Tony Attwood's Blog

I have become aware of late that sometimes when I ramble on about “landing pages” and “home pages” on web sites and in emails, not everyone is clear what I am talking about.

Obviously that’s my error – because my job is to write and speak in a way that those who are kind enough to spend a moment reading/listening know what I am going on about.

So, here’s a clarification both of the meanings and why I think these points are so important.

Home pages on web sites are the entry point – the basic page that says “hello” to anyone popping in. As such the pages is there to be used either to give a flavour of who or what you are (through fancy design or straight text) and to give links to what you do (either through headlines of latest offers or just links to your general sections).

If you want to see an example of a home page try www.hamilton-house.com – or indeed any other web page that is just the address with no extra bits on the end.

Landing pages are set up for a different reason – they relate totally to a specific campaign. So, for example, if I am advertising the mailing lists that we sell, I won’t link to that page above, but to a page about our mailing lists. Or to be more specific I might link to a page about business lists, or one about consumer lists, or one about education lists.

(Some people argue that they like to send readers always to the home page because then the reader can see all that the company does. But I can find no evidence anywhere to say that such an approach works. Rather, the more specific the landing page, the better it works).

So with a landing page the approach is:

The email or sales letter develops excitement and interest in the product or service and links to the landing page which gives the detail, the features and so on.

The landing page should then explain how an order might be placed, how the reader might get more information etc. It leads the reader along a seamless route.

One of the great benefits of having an individual landing page for an advert (whether the advert is via the post or via email) is that it enables you to see how effective the advert is at getting interest.

Thus if you send out an advert and have a unique landing page you can see how many people hit that unique landing page immediately after the advert is received. (If the advert is an email you do this through tracking the email, if the advert is postal, you measure the number of hits on the specific page).

Now if you are getting few people onto that landing page, you know your advert has failed. If you get lots of people onto the landing page, but no direct sales or phone calls, you know the landing page has failed. If you get hits on the landing page plus lots of enquiries but no sales, you know the problem is in the office.

Either way, you know exactly where the problem is, and you can put it right and get the sales going. It is in fact the ideal selling situation – either the advert works, or you know exactly where in the process the selling has broken down and you can put it right.

Home pages and landing pages are just part of the work we undertake with our Velocity campaigns for clients. If you would like to know more please call 01536 399 000 or take a look at www.velocity.ac

You can stay up to date with all our commentaries via Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

I have been arguing for some time that after five years or more of email being the dominant form of direct advertising, postal mail has made a come back.

But my comments have brought the response that postal direct mail might be ok for the big corporates, but small companies simply can’t afford to advertise through the post.

I disagree – but more to the point I think that such comments reveal that we have lost track of the noble art of testing a campaign.  Let me explain why.

In days gone by, few people went dashing straight into a postal campaign, mailing out 5000 or 10,000 leaflets or brochures at a time.   Mostly they preceded the mailing with a test run.  Then if the test run worked they would move on to the full mailing, secure in the knowledge that promotion would work.

Quite how large the test mailing had to be depended on the response rate required to make a profit.   There is a formula for this but whenever I have quoted it, it has generated more confusion than illumination, so I’ll leave that until the end – and instead give a couple of examples.

Let’s imagine you want to get a 3% response rate to a postal mailing.  With this you can mail out 200 letters at random, and if you get 6 replies you know you are on course for your 3% – so you can go ahead and mail the full list.

This experiment will cost you about £100 – when you come to mail out large numbers the cost will drop as you will get postal discounts so the profit will rise.

But you should not think of this as £100 written off.  Even if you don’t get your full 3% response rate you will probably get one or two sales, which while it won’t make you a profit will reduce the cost of the experiment.

Because of this, companies that are masters of postal direct mail tend to do regular experiments with their postal mailing, often sending out several variant promotions at the same time, to find the best one.  As we have shown in the past, changing just the last two lines of a sales letter can have a major effect on the response rate.

The only problem with this approach arises if you need just a tiny response rate to make a profit.   Imagine that you make so much out of each sale that you only need a 1% response rate – then your test run should be 600.   If you make money selling to just 1 firm in 300 then you need to mail 1800 in your test run.

If you would like to talk about postal mailings, mailing lists and the ways to write the copy, please do get in touch on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

PS: the formula for working out the number of items you need to send out in the trial is 6 divided by the percentage response rate required.  Six is taken as the base number, as it is just about the minimum number of replies that can be sought which will be statistically reliable for mailings of up to around 30,000.

Getting a campaign off the ground and reaching a pre-set target number of customers often involves a fair amount of experimentation.  And sometimes there isn’t much time to do the experimentation and then get the result wanted.

For example, you might know exactly what you want to sell, but there might be several different elements within the product or service that could be the lead message.

You might want to promote on the incredible value you offer.  Or maybe the variety and choice.  Or maybe the fact of your firm’s reputation.  Or perhaps the benefits that accrue from using your product.

What we do know is that you can never promote on everything at once – and therefore testing is needed to find which is the lead issue that actually brings in the most sales.

Also there might be a debate sometimes on who you want to promote to – which person in the organisation is really going to make the decision?  Or should you promote to two people at once, so that they can come together and decide to buy from you?  Again experimentation is needed.

Working through all these options can take time, and time is not always something that you have.

We recognise that our Velocity service (www.velocity.ac) is geared to working at a steady pace, increasing the effectiveness of your marketing month by month.  What it is not geared up to is giving you a huge amount of marketing at the start so that you can undertake all these experiments and find out exactly which one works best for you.

Where this is the case we have the Accelerator.  Here we put forward a campaign with a set period of time (usually between two and four months) which has the clear aim of getting a set number of customers or clients for you in that time for a set fee.

Thus the Accelerator programme really attacks the market (without overloading it) using a variety of resources, and with a clear end in sight.

A typical Accelerator programme might therefore say that the aim is to generate 100 clients spending £3000 each with you, in four months.   Or perhaps 1000 clients spending £50 with you.  The programme will fit any target you have – we just have to agree it with you.

We then take that aim on, and work to it over the four months, for a set fee.  If we achieve the target easily, we’ll still keep going as agreed to bring in even more clients.  But if we slip behind we will redouble our marketing output – without extra charge to you.

A typical Accelerator programme can cost anything from £2000 to £10,000 depending on the volume of work, how much goes via email and how much by postal direct mail, and so on.

If you are interested, please do call 01536 399 000 and we’ll talk it through.

The key thing to remember is that the underlying approach of the Accelerator programme is the same as Velocity, but with a set target over a set amount of time.  It is the target that drives what we do.

Tony Attwood

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

I recently got an email from a firm that goes out and finds email addresses for people that you want to sell to.  Nothing in that for me, since my company does much the same, but one line in their advert interested me.

They claimed that each email address you add to a database is worth around £75.

Now there was no analysis of this figure, and no explanation as to how they got it, but it got me thinking.  How do you put a value on email addresses?

Let’s assume that you know that Company X is a company that could be a customer of yours.  You know the company name, and getting the address is easy.  Getting the name of the right person to talk to, and the email address of that person is harder, but not impossible.

So it can be done.  But let’s say it costs £5 to get the email address and all the other data.  Is it worth it?

Once you have that email address you can email the individual regularly – as long as you can find something to say, and can write it well.

Let’s say that you want to write once a week, 50 times a year.  That would cost you maybe £22.50.  By email, once you have the system set up, the mailing is free.

So if we take the lifetime of an email address as two years, then the value of each email address is £45.00

The other way of looking at this is not just with email but with any form of direct promotion.  Let has say that you need to find 20 potential customers and email them for a year to get one decent sale.  Given that the cost of finding an email address might be £5 then the investment is £100 (there being no cost in the email transmission).  So assuming you make over £100 on a sale, then you are making money.  And you should be able to do it again.

These are of course estimates, but it does show that email addresses have a value, and are worth investing in.

If you would like to know more, please do call.

Tony Attwood

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

I wrote about going up the rankings on Google the other day, and Ian Stirling wrote to me with this point:

I would add one thing.  Activity,  I notice when we do emails about events and lots of people click, in a short space of time, on to the ‘Events’ page its ranking goes.  Not for weeks but for days.

I would completely agree with this. We run a couple of web sites which are used as experimental test beds for this sort of work – I have mentioned them before, they are both about Arsenal FC and they are listed at the end of this piece.  Between them they now get around half a million page visits per month.

We know exactly what sort of story will get people in, in high numbers, and each time we run one of these our positioning rises, as Ian says, for a while.

We know that people will hit the site if we say that player x is about to sign for Arsenal, and indeed when we ran the story “Jádson Rodrigues da Silva in talks with Arsenal” we got exactly the effect we expected.  A huge hike in hits, and a rise up the rankings.

Can this be done on all sites?  I think the answer is yes – but one needs to study the site and the area of interest and see exactly what gets the rise in hit rates.  In one way it takes us back to the old addage that the key words for selling anything are “sex”, “free” and “chocolates”.  Use the right words and the response is good and you go up the rankings.

One bonus is that having gone up the rankings a bit, although there might be some slippage afterwards, quite often not all of the slippage is lost, simply because by being higher up the Google list, more people who find you through a search click on your link, and so you stay that bit higher.

Here’s our Arsenal sites:

www.blog.emiratesstadium.info

www.blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk

Do call if you would like to go further with this issue.

Tony

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

What are the three things that take you up the Google rankings the fastest?

I know that every time I try and write about this subject I am corrected, and I will admit from the start that all my knowledge is just based on what has happened to the 100 or so sites that my company runs and the work we have done with a few dozen companies in this field.

So, based on my observations and practical experimentation on getting sites up the rankings in Google etc, I think high ranking sites are helped by

1.  Fast loading pages

2.  Lots of text saying relevant (but not low quality things)

3.  Links in to your articles and out to other people’s articles.

If you have got different experience I would love to hear from you, but let me amplify on points two and three.

Lots of simplistic text written by amateurs doesn’t help much, and some search engines have utterly removed sites of this nature.

Further, the old notion of a list of links to other sites being helpful seems to have long since become redundant, and what Google et al like are links from within articles to other articles.  Certainly when one of our sites got a link from a BBC.co.uk news page into an article within ours site, life got a lot more interesting.  We then linked back to their article, and that seemed to help again.

As I have intimated above I would not claim we are experts on search engine optimisation, but I think we know a bit, and each time I am corrected here, I do take note of the comments made and investigate further, and use the evidence provided to the benefit of our clients.

As a result of this, customers on our Velocity contracts (through which we work with them in partnership on all aspects of their marketing, including writing and sending out their emails etc) also get the benefit of our insights on their web sites and their rankings, including the re-writing of landing pages etc to help response rates and search engine position.

If you would like to know more about Velocity it is on www.velocity.ac or call 01536 399 000.

You can also follow all our commentaries on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

In almost all the research undertaken on customer loss, the most common reasons found for customers leaving one company and going to another is that people forget.

In short, they see a new advert from another firm, think that the product looks good or at least worthy of further investigation, and then they start buying elsewhere.

The second most common reason given for using an alternative supplier is, “I didn’t know you did it.”  In other words the customer knows you sell x, but doesn’t know you sell y.  So they buy y from elsewhere.

And the third most common reason is that someone somewhere has said something a little amiss, a little short, or a little untoward.  It may not have been intentional – and indeed it might be the customer who was having an off day, but that is still the third most common reason.

So the question arises, how does one overcome such problems?

I believe there are two ways to do this.

First, write to your customers regularly. I stress “write” here, and not phone, because phone calls are interruptive, and it is difficult to develop a rapport with a client when interrupting their work.  Most phone calls like this tend to be of the “Is there anything we can help you with?” type, and generally they don’t work.

Writing can take on two forms in this regard: talking about products and talking about background.  Both are worthwhile and in fact I would always recommend alternating one with the other.

Talking about products can involve talking about innovation, price, special offers and the like.  But it can also be about things you can do with products, and successes that have been noted in using your products.

Talking about background can involve giving hints and support in relation to the industry you are involved in (this email could be seen as an example of that) but can also include a more humorous approach.  Humour is not for everyone, and you need to be happy with the approach, but where it is used it guarantees to make your company stand out from the crowd at once.

The second approach to overcoming the problem of customer drift involves changing the company attitude. If your view is that your customers are loyal and would never go elsewhere, you are not going to put in place programmes to keep the customers with you.

But if you acknowledge that all customers are liable to drift, then you will start looking for ways to deal with this.

I often hear of companies that say, “they must know we sell product Z, because it is in the catalogue”, but this assumes that people love you so much that they will plough through your catalogue to find that product.  My experience is that they won’t – especially if someone else is sending them promotional material relating just to that product.

Customer retention is an art, just as finding new customers is an art.  If you would like to talk about it please do call 01536 399 000 or email me back.

Customer retention is also a fundamental part of the work we do through the Velocity programme (www.velocity.ac) through which you can pay a monthly fee for your marketing, and we will work closely with you looking at every issue raised by your marketing, and putting together and carrying out a programme that meets all your needs.

I do hope you found this quick review interesting – do give me a call if you would like to take things further or if you have a question.

If you would like to stay in touch with all our commentaries you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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