Tony Attwood's Blog

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

For most of us, most of the time, everything in marketing runs smoothly, but occasionally things don’t.

When the marketing doesn’t go well it is often because companies feel they are not getting any increase in sales, and (if they are clients of ours) they feel our techniques don’t bring about the upturn they wanted.  Alternatively if this is a new company, what they find is that the firm is simply not taking off.

So the question is, what to do when you have tried several different approaches and none of them work?  Sadly for many firms the temptation is to reign in the marketing and do little or nothing.

In one way this can appear to be a workable solution, especially if you have products that lead to repeat business.  You cut your marketing costs and business still comes along and move back into profit.

Unfortunately that cannot last forever because old customers drift away, especially if you have a rival in the market place who is out seeking to take your customers away from you.  You are not advertising, he/she is, and so the drift gets worse.

Fortunately there is another solution, and that involves changing the business model.  Let me give a couple of examples.

First you can put prices up dramatically. This may seem counter intuitive, but within our own publishing company we’ve done this a couple of times and greatly increased profits each time.  Just because the competition are selling something similar at a lower price, you don’t have to be sucked into their price arena.

Second you can put the price down. You might have feelings about damaging the value of the overall product if you do this, but in that case, just sell a rebranded part of the product (see my note on inventing a new company below).  After all if you have 100 products sitting in your warehouse that will not sell at £500 then they are worth nothing.  Sell them at £200 each and at least you have some income.

Third you can change the selling model. If you are selling your products on a subscription so that people have to buy the whole series, then look at selling them individually.  If they are paying monthly consider having them pay annually or weekly.

Last, create a new company and rebrand. This might sound bizarre, but we’ve done it ourselves and we have found it a very successful approach.   Let’s imagine you have a £500 product and you want to experiment at selling it for £100, but you don’t want anyone to realise that this is the same product as is being sold for £500.

First, you get a new web site at a new address, open a new account with the bank (they still take our money even if they won’t lend any), and add a new phone line (the cost is very low) and email address (ditto).   Build the simple web site, rebrand the product, sell it in a different way.  Maybe the £100 version doesn’t have technical support or is missing a few extra bits and pieces in the £500 version.   Now you are appealing to two different markets without it looking as if you are cutting prices.  (If all this sounds complex, it isn’t – we’ve done it for some of our Velocity clients and it takes about two weeks).

Here’s one example of these processes in practice.  We sell a course for £800.  For those who don’t want to pay that much we have a reduced part of the course for £250.   And for those who don’t want a course at all, we have a couple of books which are taken from the course, which sell at £24.95.   Are we reducing the value of the course (in that the people who buy the books might have come on the course).  Maybe – but we think there are many people who simply won’t do the course, so better to sell them something than nothing.

Put like that, it sounds simple, but it is not always so easy to see from inside one’s own business.

If you would like to explore this approach, do give myself or my colleagues a call on 01536 399 000.  There’s also the Velocity programme which incorporates techniques like this.  Details are on www.velocity.ac

If you are interested in advertising techniques you might enjoy our Creative Direct news group (CreativeDirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com ) and the blog that runs with it www.goodad.co.uk

Tony Attwood

Marketing Vox has reported that famous people with big followings on Twitter recently promoted a book, but as a result only produced a handful of sales.

Between them, two of these three people had nearly 3 million followers and got only one sale, but the third with under 5000 followers got more (although not many).  Indeed the report from Nieman Journalism Labs says that when actress Alyssa Milano (1.2 million followers) tweeted about the book sales actually went down!

But according to Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School Faculty of Arts and Sciences spreading a conversation is not the same as affecting it. “I’m not saying that Twitter is useless but I think that the ability of Twitter to disseminate information is different than its ability to influence behaviour.”

It seems the point about Twitter is not the high number of followers, but instead their ability to get their followers to act.

And your ability to make your Twitter followers act relates to the way the articles on Twitter, and the links that lead to other articles, are written.   In essence once again it is all down to the copy.

You can follow Hamilton House on Twitter @HHMailings and there’s the daily news feed that you can sign up to free by emailing direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Tony Attwood

Adtracking is a way of finding out who has been looking at your advert.  Before the internet it involved asking people if they remembered an advert or product.  These days through the use of digital technology it can involve seeing who has actually visited a web site and what they did there.

The most obvious way of doing this is to send out a load of emails with a link to the web site.  The technology then allows you to see which of those email addresses resulted in a click to the web site.

This information can be used to give you really informative comparative counts (advert A got 5% click throughs, advert B got 14%).  That of course is a perfectly legitimate approach.

But it can also be used to capture the individual email addresses that have resulted in a click through.   In a further sophistication you can then target those addresses in relation to what each person bought.

Again, most of us have done this for years with simple databases.  You record who bought what on a database, and send them adverts appropriate to that purchase.  Simple, obvious, direct marketing.

From the earliest days of direct mail, lists were made available of people who had bought x so that you could sell them y.   And way back in those dark distant days we all learned that you get a much higher response rate if you just write a regular letter to the person, rather than beginning, “I see that you recently bought a subscription to Pumpkin Monthly and wondered if you would like also to subscribe to Apple Eaters News.”  If you own both publications you might just get away with it, but otherwise, avoid it like the plague.

The fact is people in all walks of life don’t like the notion that you know their secrets – even if their secrets are nothing to be ashamed of.

So it is not surprising that in a Gallup Poll 67% of adults in the USA said they did not believe advertisers should be allowed to match ads to their specific interests based on websites they have visited.

61% actually said that these methods are not justified even if they help keep the internet free, due to the invasion of privacy.

This figure should not be confused with another one that is sometimes quoted – that 47% of respondents said that having advertisers they choose track their reading and buying on line was ok.

The key point here is “choose”.    If you have a hobby or interest, and you buy a lot from an organisation that you really trust, then you might well allow this, so they can point out to you particular products that might be of interest.

For example, I buy a lot of audio books for listening to in the car.   99.999% of all new audio book releases are of no interest to me, but having someone track what I buy, and then tip me off that there is a new Le Carre audio book out, or a new edition of Bleak Expectations available from the BBC, is great.   It saves me hours of searching.   But that is my choice, no one else’s.

In short, on line tracking is not illegal, so everyone can do it, but what you absolutely must not do is let the customer or potential customer know you are doing it.

And yet I regularly get emails that begin, “I see that you have been on our web site today…”

Believe me that is an absolute killer.   Almost anything that suggests to a reader that you are tracking their private lives on the internet will destroy a sale.

Of course you can do it the Amazon way, with their amusing, “People who bought x also bought y”, first because when it gets it wrong it is hilarious (“We’ve noticed that people who bought ‘The quantum mechanics of retrograde asteroids: a review” also bought “Thomas the Tank Engine’s Christmas Treat”) and second because it is that supplier writing to you about something you know he/she/it knows.

Amazon knows it has sold me a book on retrograde planets, so no confidence is broken.  Of course they know – they posted it to me and banked my money.   What I don’t want to think about is the fact that they or anyone else knows about my browsing or my private life.

You might track, and you might use the information.   But for goodness sake – never tell your audience that you are doing it.

If you would like to know more about tracking, and how Hamilton House can do it, and how we can construct follow up emails that don’t alarm and put off your readers, please do give us a call on 01536 399 000, or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

This article originally appeared on the Direct Mail Secrets news group.   You can subscribe to DMS by emailing direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and then clicking on the reply to confirm.