Tony Attwood's Blog

A singularly bizarre campaign has just been launched which tells advertisers that through the simple expedient of sending the same email every week to the same people for a year sales will grow.    The company running the campaign claim that they find that they get an 80% increase in response rate through this ploy.

This goes against everything that I have discovered through 10 years or more of experimenting and sharing information with members of this news group.   Repeating emails tends to lead to one thing – requests to be removed from the list.

I suspect the 80% growth comes about because it is based on zero marketing before the experiment (the advert is unclear on this).

So if we assume that the company was selling 100 products a year through no advertising (purchases from past buyers) and now is selling 180 having been advertising, then there has been that growth of 80%.

But the cost could be that people have unsubscribed, (assuming of course that the company puts an unsub button in, as they are suppose to) or have set up message rules to block the company.

A certain suspicion also arises about the campaign in that the web site that enquirers are sent to has a page rank of zero, despite a registered start date of ten years ago.  That suggests that maybe the company had no sales at all – although one cannot really have an 80% increase on zero can one?  (My maths goes funny when it involves zeros and infinity.)

Anyway, there’s no proof and no evidence offered – but just in case you see the ad, I would urge extreme caution.  In all my experience, the best way to make email to work is to keep changing it.

Tony Attwood

Barely a week goes by without a new report emerging on the topic of when the best time is to send out an email.

Is there a day of the week, a time of day when you get the best response?

The whole argument is based around the notion that people do notice when an email comes in and that this influences their response.

If I take myself as a sample of one, yes I am a little more trigger happy on a Monday morning, as I tend to have emails in the in-box which have arrived since I closed the machine down at 5pm on Friday.  And since most of my customers don’t write to me over the weekend, I have the feeling that what is in the in-box is rubbish.

But for the rest of the week, I think I take everything as equal.  I know my Australian clients are liable to write overnight (from my perspective in the UK).  And I know that for reasons that have never become clear to me, some of our clients work until 7 in the evening – or even later.

So I am really not sure that timing of incoming emails makes a difference to me at work.

As for my home email, if I wake up early I do sometimes take a peek before I go to work.  Otherwise I generally have a look when I get home in the evening.

But despite my survey of one, we have retained in this office a view that Friday afternoon is no good for emailing.   But by a curious anomaly in the way we work, (i.e. a cock up) we have actually been advertising products that a different department of Hamilton House has available to sell on Friday afternoon (because these adverts have been held back while we have sent out our clients adverts through the week).

And would you believe it, we’ve been getting terrific sales.

So, what do we conclude?   Quite probably that unless you have clear evidence that emails sent out at a particular time to a particular audience do better or worse than others, don’t follow guidance as to when is the best time.

Not least because everyone else will be following that guidance, and so that time (whenever it is) will start to become the moment everyone sends out emails.

Hamilton House can distribute your emails for you, and also has available a state of the art program for transmitting emails, if you want to do it yourself.  Do give us a call if you want to know more.

Experimentation.

Unfortunately for many companies the reverse seems to be the case – with firms saying, “let’s do the same as before” when advertising isn’t working.  But doing the same as before generally doesn’t work – whether it is in difficult times or not.

Of course if you are in one of those companies that does find that doing the same as before in terms of marketing really does make it all happen for you, that’s fine – you don’t need Hamilton House.

But if not, then experimentation is the key.

The great thing about direct mail and email marketing is that it is possible to experiment without causing any problems.  You can send out a modest number of mail shots or emails and if the advertising doesn’t work, then fine, you try something else.

Indeed if you have your own list of potential customers and a system set up to ensure that your list is not blocked by recipients, then experimental marketing through email can be a very modestly priced approach.

If you would like to discuss ways of building a list of potential clients, of running your own transmission software, or of sending emails through HHM, or indeed if you want to talk about the experiments we’ve undertaken which have produced great results, please do get in touch.

01536 399 013.

Tony Attwood

Until a couple of weeks ago I would have said no, you can’t get £100,000 worth of trade out of a single email promotion, but now we’ve done it.

A promotion of around 7000 emails – some directed to the organisation in general, some to the individual email address of the person most likely to be interested – has generated a turnover of in excess of £100,000 for our client.

Of course it would be lovely if I could say that we can do this all the time – and I have to be honest and say we don’t get this level of success all the time.

But what we can say is that we are still pushing the response rates of email up, through exploring the way in which emails are written.  I can also add that every week that goes by teaches us something new about email marketing and the way in which emails need to be written to push response rates up.

The simple answer to the question of how to write emails that work really well, is through the production of emails that are conversational and unusual, rather than ones that simply announce what is avaialble.

Which raises the question – why isn’t everyone doing it, when it is that successful?

It is an interesting point.  Despite the fact that there is no evidence that I know of in which a single short-run email can actually do any harm to a company, there remains a feeling that “we couldn’t say that” or “that’s not really us”, and it is this feeling that pushes companies back into the world of traditional announcement advertising.

If you would like to explore how this conversational approach to advertising could work for you, in your industry, do give me a call on 01536 399 013.  No obligation and no charge of course – but I do think you will find it beneficial to take a look at the issue.

Tony Attwood

In reality there’s not much of an answer to this question, except to say “it depends”.

Each approach has its own benefits, and in most campaigns both have a place, and each have a similar approach in some ways.

In an email campaign the email itself is the way of grabbing attention, of slowing the reader down, and getting the reader excited.  You can sell directly through an email, but most of the time the email campaign has a link to a web site, which is where all the details of the product are on display, generally along with an ordering system.

The equivalent in direct mail is the sales letter (grabbing attention, slowing the reader down, stopping the reader throwing the package in the bin etc) and the catalogue or brochure which has the full details of the product.

So both work particularly well in a two part approach: the grab-attention first item (email or sales letter) and the in-depth selling item (web site or catalogue/brochure).  If you don’t have a web site, or if your web site is not geared up for selling, then generally speaking, email won’t work particularly well for you.  (Of course that’s not an absolute rule – just a general point).

Obviously the availability of the list is important too – if your email list cost you 1p per address four years ago, it is not likely to work very well.  But then the same applies to a postal list.   There are also other technical points to consider – such as the way in which your emails are sent out, your ability to manage the bounces and so on.  Both approaches require a professional delivery of the message.  Don’t assume that you can use Outlook or a similar program to send out a lot of email messages.

Overall I would always recommend that you test your promotions first of all, sending out maybe 1000 emails of a few hundred direct mail shots, just to see what sort of response you get.  (The exact number you trial to depends very much on the percentage response rate you need in order to make a profit.  As a rule of thumb if you are looking for a 3% response rate on a direct mail shot, you can get a fair indication of how well things are going by doing a random trial of just 200 addresses.  If you need a 2% response rate to make a profit, you might want to mail 300 addresses.   In both cases getting six replies will meet your target.  There’s nothing magical about six, but it does mean that you can get enough to make a fair measurement.   If you are using email and would make a profit at a response rate of 1 in a 1000, I would say you really need to send out about 5000 to be sure that you are meeting that success rate.)

Tracking the result of the email is as easy as tracking direct mail – since we can always measure how many people click through from the email to the web site, and then from there how many people place an order on line, or through your phone line (unless the product is high priced, people tend not to order in any way other than on line or on the phone, having seen a product on the internet).

So my recommendation tends to be: do an email trial, and then do a direct mail trial.  Direct mail costs much more to do, but can bring in much higher results.  Email is cheaper, but the success rate is much lower, and for many firms it is not possible to  build a business on the back of email, unless you have a huge list of potential customers.

If you would like to discuss any of these issues, please do give me a call on 01536 399 013.  If you would like to look at some of the activities Hamilton House gets involved in, there’s details on http://www.velocity.ac/business.html

Tony Attwood