Tony Attwood's Blog

For many years Hamilton House used a direct sales technique which was, I think, unique.  If it wasn’t unique, it was certainly very unusual.

The idea was to write a nonsensical cover letter, based on a recurring theme – mostly centred on a mythical public house supposed near our offices.

The only selling point turned up in the PS, and in the accompanying literature that went out with the sales letter.

As a selling approach it was incredibly successful, and even now, four or five years since the last “Toppled Bollard” letter went out we get phone calls from people who remember them.  Indeed many people who claim never to read “junk mail” still quote the name of the pub to me.  Naturally, in return I mention that they never read direct mail and yet can tell me, all these years later, the name of a mythical pub that only ever got a mention in my sales letters.

The letter which had the British comedian Stanley Unwin (who resided in Northamptonshire where our offices are based) visiting the Toppled Bollard to give a lecture on Elvis Presley, was one of the most successful we ever did.

I am slowly putting up some of the old Bollard stories on the internet, as HHM prepares to launch a new and quite different set of stories.

The Unwin story is now up on the site at http://www.blog.toppled.info/archives/105

Tony Attwood

When there are government cuts in the market in which you operate, there is always the temptation to look for an alternative market.

This time around in the expansion/cut cycle there seems to be only one market that looks as if it might remain buoyant, and that is schools.   Not, I hasten to emphasise, universities, which appear to have suffered very heavy cuts, but schools.

To show what I mean about schools I am copying in at the foot of this piece an article that my office sent to school heads and deputy heads who subscribe to the school equivalent of this newsletter.  It gives the basics on what happened to school budgets in the Chancellor’s recent statement.

But the question is, is it really viable to move from selling to consumers and business, over to selling to schools?

The answer is undoubtedly yes, and we have helped many companies do this – but it has to be done with care and understanding.

The problem with selling to schools is that all of us have been to school, and have memories of schools.  But in the last 15 years schools have been utterly transformed, their budgets have increased 50%, and they have become much more sophisticated in their purchasing.  So our memories of how schools work may not only be misleading because they are the memories from the point of view of a teenager, but also because schools have changed greatly in recent years.

But the simple fact is that they do, of course, buy carpets, computers, office equipment, signs, telephones, filing cabinets, books, pens, CCTV equipment, software, services to make sure the water system does not have legionnaires disease and the walls don’t contain asbestos, and everything else you might think of.

However they have their own language, and their own way of doing business.

If you are interested in contemplating this market, I’m always very happy to talk.  You might like to have a look also at www.educationmarketing.org.uk and you might like to subscribe to our education news service (just email education-marketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com)

Here’s the article that schools received from HHM after the chancellor’s statement…

Schools in England are to get a real-terms increase in funding, as a result of the funding review.  The funding until next April has already been fixed of course, and the government has made it clear that unspent money will be clawed back from schools where, on occasion in the past, schools have been given the benefit of the doubt over money held back.

But leaving that single issue aside, the schools budget will rise from £35bn to £39bn for the next four years while universities in England will face a 40% cut to their teaching budgets and colleges a 25% cut.

Educational Maintenance Allowances – paid to encourage 16-to-18 year-olds to stay in education – are being scrapped.

The teaching budget for England’s universities will fall from £7.1bn to £4.2bn per year, and the cuts will fall largely on the humanities because the government had already promised to protect science, technology and maths.

Other Department for Education cuts include areas such as youth services, early years, teenage pregnancy services and drugs awareness services allowing the DfE to save 3% in real terms by 2014-15.  As expected the abolition of the Building Schools for the Future programme has been confirmed, although officials at the Department are saying the government will rebuild or refurbish over 600 schools from the BSF and Academies programme.

The Sure Start scheme, which provides centres and services to families of young children, will continue and will be protected “in cash terms”.

Funds given to councils for schools will continue to be ring-fenced and this “relative protection” will be passed on to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Chancellor also announced there would be “personalised budgets” for “special educational needs” although details were not given.  He also announced a big increase in apprenticeships – a rise of 50% on previous government’s target, creating 75,000 new apprenticeships a year by the end of the review period, he said.

The cuts to further education include the axing of the “Train to Gain” programme, under which at least a million employees have received training to develop their workplace skills.

Adult learners aged over 25 who have never passed a GCSE or equivalent will no longer be able to study for these qualifications free of charge, and students aged 24 and over studying for A-level equivalents will also have to pay fees.

Tony Attwood

01536 399 013

Getting on for three years ago I started an experiment in writing a blog.   It started from scratch in a completely new field – nothing to do with direct mail, email marketing and all the things I do in my business life.  I just wanted to see what could be achieved.

During the past week I’ve had three different high profile companies offering me money to have their product mentioned within an article on the site.  The income is not huge – a few hundred dollars – but it is another small indicator that suggests that the world of blogs is constantly moving in a direction of its own.  In July this year the number of hits per month went over 300,000 for the first time.

Of course when it comes to web sites what we are all used to seeing are banner adverts, but the truth is that most sites that take such adverts find that the adverts themselves don’t bring in much money.

But product placement seems to be growing, and is a much more effective approach.  One company we trade simply emails us each week with a list of links that they have to individual words on my blog.  If I agree, they do all the technical stuff, and simply add the sum (just £20 each time).  All I have to do is click a button saying yes, that word can be linked to their client’s site.

As I said, not huge money, but it is growing – and the site is now earning a decent sum from advertising.  In addition it earns some money from product sale (I wrote a book relating to the site) and there is a real sense that this whole business is growing.

If you don’t have a blog, and would like to see another very contrasting blog looks like, try these:

www.blog.toppled.info

www.blog.emiratesstadium.info

They could not be more different, and while I would say that with the former, a glance at one article will give you a clear indication what it is all about, with the latter (which is the original blog I set up, just to find out how it can be done) the articles are so varied, (and we have so many guest writers now) that you might want to skim through a couple.

If you would like to set up a blog for the first time http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs might help.  If you are already at this stage and want to go further forward, just let me know the details of your blog, I’ll have a look, and see if I can offer any suggestions.

Tony

It might seem a long way away, but it is worth noting that next year the Advertising Standards Authority expands its remit and starts to cover what it calls “advertisers’ own marketing communications in online space under the advertisers’ control.”

What this means is that if you call yourself the “largest supplier of x in the UK” online – then at the moment no one can do much about it if that advert appears on your own site.  But from 1 March next year, they can report you to the ASA.

Now the ASA does not issue fines or anything like that, but they can make life a bit more difficult for you, and it is worth staying on the right side of their regulations if you can.

The simplest regulation of all to remember is, “if you claim it, you ought to be able to prove it”.   That isn’t their language, it is mine, and it is not 100% reliable as a statement, but it more or less works for me when I write adverts for companies.

If you have any questions about the Advertising Standards Authority they are quite good at answering questions – but if you want to try something out on me, by all means do.  01536 399 013.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House is launching a series of shared email campaigns.  For the opening campaigns the charge is £99 to reach anything from 10,000 to 30,000 teachers, three times.

In essence the programme works like this.

A subject or topic area is selected (for example Secondary School Science, Primary management, Special needs etc etc).

Then up to a maximum of seven subject areas within that topic are selected. So, if we were thinking about secondary music we might list as the seven topics:

Then we take one company to go into each section.  Their details are written up as

The email include the seven entries in that format then goes to between 10,000 and 30,000 relevant teachers (depending on the subject) three times in the coming months, as well as being listed on our web site, and on UK Education News.  The point is that there is only one software company, one mobile recording studio, etc etc in each email.   And those headings are not set.  If you wanted another heading we could drop one of the headings we have, and put yours in.

The price of £99 is an introductory price for any companies that are interested in joining in the first shared email campaigns.   If you are interested please either call me on 01536 399 013 or alternatively email Tony@hamilton-house.com with details of the subject area or topic you are interested in.

That won’t mean you are committed, but it will help me decide which topics and subject areas should be dealt with first.

Tony Attwood

Our first shared email programme is designed for school theatre companies (both resident and travelling) and if you are running such a company and have not received an email from us on this subject, please do let me know and I’ll forward you the details.

I am still bemused by the number of companies with whom I speak who don’t have a list of the email addresses of all the firms that have dealt with them or asked for a quote in the past year.

I’m even more bemused when, having that part of the conversation we seem to move on to talking about direct mail as the only alternative.  There’s no email list, so drop the subject, let’s talk direct mail.

Direct mail is always a good thing to do if you have a list of recent customers and firms you have quoted, and I would never stop anyone doing such a promotion.  But just because no one has ever added email addresses to a list of potential clients in the past, it doesn’t mean it can’t start now.

Of course I am always willing to admit that the fact that I don’t convince people of the need to go out and add the email addresses is probably down to my inability as a salesman, but I must admit I do find it frustrating.

It is quite easy to research 100 email addresses from past customers in a day – in fact you can do many more.  And if you don’t want to do this you can always go out and get an outside firm to do it for you.   And the fact is, once you have got that list, you can email these people with offers, background, information, news…

But in thinking this through I have begun to wonder if maybe the problem is not so much the getting of the list that is the issue, but what to say to people when you mail them.

If you are a subscriber to Direct Mail Secrets (the daily news service on direct marketing) you may have noticed, I do slip in adverts for Hamilton House from time to time, alongside announcements and ideas related to direct marketing.   The same mix works for most companies.

If you would like to talk about how you could transform your direct mail list into a list that you can email and direct mail, do give me a call on 01536 399 000.  But even if you don’t want to do business with HHM, I would still recommend you do it, if it has not been done yet.

And if you are not a subscriber to DMS you can join by sending an email to direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com – you will get an email back from Yahoo – just click reply and then you are in.  You get one email a day four or five days a week, and you can leave at any time.

Tony Attwood

The trouble is that pictures can distract the reader as much as add to the reader’s interest.  The brain takes much longer to decode and understand a picture than it does to decode and understand a headline sentence, and thus there is always the temptation to reject an email that is full of pictures.

But that is not to say logos and pictures cannot be used at all – and a well-chosen picture at the top of an email, separated from the text can work well.

First an email in plain text: http://www.emails.gs/Plainadvert.html This is ok, but in the end does look a little dull

Second, an email with a border and a logo adds a lot to the look and feel, without distracting in any way.  There’s an example here…

http://www.emails.gs/HHMlogosample.html

Third, one can add a picture and a little more design to get what is a more attractive approach that stands out, but again which does not make the reader just hit the delete button.

http://www.emails.gs/FandBsample.html

All of these approaches are available with Hamilton House when you email schools through our services.  You can of course submit your own design in HTML or you can submit the text as a Word document and the picture separately and we’ll set up the advert for you.

Of course you will see millions of email ads that break the rules about clarity and not overloading the piece with images, and the fact that there are so many adverts that go out with lots of images all over the page is one explanation as to why some people are getting low response rates in email.

In fact, the rule is simple.  Get the text right and get the design right, and your response rate can often double or treble or more.

There’s more about the technical bits and pieces on http://www.emails.gs/formats.html or do call us on 01536 399 000 and we’ll be pleased to talk the options through.

Tony