Tony Attwood's Blog

According to a survey in the US around 40% of Americans have visited a blog, 80% know what a blog is and 8% have their own blog, which makes blogging one of the fastest growing phenomena of all time.

But so what?

As you would expect there is a link to age here – 90% of the 25-34 year olds know what a blog is, but less you think this is just a young person’s thing, 65% of the over 65s know as well and 45% of this age group have visited one.

So it’s a big thing and covers all ages. But still, so what?

I think blogging is one more element in the marketing mix, not least because nearly one third of all blog visitors apparently clicked on an advert while reading the blog.

Now we mustn’t rush to the view that blogs are wiping out other media – they are not. This is an addition – a new way of spending time.

What is interesting in the UK however is the large number of firms that are not involved in blogging at all. Indeed, dare I say it, a lot of UK companies have not yet started to analyse how many hits they get onto their web site and what happens as a result. Firms often tell me that “we have a web site”, but when I go and look I find it is out of date, hard to read, irrelevant, or (in around 10% of cases) simply not there.

Which suggests that not only are lots of companies not thinking about blogs, they are not even looking at their own web sites, and thinking about them.

It is rather like direct mail. Doing it is one thing, but only one thing. You also have to analyse the results of doing it – such as how many orders you got from a mailshot. If you don’t know the answer, how do you know how well your money is being spent? The same is true with web sites – and through them blogs.

Let me give an example. My company owns a site to do with education and we’ve worked hard so that when someone types “schools” into Google our site is on the first page – usually number 4 or 5 out of the 35 million hits Google offers. As a result we get over 1000 people coming to the site each day. Which is fine as far as it goes – but it doesn’t really do us much good unless people start buying things, or get in touch with us, or give us some other benefit.

So we start tracking where they are going. We set up experiments to see how many people follow a link, and so on.

And we keep on refining – just as one does with a mail shot. It really is an important part of the work, in my opinion.

If you would like to talk to me about how we do this, and what we do, I am very happy to discuss such matters. Give me a call on 01536 399 000.

It actually isn’t as hard as is sometimes imagined – and here’s how I do it

Firstly, you work out the necessary response rate that you need to make money. So, let’s assume that you make £20 from each average sale. Also we’ll assume you are running an average sort of campaign where it costs you around 40p each time you mail a potential customer – so £40 per 100.

Obviously you need to make 2 sales from each 100 posted in order to get this return – 2%, which is quite often achievable in direct mail.

Now the first objection is often that the orders one gets are so variable it might result in £100 profit or £2 profit. The second is that the value of the first order is neither here nor there – because most customers come back and buy more – which is where the real profit lies.

My answer to both points is the same: do an experiment, follow one group of customers over time and see what happens.

So, you might choose to mail 300 potential customers selected at random. That costs you in marketing terms around £60. Now you track the result – the total gross profit you get from those 300.

For the firms selling one item its easy – you make £20 per sale, you need 3 sales to break even. You get six sales, you are making money, so now you can go on and mail lots more companies.

For the firms where profit per sale varies, or where profit comes later, you do have to track those 300 over a period of time. Sure it is a bit more work, but the rewards can be enormous. Let’s say that you get four customers, and they bring in £10 each – you’ve made £40, and that is obviously a loss. But tracking those four over the next four months you find that you’ve made another £200 – money that would not have been made had you not done the original promotion. So it is profitable – and you should be doing this over and over again.

Put like this I think it seems so easy – and yet thousands of companies don’t look at direct mail in this simple way. I would urge anyone who is involved in direct mail to do this type of analysis.

The next objection that I hear is tracking, as in “we never know where the customer saw our advert – we’ve tried putting codes on leaflets, but they don’t use them…”

I am 100% certain you can track customers – and I have done it with a publishing company. I’ll go into more detail next time – but if you are anxious for the solution now, by all means give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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 (New Scientist, 7 July 2007).

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 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 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 want to know more, take a look at our latest web site, www.mailings.org.uk – or to see details of our mailing lists and mailing services go to www.hamilton-house.com/10%20Gateways.html  Or call me on 01536 399 000, and we can talk about how your mailing could be changed in order to gain a higher response rate.Tony Attwood

There is an ever growing trend on the internet for people who claim to know about direct mail to post incredibly simplistic pieces which appear, within a couple of hundred words to tell you exactly how to make more money through direct mail.

 
I spotted one such today which said “Nothing Pulls Response like Emotion”.   This is at best half-true, at worst misleading. http://www.directmarketingnet.com/dmnviews/2007/06/adding_emotion_to_the_marketin.html
 
Like so many other statements in direct mail it gives you an insight into a possibility, but it suggests that this is the answer – do this and your troubles will be over.  At the heart of the article is the thought “Does your audience KNOW what it will feel like to accept your offer?”
 
It is a valid question – but it is left as having an obvious answer – there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that it is helpful if your audience know how it will feel if you accept the offer.  There is no appeal to any psychological research – all we get now are bald statements.
 
At this point I am going to appear to be doing nothing but banging my own trumpet, because I am about to cite one of my own pieces – sorry if that seems disingenuous, but it seems the simplest way to make the point.  My article on emotion in direct mail point 3 in the article on http://www.theory.bz/psychology%20ofadvertising.htm includes this
Emotions are good – sometimes
The comments at the end of section 2 [the previous part of the article from which this extract comes] should not be taken to mean that emotions should not be used as part of selling.  Indeed it can be argued that when you make up your mind about something then what happens is that your emotional system gets involved.  
The problem is that emotions don’t always allow us to make the right choice.  Emotions can make us impetuous and risk prone – and indeed selfish. 
Thus a person looking to launch a business, but who has always been an employee, might feel that she needs to “push the boat out” – and have the feeling that she has always been too cautious.  In such a state of mind being cautious becomes associated with failure – the real winners (the rich, the successful) are seen as people who go out there are do it.   Following such a scenario successful business people are not seen as those who carefully weigh up the options, consider alternatives, look at fall-back positions in case something goes amiss, but simply as those who go out and do it.
This emotional state leads a person to be very vulnerable to advertising that suggests that there are easy ways to make money, in the same way that advertising of certain clothes styles can lead one to be more attractive, or more successful. 
Source: Daniel Fessler, University of California.    LA.   Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes    vol 95 p107
 
My point here is that direct mail has descended into alchemy – it is just a mass of mumbo-jumbo without proper explanations.    My piece above is part of a long article which examine ten different issues within the psychology of advertising, each drawing on a different source.  
 
That at least makes an attempt to be scientific, rather than just saying “hey guys I’ve got a way to make you a fortune – cross my palm with silver and then go and get a drop of bat’s blood to sprinkle on your key board…”
 
Of course my approach which replies on science is more boring, and takes longer – but I suspect it gets better results.  In fact, as I wipe the bat’s blood off my desk, I’m sure of it.
 
Tony Attwood

For several years I have argued that the way to use the internet as a method of marketing is not to use Google’s Adwords and the like, but instead to put up lots of relevant content on the internet and so capture the passing reader.
 
As an example I have tried to do this myself by creating some 20 or more separate web sites to do with different aspects of direct mail, while running this blog, and the four newsgroups (Direct Mail Secrets and the like).
 
Now in one of the most excellent pieces of research I have ever seen relating to selling on the internet MarketingExperiments.com have compared the hiring an employee to blog, create content, and in general work to drive traffic to sites, with the much simpler approach of using Google Adwords to drive targeted traffic to the web site.
 
The research took place over 12 months and in summary the research showed that the blogs / text / discussion approach yielded more than 93,000 visits to the site.
 
This was compared with a 30-day test of Google Adwords, bidding up to 75 cents per click on a variety of keywords related to the test websites which drove 2,047 users to the site at a cost of $1,250 (£625). So this compares with the “word-of-mouth” efforts which yielded 93,207 unique visitors at a cost of $3600 (£1800).
 
Thus as Marketing Experiments.com points out, the word of mouth approach yielded a 1427% greater return on investment than the GoogleAd approach.
 
As the report says however, pay-per-click advertising was a much easier to run and was much quicker, but it was much more expensive and gave a much lower return on investment. It doesn’t say it, but in essence, all you need to do is hire someone to do the work – so its not that much harder. I personally think this is a really informative piece of research and I would urge everyone to look at it.
 
I am so grateful to Marketing Experiments Journal because at last we have some firm evidence for the notion that maximising content is the way forward.
 
Mailing Information Service (range of web sites created by Hamilton House Mailings plc): www.theory.bz – scroll down the home page.
 
Marketing  Experiments (who undertook this research)
 
http://www.MarketingExperiments.Com
 
MarketingExperiments.com
Digital Trust Inc. 412 First Street North Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250, USA

Most of our decisions and judgements get attached to arbitrary facts and figures and become anchored to our perceived reality by completely irrelevant detail.  This is particularly true when we are working with very limited information..
The most common example of this is the word: “Reduced”.   Wine in supermarkets is often seen to be reduced from £7 to £4 and this can enhance sales.  What we don’t know is that this is a £3.50 bottle of plonk which has been advertised at £7 for a month or two, and is now “reduced” to £4.
This linking of reality to irrelevant facts is known as “Anchoring” and is virtually impossible to shake off once it is implanted in our brains.
Much of the time these anchored facts are not facts at all – as in the case of the bottle of wine which was never “really” a £7 bottle of wine at all.   In one of the most famous examples President Eisenhower in the US asked his advisers to report to him on the best ways of overcoming poverty and deprivation in order to make the United States a more just and equal society.  His advisers told him to look at Sweden, a country with limited natural resources which had done wonders for its population through a programme of social democracy based around high taxation.
The left-leaning Sweden was not the model he was looking for however, and so Eisenhower told his advisers to stop talking about Sweden.  Suddenly he said, “look what good that socialism did them – highest suicide rate in the world”.   The statement was completely untrue, but the slur stuck and for many years anyone who wanted to denigrate European social democracy trotted out this made up statistic.
Of course in advertising one cannot simply make up facts about one’s rivals, but opinions do need to be anchored somewhere.   Beer makers have used the approach by calling some brands “Export” while spreading the rumour that beer for export is stronger beer than the weak stuff sold on the home market.  (This plays on the notion among some Britain’s that Britain is an over-regulated country while on the continent everyone is free to do as they please).
This article is taken from a series of pieces on the psychology of advertising which appears on the Theory of Direct Mail web site – probably the largest collection of serious articles on direct mail that is available anywhere.   It’s available on www.theory.bz

Most of us look to prove what we already believe to be true, rather than consider alternatives that might overthrow our current beliefs.  Which obviously means that we should try to stay with the current views of people rather than overthrow them.  Thus it is easier for me to sell direct mail advertising services to people who believe direct mail is a good way to sell, rather than for me to go out and convince someone who is prejudiced against direct that direct mail can work.   Likewise if one is selling a high risk investment strategy then it is easier to work with people who are friendly to risk, rather than change the attitudes of those who are risk averse. 

The trouble with this is that sometimes we do want to change people’s thoughts.   If the general feeling is that Apple computers are better for design work than PCs and you want to sell PCs to graphic designers you are going to have to face this issue.   

Taking another example, we can see how this can work.  Some people re-fill their laser printers using toner supplied by the manufacturer of the printer.  Others prefer the cheaper generic brands.   Getting people using the manufacturer’s own supply to change to the generic brands is difficult, and a simply appeal to cheapness may not work since the preconception of the reader is that this cheap stuff is second rate, and may cause damage to the machine. 

To overcome this one might write in an advert: 

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the manufacturer’s own brand toner in a laser printer? 

Such a question can raise interest even among the most committed, because it is not openly challenging their views but rather leading into what looks like an even handed debate.   You might start, in this example, by saying that it is true that manufacturers can claim that their warranty is invalidated if you use someone else’s toner.  You could add that this might not be enforceable in law, but then you don’t want to wait for a court case before you get your printer repaired.  But it is also true that manufacturer’s toner is much more expensive than alternative brands.  So what is the way forward… 

Thus the debate moves on and you gradually bring it round to the fact that your toner is guaranteed to give the same service as manufacturer brand, and that if it ever were to be the case that the manufacturer refuses to repair the machine, you’ll replace the machine.      

In other words, you work with the prejudices and gently turn them around, step by step.  This approach means that the reader doesn’t notice that persuasion is going on and so you are allowed to get your message across.