Tony Attwood's Blog

These days I feel fairly solid on the subject of blogs. Last year one of the blogs I write got 1,600,000 hits – that is the site was visited 1,600,000 times (also known in the trade as “page impressions”)

And just before you think that maybe I sat at home going onto my own site 4500 times a night, I would add that by the end of the year we were getting 120,000 individual readers going onto the site each month. It wasn’t just me.

One of the great bonuses of the site is that in the past year more and more of the pieces I have written have being copied onto other sites – usually in full, and usually citing my site as the origin. This has helped make the blog one of the most popular in its field. All from a standing start of zero readers two and a half years ago.

During last year I also started writing regular blogs for other companies, and in doing this, I began to get a deeper understanding of how firms see blogs, why some feel that the blog concept is not right for them, and why some blogs don’t get high levels of readership.

The point is that the blog is not an advert, but is a way of engaging with customers and potential customers. It does not always make a complete sale, but it puts the customer into a more positive frame of mind about you. It builds a brand, at a very low cost. And it means that when you do advertise to people they are more likely to accept what you say, rather than think “just another advert”.

This lack of understanding about blogs can also be a huge benefit to those who do use blogs successfully, because it means that in most industries if you start writing a successful blog, you can be sure most of your competitors won’t be doing this.

I am happy to send you an example of a blog I have written for a client, and to talk with you about how a blog might work for your company. I’ll even sketch out an idea or two for you if you are interested. Call me on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamilton-house.com and write Blogs in the subject line.

Tony Attwood

If you have a promotion that you want to send out to customers and potential customers, you are always very welcome to send it to me, and I will call you back with my thoughts.

And when that happens one thing I often find myself recommending is that you keep the leaflet you have produced exactly as it is, but add a sales letter over the top.

The reason is simple – sales letters can be changed readily, they don’t involve huge design costs, and they can have an enormous impact on the sales by setting the reader in the right frame of mind to take in the brochure or catalogue.

Of course not every sales letter works, and I often find myself having conversations with people who tell me that they have “tried the sales letter approach and it didn’t work”. I can well believe that because getting the sales letter right is an art form in itself and it took me several years to perfect.

If you would like to know how to write the perfect sales letter and how it can double the response rate of your next mailshot, please take a look at this link

If that link does not work, go to www.hamilton-house.com and click on the How To option on the left, and then scroll down the list of articles until you find “How to write the perfect sales letter.”

It will take about 10 minutes to read – and could indeed change your whole approach to marketing.

I was meandering around the internet (as one does) and found an article on a direct marketing news service (source details at the end). This is how part of it reads

When was the last time you received an uninspiring sales letter that was a front and back page of text, text, text? No bold. No italics. No imagination. Just gobs of information on white paper.

With sales letters,, subheads can be the key to turning a scanner into a potential customer. Use subheads in your sales letter to break up the sections of your copy.

Later there is an example of what the writer means…

Dear Mr. Smith,

You’re tired of working for someone else. The boss gets all the glory while you’re stuck in your rut waiting for 5:00 to roll around day in and day out.

Don’t be someone else’s lackey anymore.

Become Your Own Boss
Most people dream of being their own boss but you can turn that dream into a reality today. The only boss you’ll ever have again is yourself.

Flexible Work Hours
Say goodbye to punching time cards. Once you get started, you’ll work when you want. No more putting in a request for vacation!

Make Money at Home
You set your own hours so it’s up to you to decide how much money you want to make each month. Bring home the bacon one month and live it up the next.

You get the idea. This is in fact the way many people are taught to write – with sub headings. About 15 years ago I started to do some research with the sales letters of Hamilton House, and I compared the results I got from writing with the standard sub headings, and without. Writing without the sub headings won (in terms of response rates) hands down – as long as I obeyed some other rules.

What I found was that if I kept the paragraphs short (two or three lines each), had big margins each side (about 1″ or a bit more) and opened every paragraph with a phrase that seemed to suggest that this was the paragraph that was going to give you all the inside information, I got the best results.

In fact what seems to happen is that people receiving such cold call sales letters skim down the paragraphs looking for something that is going to be the key to the offer. With short paragraphs with interesting openings (such as “the solution comes from” or “the real reason is” or “However what really improved the situation was”) even if they just read the openings, they somehow got the hang of what the rest of the paragraph was about.

In short it is the closest direct mail advertising ever gets to the subliminal.

Such improvements in response rates that come from taking out the sub headings and instead writing the opening to each paragraph in a certain way, are less than the improvements you can get from writing a really good headline and a PS that throws the reader back into the letter. But that they are still interesting and still worth doing.

If you would like me to comment on any particular direct mail campaign you are or have been involved with, just email it to me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony

There’s more on direct mail writing in the How To guides on www.hamilton-house.com Here’s the link to the original article that I found on the internet…

http://advertising.about.com/od/directmail/a/subheadsdirect.htm

Throughout the last six months I’ve received contrasting phone calls from firms that use direct mail and email to sell their products.

Some have been saying that response rates are really down, while others report that things are picking up and response rates are improving all the time.

To find out what’s going on, I’ve undertaken a study into how these two contradictory effects can be happening simultaneously.

What I have found is this: the firms that are doing well are doing something rather clever. They are using their promotions both to get sales, and to get potential customers onto their email list.

This list is then emailed every couple of weeks on a simple rota that looks like this…

Week A: advert with special offers and new products etc

Week B: chatty article on other items of interest

These “other items of interest” emails are really important – because it is they that keep people reading the email each time it arrives. The firms that insist on just mailing special offers and the like quickly lose their response levels.

Directors of companies that don’t try “Week B” type emails generally justify themselves by saying “we have to make money on every promotion.” But in the end they achieve exactly the opposite of what they want. Their public gets bored, and stops reading.

So we have two implications.

1: The need to talk to customers via email, in a relaxed conversational style, about issues of interest, rather than just about sales issues.

2: The realisation that sales promotions have two tasks – one is to get some sales, and the other is to generate more names for their marketing customer list, in order to get sales later on.

If you’d like to know more about all our findings and how you could make this approach work for your company please call Stephen or myself on 01536 399 013 and we’ll be pleased to talk it through. Or you can email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

There’s an interesting article on Brand Republic’s web site which takes up the notion that I’ve been kicking around for a while that the way in which people read advertisements has changed dramatically recently. As such we need to change the way we write ads, if we want to keep up our response rates.
In the article they quote Marco Bertini, professor of marketing at London Business School, as saying ‘Consumers are getting more creative in finding value-for-money solutions to problems and are looking at alternative categories.’

They also quote Chris Sanderson, director of strategy and insight at trend analysts The Future Laboratory, describes the current economy as being in a state of ‘cataclysmic change,’ adding ‘Once we are through this recession, things will never go back to how they were,’ warns Sanderson.

They also quote Malcolm McDonald, emeritus professor of marketing at Cranfield University School of Management, saying that ‘The best companies are focusing on core markets and doing genuine 80/20 segmentation, not just slashing and burning. They are spending less, but more effectively, and will get a higher share and stronger brand.’

All this is interesting, but none of it goes into the issue of exactly how the language of advertising has changed in these changed times, and that’s a shame, because to me that is the key issue. The old notion of shouting 70% OFF!!! just doesn’t work in this climate. Instead people who buy, whether it is as consumers or within their employment expect to have discussions and debate with those who wish to sell to them. They want to be treated as adults not as little children who will be impressed by the word NEW!!!!!!!!

They do not, and will not, do as they are told. And why should they? Doing as they are told resulted in the biggest economic collapse since the 1920s, so they have learned the lesson. The man or woman buying for his company has more sense than the average financial adviser.

This is why it is vital to write advertisement in a new way – a way that treats the reader as a sensible person with whom one can have a decent discussion. Anything less results in the direct mail and email dropping straight into the bin.

This article first appeared on Creative Direct. If you would like to receive one or two emails from this news service each week, free of charge, just send an email to CreativeDirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and then reply to the return email. You can leave at any time by just sending a second email

Source of quote article:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/BrandRepublicNews/News/901388/Marketers-react-era-austerity-takes-hold/?DCMP=EMC-DailyNewsBulletin

The factor that marks the current market place is that some firms are finding their advertising is becoming less and less productive, while other firms are finding that they are getting better and better response rates from each advert.

I’ve been looking into this, and have reached the conclusion that companies that change their style of advertising to overcome growing customer resistance are doing well.

The whole argument is set out in a short report which is part of the new “How To” series of reports being prepared by Hamilton House Mailings. You can read the report by clicking here.

Tony

There are regular debates in email marketing that go round and round and round. Like whether it is better to email on Monday or Tuesday, in the day or in the night.

Such debates first show one set of results and then another – probably because everyone reads the latest research and follows that route – and then recipients react in a different way.

Their problem is that they start from the notion that it is possible to define a good email in terms of mechanics. Do x and you get y response.

But life isn’t like that – although many people continue to believe it is, as witness the fact that another such topic has recently been doing the rounds:

· Shorter email subject lines get higher open and click through rates than longer subject lines.

Before we even get into this, we can dismiss the “open” rates issue, because research has shown over and over again that open rates are meaningless. They are not even consistent when measured by the same software.

If you want to know more about this, see the Hamilton House free report on open rates at http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/OpenRates.htm In that report we not only take our own evidence but also evidence from a completely separate set of experiments in the US. After reading that you’ll wonder why you ever thought open rates were interesting in the first place!

But click through rates are a better measure of what is happening in terms of your email marketing, and so it is interesting to see where a debate on the relationship between click throughs and the subject line leads.

Research from Epsilon in January 2009 suggests that although there is a link between subject line length and click through, there is just as much importance in what the words say (or “word order” as they rather cutely put it) and click through.

Their analysis involved more than one billion emails over nearly 20,000 separate campaigns – so it ought to be informative.

But in the end it suggests that the relationship between subject-line length and open and click rates is not as strong as previously argued – which really is no surprise at all.

The reason it is no surprise is quite simply that in communications between humans, meaning is always of greater importance than length. I might talk for an hour, and bore you stupid – which would lead people like Epsilon’s researchers to suggest that long speeches are hopeless.

On the other hand if I were addressing a political audience and I had the fluency and wit of Lloyd George 100 years ago, I would hold the audience spell bound for an hour, two hours – as long as I wanted.

Likewise a couple of careful chosen sentences can change someone’s opinion – or confirm their belief that you are really silly. It all depends what you say. (And of course the “word order”).

If you give a person an email to read, and it is stunningly exciting and interesting, that interest will overcome any thought of length.

So although some people can find a high correlation of subject line length to clicks, the reason almost certainly is not in the line length but in the meaning of the text.

This is supported by the fact that lots of companies in the Epsilon research found that the relationship between subject email performance to be relatively weak.

Ultimately Epsilon analyzed the content of subject lines and found that “word order”, and “word choice” (ie the meaning), along with the relationship between the advertiser and the audience were much more important than length – despite the fact that research in recent years has focussed on length.

So we are making progress, although many companies continue to take a highly mechanistic view of email marketing – as if the English language can be reduced to a set of data based on the words themselves. We may expect at any time now a report that says that subject lines that start with the letter E get higher click through rates than anything else.

Certainly Epsilon are now talking about “positioning the most important elements first” and “front loading subject lines with the most important information” – so an alphabetical analysis may be with us shortly.

Yes, it does make sense to keep the subject line short, because the way people have their email programs set up often means they only read a few of the words. But there is still no reason to forget about the language, and the wonderful things it can do.

We must never forget that subject lines don’t give you much space – but they are locations in which you can be creative, and so can make a difference – rather like the PS in letters.

Of course the title of this piece may have turned you off totally, in which case you probably are not reading this bit. But if you are, it might be because you tend to read things I write – or it might be because you were intrigued. If you were intrigued it was almost certainly not because I used four words instead of six, but because of the “word order”, or (as I would prefer to say) because I used an odd phrase at the top, which looked like it ought to mean something but didn’t.

(I don’t advocate that this trick is used all the time in emails – but it serves to illustrate my point.)

If you’d like to talk about the way “word order” can affect your email, how you can generate higher response rates, and how the subject line and the rest of the text inter-relate, please do give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Alternatively email me a copy of an email you have sent out or are thinking of sending out, and I’ll give you my opinion.

You don’t have to take any notice, of course, but you never know – I might come up with a neat idea.

Hamilton House sells business, consumer and educational email lists, and we can undertake the emailing as well. There’s more details on www.yesmail.org.uk Or call my colleagues on 01536 399 000 – they’ll be pleased to help.

Tony Attwood
Hamilton House Mailings plc

In my opinion direct mail is not complex – it is just misunderstood. In fact there are only three simple, straightforward rules which control the success of all direct mail. The more you follow these rules the more successful your direct mail will be. Here they are

• The more your direct mail reflects the world-view of the recipient, the more successful it will be.
• You have 5 seconds to grab and hold attention – if you haven’t grabbed attention in that period you have no chance.
• The mailshot must be consistent throughout in style and approach.

The key point is that the laws fit together – they all come from the central understanding that the perception of the reader is fundamental and controls the response rate. Each rule suggests and reinforces the point that you have to talk about the recipient and the recipient’s needs in a format and style that the recipient finds acceptable.

Thus the recipient is at the centre. Not the product, not the writer, not the company, but the person you are writing to. This opens everything up to a scientific basis for your direct mail, because the view of the recipient can be discussed in terms of the psychology of the individual (the personality, hobbies, outlook, style), the social psychology of the setting in which the pack is opened (the crowded school staffroom, the calm elegance of the chairman’s office), and the unchanging psychology of perception – (the way in which all of us view the sheet of A4 paper when we first glance at it.)

It is out of this scientific awareness of how the recipient looks at the direct mail that we can bring in theories developed by academics who have for years researched individual aspects of direct mail. Here more than anywhere else we can see the folly of the “I’ll tell you how to do it” determinists who reject all theory and just give you a list of what to do.

The determinists will say “put a picture there – a picture is worth 10,000 words”, while the follower of the 3 laws who understands the science of direct mail will say, “what actually happens to the reader when you juxtapose a text and a picture?” In this individual case what we discover is that a picture is not worth 10,000 words. Everything depends entirely on how the picture sits alongside other items on the page (like the text). This is because there can be a tendency for confusion in the brain at this point because of different ways in which pictures and text are handled by the brain.

So the simplistic notions like “a picture is worth 10,000 words” actually hinders response rates. You cannot use an image to grab attention, and then hope the recipient carries on and reads the text. And this is exactly what Law 3 says. Your approach has to be consistent.

Overall the three laws offer a liberation from the folly of the gurus who say “do this, don’t do this” with no background and no logic holding everything together.

So with this approach evolved from the 3 laws you cannot suddenly say “what about using a different coloured envelope?” without then asking, “how does the recipient respond to this?” and “what is the science here?” and “what else is going on at the same time” (as in, “will the recipient open the mailshot anyway?”

Most direct mail produced in the UK ignores these three laws, and as a result tends to underachieve in terms of response rates. Some direct mail also annoys some of the recipients – hence the name “junk mail”. Junk mail is in fact direct mail that fails to follow the three basic laws.

The web site www.theory.bz takes you through every issue that arises in direct mail. But if you fancy a short cut, email me a copy of your mailshot, with your phone number, and I’ll call you back and tell you what I think. I’ll pay for the phone call, and you don’t have to take any notice of what I say. But you never know – I might just be right.

You can call me on 01536 399 000, or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood