Tony Attwood's Blog

I have been reporting for some time that direct mail volumes have declined dramatically in the past five years, and that as a result the opportunities for getting enhanced response rates have risen greatly.

Now the news comes that TNT and Royal Mail (the two huge rivals in the postal service) are looking to work together on some marketing ideas in order to get volumes back up.

My own view (which of course counts for nothing when one is considering giants like Royal Mail) is that the one thing that really boosts sales is getting the language right. Conversational approaches to selling which deal informally with the topic in hand always seem to do particularly well.

In writing this I am reminded of an issue that arose four or five years ago, when I bought a copy of the DMA’s book of award winning direct mail. About 30% of the pieces that were included were funny. And yet only about 1% of all direct mail that goes out is funny.

Humour is one of those areas that works very well for me, and yet hardly anyone goes for it. I wonder if the new TNT/Royal Mail approach actually considers this, and starts encouraging us to be funnier in our writing.

Of course there’s nothing very amusing here – but you could always have a look at www.blog.toppled.info where some of the old Toppled Bollard stories are being (slowly) republished. They were generally good for a laugh.

If you would like to talk about conversational styles in direct mail, or indeed about the use of humour, or come to that any other approach, do give me a call or drop me an email.

Many promotions through direct mail and email are intended to get a sale there and then – and that is always important.

But there’s another element to marketing: making the advert memorable. The benefit of this is very clear – if the reader is interested, but for whatever reason does not respond there and then, very obviously there is no sale.

However if you can put something in the mind of the reader that makes him/her remember you for a while, then next time to write to that person you will already have started making the step towards a sale.

Making a piece memorable is achieved by a whole series of activities in the writing. Most obviously you have to make the email or direct mail different from other sales messages. If you pitch in the same way as your competitors or other firms that are promoting at the time, you won’t make much impact.

To give the most simple example, in the town near the village where I live there must be three or four pizza delivery shops, and another three or four Chinese take aways. They all stick notices through my door, and I find that I can’t distinguish any of them.

They are all brightly coloured, with stars containing discounts or special offers, and nothing is different. It is as if they go to a designer or printer who says “this is what pizza delivery companies do” and that’s what they get.

In my view you need to say different things. (Looking different is ok, but does not have the impact of saying different things).

The least used approaches in direct mail and email are

• Approaching the subject with some humour
• Approaching the subject with an interesting open question that is debate through the piece
• Approaching the subject through an emotional appeal.

There’s an example on http://www.goodad.co.uk/?p=4, and there is a series of eccentric sales letters on www.blog.toppled.info Finally there is an example of a sales letter along with an explanation of how it was written on http://www.solo.ac/example1.html

Hope you find some of that helpful. If you want to talk any of this through, give me a call on 01536 399 013

This school term we each have more choice in terms of media in terms of selling to schools, than ever before. There is so much choice in fact that even an attempt to boil everything down to the basics is difficult, but here’s the start of a rough attempt…

In this email I take the two services (one postal and one email) I would always start my campaign with.

Solo mailing:

The most expensive, but also the most responsive approach. Getting 2% or 3% sales off the page is not unknown for products up to £50.

So the calculation is simple – the cost of a solo mailing is about £450 per 1000 schools. And we have repeatedly found that it is possible you might get 20 or 30 replies to a well-written promotion sent to 1000 schools. Thus the question is, would those 20 to 30 sales make a profit for you if the promotion had cost you £450? If yes, it is worth a trial.

Therefore you might get to try 300 schools (cost around £140) and see if you get the replies you need. If yes, you can go on and mail the rest. If not, yes you have made a loss, but not a huge loss.

Solo mailings have the benefit also that they are incredibly flexible – you can choose all the schools with 15 year olds, or the private schools in the UK, or the primary schools with over 200 pupils, or the schools in certain post codes – or even the schools that don’t reply to emails.

Personal email list

The most expensive email approach, but again the most responsive. If you are thinking of emailing, I would always suggest you start here, because it is the one of the most responsive types of list available. If you can’t get sales here, then you certainly won’t with any of the lower priced email services.

A personal email campaign costs £180 per thousand, and response rates in terms of actual sales can be 1% to 2%, so again that calculation can be made. If you spend £180 and get 20 replies, is that profitable for you?

Personal email campaigns can also be used to get the reader to click through to your web site, which is very helpful indeed if you have a site that really does sell for you.

Personal email lists are extensive for secondary schools, where lists exist for most subjects. They are also developing for primary schools. The key point about them is that they are useful as a trial – as a way of getting your message right.

In other words, if you start by sending out your message to a generic list and you get a response rate of 0.3% (3 sales per 1000 emails) it is hard to know if the low response rate is due to the list you are using or the way in which the sales piece is written.

This doesn’t mean that generic email lists don’t have a value – they certainly do – but I believe it is worth trying out the message first in the personal lists, to ensure that you are getting the writing of the message right.

If you want to discuss these options (or indeed other options such as shared mailings, preference emails and so on) do give Hamilton House a call on 01536 399 000).

In the three months to August 2010, just under a quarter of people aged over 15 responded to one or more marketing channels. In 2009 the figure was 19.2%. The rise equates to 1.5 million more people.

The growth started just on a year ago and is on-going.

The most responsive areas (in order) are

direct mail, TV, newspaper/magazine ads, email, internet adverts.

There are many commentators who are saying that email is about to take a tumble, although I am not at all sure this is true. Steve Abbott, the British Population Survey’s marketing director is quoted as saying, “We haven’t yet got to the point where people are ignoring email marketing totally, but there could soon be a tipping point.”

However this ignores the way email is changing. The old “email everyone” approach has been consigned to the dustbin and instead firms are focussing on researching their own lists of potential customers and then emailing them on a weekly basis with information and conversation rather than with hard hitting ads. The companies that are seeing a decline are those who rigorously stick by the old approach.

Tony Attwood

Source:

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/3017858.article?cmpid=MWE01&cmptype=newsletter

From my observation, companies that are doing well in their marketing at the moment are diversifying the media that they use. For example, those who moved into email a few years ago are now adding direct mail back into the mix.

Companies that focussed on buying in lists of possible clients are now also working on building and developing lists of current clients, and those people who have shown some sort of interest in the past year or two.

The fact is that some firms will pass on emails sent generally to an address, but most won’t which is why many companies have abandoned buying in ready made email lists and are instead researching small, but exactly targeted lists that meet their own needs. While the cost is higher at the start, it pays for itself within a month or two.

Such an approach makes use of the fact that getting a list of companies is not very hard – you can buy a list of anything from abattoirs to x-ray machine makers. But primarily what you get are the postal addresses of these companies. So what you then have to do is to research the email addresses – and through that the names of the people you want. You then write to them, and email them, on regular occasions and through that work out the best way to communicate with them. The list becomes yours, and you can use it whenever you like.

Of course if the need is for promotion now, rather than promotion in two months time, that’s no good – but where you can plan, it is an approach that really does work. The route in summary is…

1. Buy in the direct mail list
2. Research the email addresses from that
3. Add the email addresses and names from your research to the database
4. Alternate between direct mail and email – always remembering to couch your promotions in the conversational style. Bullet points and announcements really don’t work any more.

If you would like to talk about any of these points, please do get in touch. You can call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000, or email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

Of all the topics I have touched on through the summer months, “sponsored conversation” is the one that has rung the most bells, and raised the most interest.

“The Sponsored Conversation” is a fancy title for having outsiders write your email, blog and news group copy for you, writing as if he/she is a member of your company, in an agreed style.

The benefit is clear – where the writer gets the style and approach right then not only do you get regular copy to place on your blog, and to send in your weekly email to past and potential customers, you also get it written in a style which really can attract readers, and which can draw them into your world.

The fact is that while all of us can write, writing text which appears as emails or web copy is a highly specialist art form which incorporates a fair amount of science. I would never say that most people can’t do it, but it can take years to become a really good practitioner of the art.

So the issue is not so much that if a non-expert writer writes your promotional emails and blogs, then you won’t do very well, it can be worse than that, in that the result can be a turn-off for the reader. And once turned off, readers rarely come back. I

In terms of the blog, the reader will not go to your site again. In terms of the email he/she will simply press the “unsubscribe” button, and you will have lost them.

The great test in this market is the notion of writing every week. Could you think of something original, exciting and interesting to say to your customers every week – something that will draw in readers to the blog, and keep subscribers on the email list? If you can, and if you are doing it and it is working, you don’t need an outsider undertaking a “sponsored conversation”.

But if you have tried and it doesn’t work – or if you are horrified by the notion of writing to customers and potential customers each week, and you believe that such an approach will just turn the reader off, then it might be well talking to others who have done it.

And here’s just a thought. My comments appear three or four times a week on this blog, and also appear on the Hamilton House email news service. We also produce one blog which (with a variety of writers) appears not three times a week, but three times a day – and its readership is still increasing (with a third of a million hits last month). It can be done.

If you would like to talk about sponsored conversations please do give me a call on 01536 399 013. If you would like to see how these emails appear as an emailed news service just send an email to direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. You will get a confirmation back – just reply to that, and you’ll be in. You can of course unsubscribe at any time.