Last week I was kindly invited by the UK Spa and Wellness Conference to give a talk on raising response rates in direct marketing.  Always something of a challenge, not least because this is what I talk to our clients about each day.  How does one reduce the work one does all the time into a 50 minute lecture?

In the end I came up with ten points that seemed to me to cover the whole ground.  Get these ten points right, I argued, and you will effectively double your response rate.   Here’s a short summary.

First off – the functional work.

1. Build two mailing lists – one of your customers and one of potential customers.  In each case add in not just the postal address but also the email address.   There are many ways of obtaining this information, but it is a fact that a large number of companies don’t have such lists – or at least don’t keep them fully up to date.

1. Get the technology.   By this I mean make sure that you have a way of sending out bulk mail and bulk email on a regular basis.   You can buy the software and hardware in yourself – but for most companies the most effective way forwards is to bring in another company to do it.  If you don’t have this sorted, we’ll be pleased to help.

Next we come onto deciding how one is going to sell

1. Choose the approach.   There are in fact five ways of selling (by price, by benefit, by asking an interesting question, by emotional appeal and through humour).   Sadly most firms ignore all five and instead try and sell by making announcements, simply talking about the product, rather than selling it.  You need to choose one approach and use that.

1. Choose one item to highlight.  Most of us have lots of products or services to sell but in each email or sales letter you should choose one item and stick to that.  Don’t be tempted to try and tell the reader you have lots of other things (if you are enclosing or linking to a catalogue they’ll see that quickly enough).

After that it is time to grab attention and hold attention.

1. Write an amazing headline and a stunning PS or final sentence.   These are the two things that are read more than anything else.  And yet most emails and postal direct mail campaigns don’t have headlines – or a PS or great sign off.   You must grab attention at the very start and you must acknowledge that readers skim to the end– they don’t read it all.

1. Now write your email or sales letter as a conversation.  Don’t shout at the reader by announcing 50% discounts with lots of exclamation marks.  Write to the reader as if you were having a friendly chat.

1. In considering your layout and design make sure you use the findings of the psychology of perception, which tells you exactly where the eye goes, where to put (and not put) pictures, and what colours to use.

Finally you roll out your advert…

1. You’ve done the email or the covering letter, so you now need the blog, the brochure and the web site.  These are the places where you do the selling and maintain the interest.  The email and the sales letter have gained attention – now you know the reader is reading.

1. Keep up the pressure.  Write to your customer or potential customer each week with an email or a postal campaign.  Some will say, “They will go mad if I write each week” but the fact is they won’t if you keep it lively and exciting – and I can prove it!

1. Do a review.  Look at your promotion as if you were a potential customer of your company and ask, “why should I buy this?” and “why should I buy this from this company.”  If the answer does not leap out and slap you in the face, something is missing.  Go back and revise.

I hope that quick summary helps.  I’ll try and come back to certain points in the future – but if you want to debate any specific issues, please do give me a call on 01536 399 013 – or alternatively, send a copy of your latest advert to Tony@hamilton-house.com and I’ll give you a call and tell you my answer to those two questions.

Between 2002 and 2005 I wrote a series of short marketing pieces centred on a mythical public house, The Toppled Bollard.  Even now, five years after the last story in the series appeared, barely a week slips by without some kind soul phoning the company and saying how much he/she had enjoyed the Bollard stories.

I finally drew a veil over the Bollard in 2005 simply because I felt the tales might get stale, and I wanted to try out other ideas.  But it has always been in my mind that it ought to be possible to take the genre of the sales letter as a story a stage further.  Not more Toppled Bollard, but the next development in the idea.

Hence the story of the of the marketing agency Badely Darby Didcot, whose staff tend to head for the local public house, at the end of each working day.   This is the first episode.  Please don’t worry that the story will take over this news service – it won’t, it will have its own web site etc etc.  But it is an example of how I feel that through experimentation one can start to find new ways of putting across one’s message – just as HHM did with the Toppled Bollard series.

(Incidentally some of the old Toppled Bollard stories are appearing on www.blog.toppled.info)

Tony Attwood

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The story of Badely Darby Didcot and the Headless Monk.

Quite why a cross section of staff from the marketing agency Badely Darby Didcot (or BadAd as we are commonly known) started meeting at the Headless Monk after work each day is lost in the mists of my selective (not to say myopic) memory, but it must be something to do with the fact that as a public house the “Decap” (as it is known among its regulars – which is basically us) has two overwhelming advantages.  First, it’s always empty except when there is a football match in the vicinity, and second it’s opposite the office.

Indeed when I joined the firm several millennia ago it was already called Meeting Room 4.  But its popularity has since declined, and now it is the after-work refuge of the hard core regulars, the powerhouse of the old firm.  We keep up the traditions, for if we don’t who will?

Arkwright from Databases usually gets in first and despite his reputation as a no-nonsense Yorkshireman with short arms and deep pockets, his round is always bought afore the rest of us troop in.  Of course we never actually see him pay for the round, nor do we measure of alcoholic content, but with knuckles like his, no one is going to argue.

Ultimately we catch him up, we unwind, we sip our drinks, and we talk shop.   And yesterday somehow we got on to subliminal advertising.  Worse, for reasons that I now can no longer recall I proclaimed that subliminality worked, but Ms Jones (whose first name I really ought to know by now since  she’s been with us three years) disagreed.

Actually she disagreed twice – once as to whether subliminal advertising worked at all, and once as to whether subliminality is actually a word.  Mind you, Ms Jones always disagrees with me.  I don’t think she means to, it is just a sort of knee-jerk reaction.  I speak, she says the opposite.  Just one of those things.  Annoying, true, but not as bad as my ex-wife who always left the room when I spoke.  But that’s another matter.

Ms Jones heads up the design team and is the fount (or is that font?) of all knowledge on the psychology of perception – the cornerstone of our agency’s creative output (at least according to Ms Jones).  In a voice profound with definity she said that none of the many experiments involving subliminal ads had ever shown any positive results.  “Money, drain, down,” she said.  She speaks like that.

“What’s subliminal when he’s got his hat on?” asked Arkwright, whose attention, I felt, must have been slipping somewhat.  Still I suppose manipulating addresses all day long does that to the intellect.   I was about to provide a run down when William Cardigan-Cardigan, our young lad from customer relations, jumped in ahead, as these cocky young fella-me-lads are apt to do.

“It’s where you slip an unseen message on the screen for a fraction of a second,” he pronounced.  “The brain picks it up but your conscious mind doesn’t know its there.  The message says, ‘Must eat popcorn’ so you rush out and buy a huge box of popcorn.  They’ve done it in the movies, on TV, on the radio, on pop records.”

“Isn’t it illegal?” said Arkwright, hitting the nub.

Louie interjected, anxious as always to be a part of the show.  “Rule 2.12 Ofcom Broadcasting Code and rule 5.4.5 BCAP TV Code.  Only illegal on radio and TV.”

I wonder where she gets all this from – I mean being our resident IT geek is one thing, but does she really have to know all this legislative stuff too?  Come to that does she really have to wear hobnail boots to work, and pretentiously drop the letter “s” from her name to make her name sound like that old rock song by the Kingsmen?  I mean (I thought, as I got in my round) what is the point of retaining all this esoteric nonsense in the head?

“Anyway, it doesn’t work,” said Ms Jones, returning to the fray as Mr Doberman, the publican, graciously attended to our table in case Louie needed help sipping her drink.  (I have been watching the way Mr Doberman looks at Louie each evening. It is not a pretty sight.)

“Except I have the evidence,” I said.  “As Ms Jones’ team always tell us,” (I gave her my best smile hoping she would come out with, “please call me Delilah,” or whatever her name was, but she gave nothing away), “the reader only reads the first four words of each paragraph.     But I believe that the right-brain scans the rest of the paragraph holistically and takes in the full meaning – and registers it as true, while the left-brain is occupied elsewhere.”

Arkwright rumbled – a sure sign that he was going to speak.  “So if you say, ‘It’s time for a drink,’ in the opening of a paragraph in an email, then the reader just reads that but doesn’t take any notice of it, because it is the cynical left-brain working.” (He made the statement while seemingly simultaneously knocking back half of his pint of Heavy. How does he do that?)   “But if the rest of the sentence talks about the desirability of eating crisps and peanuts every day, that’s all grabbed by the right-brain, and it affects behaviour?”

“Dead on the button,” I said.

“If that’s true, we could make a fortune,” said William C-C.

“If that’s true, I’ll eat my hat,” said Ms Jones.

William offered to cut the nifty flat cap she’d been sporting this past week into one inch portions,  on the grounds that the smaller bits would  be easier to chew, but she didn’t rise to the provocation.

After that it was made clear that the rest of the ensemble would now demand proof of my assertion – or else would have me buying double rounds for the next month.

And thus as the evening wound up and we prepared for our individual homes (“I’ve had a wonderful evening . . . but this wasn’t it,” said Arkwright citing his customary farewell), Ms Jones gave me a  warning look.   “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” she said, and deeply puzzled I watched her make her way to the car park.   I mean, I can imagine her quoting the odd Alfred Lord T. “Half a league onward,” rot, but when had she ever read the poet Pope?

It makes you think.

(The story will continue on the www.BadAd.co.uk web site in the coming days, weeks, months…)

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.