offers, as well.

I think this final point shows that a key point of direct marketing is getting through: different people will respond to different channels.

In short there are three direct marketing channels which involved the written word and pictures:

The blog

Emails

Postal

… and what we find is that while some people will look at information no matter what media it comes through, many others focus on just one of these three media.

Therefore it makes sense to send out a postal campaign from time to time. And indeed because it is possible to find out if your postal campaign will work by sending out a very small preliminary, then the door to direct marketing via post is a welcome one.

A postal campaign often costs around 50p per address reached, (£50 per 100), and response rates of 2% and 3% are fairly common for firms that have experimented with the approach. That means that these firms are more than covering the £50 with the profit from sales to two or three customers.

What’s more it also means that new purchasers are being introduced all the time, and thus their names can be collected and used as well in future promotions. So your list of past customers (the most valuable list you have) grows day by day.

If you would like to discuss the use of direct marketing via the post, please do call 01536 399 000, or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

How you grab attention is the single most important factor within postal and email campaigns.

When you present an individual with a sheet of A4 paper the reader’s eyes start out by looking at a spot about 30% of the way down the page.  If that is where you have your attention grabbing headline then the chances are that the reader will take it in.

But what about email?

The advent of email has meant the demise of serious thinking about the headline.  Instead the best copywriters tend to spend quite a bit of time thinking about (and testing) their subject lines.

And this is quite right too.  Subject lines make a huge difference.

And yet, and yet… emails that have superb subject lines and a brilliant headline (written in 14 point Arial bold, or something like that) appear to do best of all.

In terms of what you say, everyday comments such as “50% off!!!” and “Midsummer madness” tend not to deliver such high responses because lots of people use them.

The simple rule is: you need to be different to bring in the highest response rates.  Indeed if you can be different, unusual and eye-catching all at the same time then you are really onto a winner with your email.

So, what makes an interesting subject line, and what makes an interesting headline?

Quirky comments work – as long as they link to something that the reader knows about or are inherently interesting.  Quoting a line from a pop song or famous book can work too, if the line will draw the reader in even if the reader has no idea about the origin of the quote.

Questions also work – but only if they are open ended (ie they can’t be answered yes or no) and are inherently interesting.  Thus, “Would you like to make more money?” doesn’t help anyone.

“What is the most effective way of gaining higher response rates from your emails?” is much more interesting – because it suggests that an informative discussion will follow.  And it can’t be answered yes or no.

But as an alternative approach try a subject line like the one I have used today.  “The beginning is simple to mark,” is the opening of “Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan.  This has nothing to do with writing emails or sales letters that people will read – but it grabs attention because it is not obvious.

Thus gaining attention is the name of the game, for if that fails everything else fails.  So it makes a lot of sense to try and gain (and then hold) attention both with the headline and with the subject line.

If you want another one you could try “here is the deepest secret nobody knows” which is from “I carry your heart with me” by EE Cummings (or better said e e cummings).  That line used as a headline or a subject line will always increase readership.

And remember: most people don’t write quirky or interesting headlines and subject lines, because they are afraid of going out on a limb.  Which is another reason why quirky or interesting headlines win out – because so few people write them.

If you would like to discuss alternative ways of writing for email campaigns, or indeed postal campaigns, please do get in touch on 01536 399 000.  You can also find a way range of issues relating to direct marketing on www.blog.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Research can allow you to prove anything; there’s no point in doing it at all.

It is interesting how much opposition there can be to the simple notion of undertaking some research among clients and potential clients.

And this is despite the fact that research can find out why people bought from your competitors rather than you.  And why some firms will never buy (unless you talk to them in a particular way), but other ones will.

Supposing you found out that people who don’t buy from you generally believe that you only sell one line of products (which in fact you sell a multiplicity).  Or maybe they see you as dealing in good products and services, but that you are much more expensive than anyone else.

In either of those cases you would, I imagine, start running an email or postal campaign which countered such ideas.

My point here is simple: if you don’t know how people perceive you then you can’t write promotions which are geared to their perceptions.

But there is a second point here.  Most of us have our own views of our own companies – and we can very easily get to the point where we believe utterly in our own perception because our regular customers reinforce it.

However our regular customers are not the question here.  What we need to think about are the non-customers – because they are the ones who probably have a false perception.

Let me give one example of how a lack of research can totally mess up a campaign.

A company asked Hamilton House to promote its air conditioning units. 

They told us that their salesmen were reporting back that firms were generally impressed by their products, once the salesman had got an appointment to explain the product.

Our direct mail campaign based on this approach flopped totally.  Naturally we lost the account.

I was concerned about this failure, and so took it upon myself to do our own piece of research.  We asked 200 potential customers of this firm what they thought about air conditioning, and whether they had considered it.

What we found was that those firms without any air conditioning, tended to be utterly closed to the notion that it was something that they wanted.  Only those that had some form of air conditioning tended to be much more open to persuasion to put in more.

The point was that the salesmen never got into firms that were utterly negative about air conditioning – which is why they reported that they did well once they got into the firms.

It wasn’t that firms wouldn’t see the reps because they simply kept all reps out.  It was because they were utterly against air conditioning – something that our client had never found out.

In short, the advertising we had done was wrong – we should have researched which companies had air conditioning and which not, and written completely different promotions to each group.  Then the sales would have come in.

If you would like to talk about research, and how we do it, please do get in touch – I am always very happy to talk..  Call 01536 399 000 or email Sales@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood