Tony Attwood's Blog

The brain is very good at very fast processing and instant decision making – what we often call “gut instinct”. Generally when meeting someone new we can make our decisions as to whether we like them or not within on tenth of a second of seeing a face for the first time. What’s more we rarely change these decisions.

Gut instinct is what we all use for complex decisions, so that is what the advertisement should allow the reader to use. In many cases there is no need to offer samples, trial runs and the like, even though you may feel that this is what the reader will need. Just offer the reader the chance to get straight on and do it.

Indeed I have come across companies that have been run for years on a process of encouraging potential customers to phone in to discuss their needs, on the grounds that otherwise no one will buy anything. But then, on analysing their sales these companies find that their customers are finding ways around the formalised approach in order to get a quick purchase.

What is happening is that the customer is saying “give it to me now” and the seller is saying, “no I must talk to you first,” or “no you must see a sample first.”

However there is a time when you might want to offer a choice – and that is where you are selling something that is very simple to understand.

In such circumstances you can offer your potential customer some facts and, as along as these facts are kept very simple, you can then give the recipient of the advert the time to digest the information and get a clear picture. This helps them weigh up the issues and then feel that they have done their “research” properly, and they are now ready for a purchase. .

This should not be thought of as a way of tricking the customer. Much of the time we make better decisions by letting our gut instinct work out what to do and what to buy – unless the choices are very simple. This may seem strange but it is a left-brain/right-brain issue. The right brain is brilliant at making instant holistic judgements – which is exactly what is needed in complex transactions.

The only time when it is not a good idea for the purchaser to make such a decision is when the whole sale is pitched at the emotive level – for example when selling cars, jewellery and the like. In such cases the customer’s instinct might not serve you well since it will be rendered ineffective by the over-arching emotions. If you want your customers to make the right decision, don’t combine emotion and gut instinct – but if the issue of whether the decision is right for the customer is not to be considered, then emotion plus an appeal to gut instinct can be exceptionally powerful..

Source: Ap Dijksterhuis University of Amsterdam. Science vol 311 p1005

From the basics of mailing lists and email lists to the finer points of copywriting, from setting up a blog, to researching the addresses of potential clients… that is what we do. Hamilton House Mailings 01536 399 000

www.hamilton-house.com

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

Almost everyone will always assume that when something good is about to happen (or indeed when it is promised) the goodness will turn out to be a lot better than it actually is. Everyone for example assumes that winning the lottery will make them incredibly happy – although the reality as reported by winners does not make bear out this notion.

Because of this effect we don’t have to over play benefits of our products, because our potential customers will do that for us. Thus an understated promotion which shows benefits but doesn’t shout them out can work particularly well, because the recipient of the advert will do most of the hard work – they will up the level of satisfaction in their own mind. They’re ready to imagine the earth – let’s help them do it.

Similarly people always have an over active imagination when it comes to disasters – we always imagine the results of disaster to be far worse than they actually are. Thus when selling salvation from disaster, we can be sure that our readership will over-imagine the disaster – so we can be controlled.

In all, the imagination of those reading our advert is a much more powerful tool than our words. This is of great benefit if we know how to use it because it overcomes all the limitations that are imposed by the Advertising Standards Authority in terms of what we are allowed to say.

Even better, because most advertisers ignore this approach and insist of shouting out the brilliance of their product, anyone who understates and remains calm is able to make a significant impact, especially on reasonably intelligent people. With every web-site being an “award winning web site” and with every house insulation system being “the leading” system, the public long ago began to discount such flimmery. Understating allows the reader to take the message on far further than we would ever dare go.

Source: Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University Psychological Science Vol 17, page 649

If you would like to discuss ways of enhancing your sales through email or through postal direct mail, as well as on web sites and blogs, please do call 01536 399 000.

And just in case you’d like to see the other side of the coin, and look at a few reviews of adverts that don’t work, you can see some on www.goodad.co.uk

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

Everyone says, “you must have a web site” and of course this is true.

But, inevitably, that simple message doesn’t tell you everything. For really you need to go a bit further.

First off, you need to keep adding to your web site if at all possible. You can either do this by adding new pages about your products, or you can do it by having a blog with regular new pages added to it.

I know that this might sound tedious and difficult, but in fact it isn’t once you get the hang of it. And remember, that sites that are regularly adding pages of good original information will always go up the search engine rankings, and attract readers who might otherwise have not found you.

Second, you need to have landing pages for your email adverts.

These pages are not the same as your home page (the page that says who you are, and what you do), for the landing pages are written directly in relation to individual email adverts. If your product is one that needs to be seen, you might well put the benefits of the product in the email, and the pictures on the web site.

Finally there is the issue of the blog. Blogs can bring in huge numbers of enquiries – and they can do this quite often by reusing copy that has been created originally for email and post advertisements. (There are some examples of blogs in our links below, if you want to see some examples).

Hamilton House can certainly help you create a web site, a blog, and indeed new landing pages for a blog, all at prices that will be well below what you might imagine.

If you are starting out on a web site for the first time, or if you have had a web site before and are finding the designer a difficult person to stay in touch with, you’ll find this page helpful: http://www.hamilton-house.com/webdesign.html

If you want to know more about blogs, then you will find information on http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs

Last, if you would like to make the development of your web site or blog part of a larger marketing package, we can certainly do this through our Velocity programme.  You will find details of that at www.velocity.ac

Of course we all one most obvious direct marketing fact: email marketing is cheaper than postal marketing. Although we also probably recognise that email marketing gets lower response rates than postal.

But behind these simple statements is a second factor: that good, reliable email lists of businesses and individuals are a lot harder to obtain than good postal lists.

The reason for this is twofold. One is that people can change their email addresses at a drop of a hat, and so email lists go out of date fairly rapidly. The other is that postal lists are easier to research.

So what is best: email or direct mail?

The answer is that if you have a quality email list of all your customers and potential customers, and someone in the office with a talent for writing interesting and occasionally quirky adverts and newsletters, then emailing your past customers and your potential customers on a regular basis is a really good idea.

Various research studies have shown that the most common reason given by customers for moving from one supplier to another is that the company in question did not contact the customer. And the most common reason for not choosing a company as a supplier in the first place is, “I didn’t know you were there” or “I didn’t know you did that.”

But, even then, not everyone reads their emails. So occasional postal mailings are also helpful, even when you have a near perfect email list.

However for most of us there is still the issue that the email list that we have of customers and potential customers is not as good as it might be.

There are many different ways of resolving this situation, including telephone research, requesting the customer’s email address when an order is placed, offering a free product or service which can only be obtained via email, and writing exquisitely interesting pieces that are so good that everyone wants to read them… but which are only available via email.

And there is something else that you can do; you can put some of your emails on your blog. If you do this you will be amazed at how many new customers arrive just because they have found your blog via a search engine. You can then invite the readers to receive your regular email bulletin, complete with its offers of discounts etc. All they have to do is email you – and you have their email address.

Of course all this takes a bit of time which is why Hamilton House specialises in researching such lists and creating on line blogs – either as part of our Velocity programme (www.velocity.ac) or as individual projects. If you would like to know more please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Let people feel good about choosing to buy your product

When people feel they have made a choice and that the result is good, they feel good about their choice and give themselves credit for their choice. Even when they didn’t make much of a choice in the first place.

Generally speaking we don’t like choices with no information because in these circumstances we can’t give ourselves credit for making our decisions.

When we have to make a choice from two bad options, we always feel bad. Choosing the lesser of two evils is always a distasteful event and we never take credit for it. Indeed when the choice is trivial or distasteful we sometimes let others choose in order to avoid getting involved.

So if there is a choice to be made, make sure that you offer a simple choice of two or three good things, and then go out of your way to congratulate people on having made such a good choice.

Every day we deal with numerous direct mail and email adverts, and watch the results of each one. If you would like to talk about our handling your marketing, either as a one off, or on a regular basis, please do call. 01536 399 000.

You can read all our articles in this series on www.blog.hamilton-house.com or follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

The original research cited here was quoted in Simon Botti Cornell University Ann McGill Uni of Chicago Journal of Consumer Research vol 33 p211

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

There is strong evidence from the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that if there is one factor that correlates with a business person or a professional about to make a positive decision, it is excitement.

Whether this involves two business people exchanging business cards or whether it is someone getting ready to agree to make a purchase, the situation is the same. What’s at the heart of each situation is excitement.

A business person getting ready to make a positive decision acts “like a kid who’s excited and bouncing around,” according to Media Lab

The implication is clear – if you want to get a sale you have to generate excitement.

Now for the telephone sales person this is simple: speak invitingly, vary the tone and volume, be really interested. (Isn’t it amazing how many people don’t do that when selling on the phone!)

But the implication for direct mail and email is less obvious – simply being excited about the product and saying in gushing prose how wonderful it is doesn’t work any more than a bland and boring description of the facts works.

However that should not surprise us because that’s not the approach of the good tele-sales person, nor was it ever the tactic of the good door-to-door salesperson either. They empathise, they listen, they reflect your concerns, but still somehow through all of this get you going. That’s what good direct mail and email does too.

In doing this we are helped enormously by the fact that there’s a lot of recent research to suggest that far more human behaviour is automatic and determined by instinct than we ever previously imagined. We like to believe that we make rational decisions, weighing up all the issues before jumping in. But the fact is, most of the time this is a gloss put on our own account of what happened. In fact 80% of our mental processes seem to be simple and automatic.

Just as the greatest footballers and jazz musicians respond automatically to what is going on around them in order to score a goal or play a riff, so all of us who drive cars or ride bikes put much of the decision making involved in such events onto auto. And that’s not because the brain is in overload. It is because unconscious automatic thinking can be more effective than conscious thought.

So, back to the business of selling stuff. It looks more and more as if the best way forward is to ignore the logical, rational, consciously generated actions of individuals and instead think of the way in which we unconsciously move together and respond to each other. Which means, forget all the logic and boring detail. Generate the enthusiasm, and see what follows.

If you would like to discuss this sort of approach, please do call. 01536 399 000. It is very exciting.

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

The Latin word “advertire” from which we get the word “advertising” means “to turn towards”. I am not sure of the Latin opposite, but It is quite possible to imagine resisting this pressure to be turned towards something – indeed we all of us do it all the time.

But a quick look at the world of direct mail shows that for some people simple resistance to the advertising is not enough, for there are some people who are against the whole process of trying to persuade someone to do something. Indeed for some the resistance to advertising as a process is so absolute that is close to fear, or even paranoia or phobia.

People with advertire-phobia are usually very selective in the advertising they dislike. They might quite readily read magazines or newspapers packed with advertisements or listen to commercial radio and watch commercial television, all without comment, but can on occasion be found ranting against direct mail and going to great lengths to ensure that it does not arrive in their home or at their place of work.

Obviously it is possible that the dislike of a particular type of advertising can be a rational view, a dislike of the moral or ethical or artistic nature of the work, and whether this is the case can readily be seen by the way in which people engaging in such “preferences” are able to debate the issue.

Not to like radio advertising because it is highly repetitive and treats one as if one has the IQ of a backward banana is one thing. But to expect commercial radio to continue without advertising is such an obvious contradiction as to suggest that maybe there is an element of phobia there.

This was where we once got to with direct mail, with people wanting to have a cheap postal service, but refusing to accept that there also had to be advertising within the postal service, to pay for low cost postage.

But now it seems we don’t hear these claims any more. What we hear are some people getting fed up with email, but not with the post.

And this is for the simple reason that the amount of post being sent out by companies is a fraction of what it was 10 years ago. And that has a double benefit for postal advertisers. First, the endless newspaper argument against postal direct mail has gone – because no one is much interested. And second, response rates have risen dramatically because people have far less mail to read.

Hamilton House supplies a wide range of mailing lists, and can arrange the full service of fulfilment of the mailing. If you would like to enquire about any postal mailing list, please do call 01536 399 000.

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

It is a central part of the research from the psychology of perception that the placement of images on an advertising page needs to be handled with great care.

While text is generally perceived by the left hemisphere of the brain, the image is generally seen on the right, and, given the limited amount of interaction that there is between the two halves of the brain, putting text and pictures next to each other can put off all but the most committed reader.

Now there is new evidence that the unwillingness to give time to adverts where images and text knock up against each other is related to age.

Let me add another caveat first, however. We are talking here about the readership of advertising material by people who are not immediately drawn to the subject matter.

Consider the advert you receive which maybe relates to you in general – but is not of instant specific interest. (For example, you are interested in gardening, but you are not thinking of buying a new lawn mower. You receive an ad for a lawn mower. It is not wholly inappropriate, but it is not top of your list of interests at this time.) This is the sort of situation we are talking about.

It seems that people of more mature years find the close juxtaposition of image and text even more off-putting than those of younger years – and they find it hard enough to focus with ads of this type.

Older consumers prefer single-image advertisements over ads with multi-image collages by a margin of 66% to 34%, according to a recent image-preference survey by Creating Results.

Their Photo Finish study set out to look at which type of photography is most effective when advertising to Baby Boomers and older generations. What they discovered was not just the expected difference in preference of photographs, but in the responsiveness to pictures overall – a finding that fits totally with the earlier findings from the psychology of perception.
Interestingly, older people preferred:

Vibrant pictures featuring brighter colours and expressive models rather than cooler colours and contemplative models, 65% to 35%.
65% of respondents preferred images in which the model’s face was clearly identifiable vs. cropped photographs.
The older a consumer, the stronger his or her positive feelings for identifiable photos. 76% of those over age 75 preferred recognizable photos, as well as 75% of 65-74-year-olds and 62% of those ages 55-64.
Lifestyle photography was preferred to product photos by all respondents (59%) and was most effective with those designated by Creating Results as Caregivers (71%), Gardeners (78%) and Volunteers (75%).
These are the sorts of bits of information that we hold in store for our customers. If you want to discuss your advertising step by step with us the most appropriate route is via Velocity (www.velocity.ac) but even when you book in a single mailing you can talk to us and we’ll discuss the in’s and out’s of the text and design.

Do call 01536 399 000. And you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings and on www.blog.hamilton-house.com

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

Whenever Hamilton House Mailings writes a letter or brochure for our clients we recommend that they test our approach with their own approach.

Here’s the result from one particularly interesting experiment of this type – and the lessons that can be drawn.

One of our clients wanted to do a promotion to a list of people who had not bought from them before. The key element of the promotion was a discount offer – to induce the readership away from their present supplier.

So, the purpose of the mailer was simple – to encourage the recipients to see the offer, read the catalogue and go on and place an order with our client for the first time.

Our client (we’ll call them Company A) designed the promotion so that their offer appeared as the front page of the promotion – the first thing the reader would see. It was utterly clear, highlighting the discount that they were offering for the next few weeks.

We argued that an alternative approach might work better and suggested that, instead of a hard hitting advert which was wholly about the special offer, we should lead with a letter which, in a conversational mode, talked about matters of interest to the recipient and which only mentioned the special offer in a short PS.

In other words our approach was very laid back and restrained – exactly the opposite of the more brash approach of Company A.

There was considerable concern about the Hamilton House approach – not least because the letter (clocking in at around 300 words) was considered to be “too long”. “Nobody would read it”, I was told.

So concerned was Company A, that they took the Hamilton House letter and circulated it among half a dozen people taken from their target audience. These people as one said that they too would not read the letter, and criticised it (again) for its length, its style and its approach.

So why did we set out our advert in this way – and what happened. Could it be that the common sense approach of our clients was right and we were wrong?

The full story is available here http://www.theory.bz/Factor%2065.pdf – or if you prefer, give me a call and we can talk it through (01536 399 000).

Sorting out alternative approaches like this is very much what our Velocity programme is about. We don’t do the obvious, but we do get surprising results. Velocity is described on www.velocity.ac – or again, please call.

Tony Attwood

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

To ask me, “how come you claim know how to sell to schools when other firms don’t?” is, I think, a perfectly reasonable question.

The reason is that Hamilton House does something that (I believe) no other educational mailing house does.

We have, within the group, a number of companies that sell to schools. Naturally we write the adverts for these companies in-house, and when writing these adverts my colleagues and I do some experimentation.

In short we try out ideas that we would not try with our clients, because they are thus far not proven to work.

Some of them don’t work – but the only loser in such a circumstance is ourselves – we are using up our resources and failing to sell many of our products. We don’t like it, but we learn.

We have four product areas in which we sell…

Courses
Books
CDs and downloads
Clothing

and we advertise these through the post and through email and on our web sites very regularly.

Last year we also started to publish non-education books, to learn more about how those markets work and more specifically how the advertising within them works.

What we consistently find is that the lessons learned in selling one of those products can be transferred to selling the other three. There are set rules about selling to teachers, and these are the rules we use when creating adverts for others.

If you want to know about any of these ideas in particular, do give us a call, but if you are reading these notes regularly, you will find them here.

If you want to get alerts for each new item we publish these are on Twitter @HHMailings and then on www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk If you would like to know about the services we offer they are outlined on http://www.educationmarketing.org.uk/Services.html

Tony Attwood

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