Tony Attwood's Blog

In early 2001 a small group of direct mailers began contributing to a unique project which aimed to reform the way in which direct mail was understood.

The group’s aim was to turn direct mail into a science – a science which would allow users both to make much more accurate predictions as to which mailshot would have the best results than had hitherto been the case.

Up to this point most writers on direct mail had adopted a “common sense” approach – indeed one of the most popular books on direct mail at the time was called Commonsense Direct Marketing by Drayton Bird.  There was nothing new in this: the phrase “common sense” was also used by marketing writers such as Stefan Engeseth, Brenda Adbilla,  Steve W. Martin, Dave Majure and others.  In fact it is one of the most common phrases to be found in marketing books of all types.

Many of those of us who formed the Creative Direct group in 2001 had two worries about this approach.  One was that common sense arguments are in some circumstances unhelpful – as in the fact that common sense tells us that the earth is flat and that sun goes round the earth.  It takes scientific method and analysis to show us that this is untrue.

The other was that the common sense approach leaves no room for those areas of direct marketing that have already been explored by science – most notably the psychology of perception.   Common sense gives instant answers – leaving the scientist struggling in the wake as he/she laboriously makes predictions and follows the scientific method.

We therefore started on a long journey, pulling together such scientific study as there had been, testing the claims of gurus and experts, and basically looking for the science in direct marketing, rather than the common sense in direct marketing.

Many of our results have been written up on the theory of direct mail web site www.theory.bz and I am glad to say that almost at the work started to produce results.  Here’s just one (very much abbreviated) example of how the scientific approach takes on the common sense approach.

Two leaflets were produced advertising a book and were mailed through random mailings on the same day to the target audience.   Mailing A contained a colourful leaflet that had colour images of the cover next to the text.   Mailing B consisted of a simple A4 sheet of text in black, on yellow paper with no colour illustration.   The text of mailings A and B was identical in each case.  (Numerous other tests were carried out to ensure we were isolating individual criteria – I won’t bore you with all the details here).

The “common sense” prediction was that mailing with the colour would get a better response rate, on the grounds that colour looks better, gives a more professional feel and more confidence to the reader that the person selling the book is more reliable.

The scientific evidence drawn from studies in the psychology of perception suggested that the non-colour piece would do better on the grounds that colour can interfere with the way the brain of these particular readers would handle the message being put across.

Now of course the scientific argument here is much more complex than that – and even the detailed review of the science written up on the Theory website is itself just a summary.  As a result many “common sense” writers have just shrugged off the scientific approach, deliberately or accidentally being highly selective in the way they report the experiments, and dismissing what was months of work in a sentence.  It’s unfortunate that this has happened, but there’s not too much we can do about that.

However for those who are interested, the fact is that the common sense predictions that colour would work better were proven wrong, and the scientific prediction was proven to be right.    The same has happened over and over again.  It doesn’t happen in every case – there are exceptions, and the theory successfully predicts what those exceptions are – and why they are exceptions.

In doing this work what we have found is that on occasion by moving from the common sense to the scientific approach it is possible to double response rates – quite often it is possible to do far more than that.

The attempt to develop a theory of direct mail is on-going, and if you know of scientific experimental research that is relevant, please do drop me a line (tony@hamilton-house.com). In the meanwhile I hope you find the information on the Theory site (www.theory.bz) of interest.

Below is a quote from the Email Marketing Journal, http://emailmarketingjournal.com I print quite a bit of it because it seems to represent where we are on the issue of using email as a marketing tool. It says that…

“More than 50% of internet surfers use email every single day, making this a very effective method of reaching them…. Email marketing is eco-friendly since there is no paper to waste….
Tracking is far easier with email marketing than it would be with direct mail. You can add special codes to let you know exactly which email is leading to which sales, even…. Even on a budget, email marketing can reach millions of people for a fraction of the price of direct mail.
With email marketing, your message gets to the potential client within seconds, rather than days or weeks.”

Now my problem with this is simple. There is not a single reference to response rates.

Email marketing response rates are the issue – who cares if half the planet reads what you write if no one buys anything. Who cares if you have saved a forest or two (given that the EU is self-sufficient in paper anyway). If you don’t sell nothing, nothing happens.

But somehow advertising like this does work, and does attract attention and does encourage people in to email marketing.

Now I am not saying that email marketing does not work – but I can say that it took me 18 months to move from getting a 0.2% response rate selling a £20 product to a generic list, up to 1.2%. Doing this I didn’t mail more people (obviously) – what I did was change the style and approach, modified the copy, and above all learned.

I am bemused as to why the message such as that put out above, continues to flourish, but it does.

If you would like to talk about raising response rates via email rather than just reaching more people, please do give me a call on 01536 399 000. There’s more about Hamilton House’s approach on www.yesmail.org.uk

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

I had an email from Drayton Bird recently which really had me worried    Here is the opening

Do you recall an old TV campaign for Barclays? It must have cost millions, and featured Samuel L. Jackson walking though the country accompanied by a most appealing pig.

Being a bit thick, I didn’t see what this had to do with banking.

So I asked an audience of 1,500 salespeople if they thought it would persuade a single person to switch to Barclays. One person did. Most of the rest thought it would do nothing – or actually lose customers.

Then I asked a class of marketing students what they thought. Not one could even understand it – and even if they had, the most lucrative customers for any bank are middle-aged or older.

Now I remember seeing the ads, and particularly remember the first time I saw final one in that series, in the cinema.  Samuel L Jackson says to his wife, “Honey its your birthday.  What do you want.  Name it you can have it.  Do you want a diamond ring?”  She says no.  “Do you want a gold necklace?”  She says, no.  “Well how about a world cruise?”  She says, no.  “So what do you want?”   She says, “A Divorce.”  He says, “Hell I wasn’t thinking of spending that much.”

Half the cinema audience collapsed on the floor - hoots of laughter.  Cheers, clapping.   the other half sat stony faced. 

So what does that tell us?   That Drayton Bird and I have a different sense of humour?   Yes, but more than that.  No advert appeals to everyone.  Although Drayton Bird and the other gurus love to give long chats and analogies about ads, it always seems to come down  to the same thing – “these are the golden rules of marketing”.

I admit I have done the same on the site www.theory.bz – but the first rule that we came up with was that you have to get inside the head of the audience you want to communicate with.   Barclays clearly has customers from all walks of life, and those cinema / TV adverts were aimed at one group.  Maybe they had done some work and found that they were under-reaching people with a sense of humour.   Or people who had been divorced.  Or even people with quite a bit of money.  Whatever it was, they made those ads to reach one group, and that means that other groups would not get the ad.

It’s an area I feel quite strongly about because I use a direct mail technique which does make some people send me anonymous letters saying that they will never ever use my company, and that I am a total idiot, and that no one will ever buy anything from me because I don’t know how to sell.    Fortunately for me I have not aimed my adverts at people who would send anonymous letters.

I don’t think Barclays are the idiots Drayton Bird thinks they are.   I would suggest no ad appeals to everyone, and the prime rule of advertising is, know what your audience wants to see and read.  You have to get inside the head of your intended audience.

Which leads me back to the most worrying thing in Drayton Bird’s piece: Then I asked a class of marketing students what they thought. Not one could even understand it – and even if they had, the most lucrative customers for any bank are middle-aged or older.

What the hell does that mean?  The middle aged or older people don’t have a sense of humour?  Or that we don’t have the intellect to understand a piece of surreal advertising?

I am starting to get very insulted here.

If you’d like to discuss the point, call me on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

There’s a funny thing that goes on when people create adverts. They start to think in clichés. Want to show you are green? Put up a pic of a polar bear. And don’t worry if everyone else is using polar bears (Ariel, EDF Energy, HSBC, Philips and Ben & Jerry’s) – people will know with us its real.

But no, we want to show we care about the future. I know, let’s use children. I know Philips, B&Q, EDF, and Earthwatch do it, but still. Children is good.

Exotic animals (HSBC, Eon and GE) or green fields (Eon, EDF, B&Q and Anchor Butter). Must do it because environment is good.

So what is the thinking? Simple – its that old game, “let’s do what the other guy does.” We see it in direct marketing all the time – and I mean all the time. Want to sell to teachers? Let’s have a nice image of happy children (in case teachers don’t know what children are) or maybe a cartoon of a Will Hay type figure in a mortar board in front of a blackboard.

Does repeating tired old images work? No, I don’t think so. Better to risk getting it wrong than to hit the same old buttons over and over.

When I started writing nonsense statements on envelopes (“This package is not microwavable” was last week’s piece) the phone rang and rang with customers and potential customers commenting on the campaign. I haven’t seen it done before (although I am sure someone somewhere did it – but the point is it is not common.)

Thinking outside the box is one of the most awful phrases that is overused, but it does convey what needs to be done. Better still throw the box away.

Normally I can smell a mistake at 100 paces – goodness knows I have made a few during my spell in direct mail. But the new Experian promotion has me stumped. Is it a disaster area, or a bit of post-modern irony or the cleverest campaign of all time?

If you’ve had a promotion from them – please do let me know. Here’s the details.

It is a big postcard. It reads…
——————————————

First impressions count.

Make a truly powerful impact every time.

As part of a successful agency, you understand the importance of checking the accuracy of your marketing data before committing valuable client budget….

Our FREE, no obligation Data Healthcheck will compare your marketing records with Experian’s expert business data sources… to give you a valuable view of your client’s data cleansing and enriching needs…

——————————-

All fine, except that we received 9 of these this morning. There were minor errors in the company name and address, but the most telling point was who these items were addressed to. Six of the nine people were no longer with us. One left in 1994, one in 1995, one in 1996, one in 1998 – the other two left in the early years of this century.

How could such a strategy make sense (given what is being sold)? And if it is a total utter mess, how come they kept on their database a person who left us 14 years ago? When someone leaves, surely they are deleted from the database? Because if not, well, then you could have a disaster.

But please do remember, I am not sniggering at Experian’s error, if so it is, and in a forthcoming mailing I’ll confess my greatest mistake. It is just the nature of the error that bemuses me.

To stay in touch with all the news in direct marketing, please email direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Tony

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

The Guardian this week carried a story about a simple but brilliant piece of hospital research.  The researchers wanted to know if an incredibly simple modification to what people in hospitals do when working with intravenous drips could cut infection rates.

Please don’t give up on me at this point – there is a real marketing issue here – and this is not about some complex medical procedure.  All the researchers instituted was a tick list.  The research set out to prove whether there were less infections when the medical team had a tick list covering all the basics - such as wash your hands, put on the gloves, and so on.

The result of the research was amazing – in a period of 18 months the level of infections dropped by 75%, 1500 people lived who (by the results being obtained before) would have died, and over £100 million was saved in terms of further medical intervention.

All from a simple tick list reminding people to do the obvious.

Now in marketing we don’t deal with saving people’s lives, but we do have to deal with money.  Just imagine what impacts we could all make through such tiny changes as this.  

There is just one problem.  While, in the medical sphere, there is a tradition going back hundreds of years of experiment and  research on the job starting from one principle and working out.  Of course I can’t talk about your work, and I’ll be delighted to receive your comments telling me I am wrong, but my experience in general is that very few marketing people do this type of research.   Certainly the great gurus of marketing tend to give little analogies, and check lists of do’s and don’ts.  No one encourages simple, but well thought out experiments outside of university departments.

Maybe its because “research” sounds too grand.  But as the tick box story (which is quite real – page 16 Guardian, Feb 23) shows simple ideas can be tried out to see what effect they have as long as the results are measured. 

20 years ago I sacked a designer and copywriter from the publishing company I was running because they had taken a promotion I had devised as a one colour one side piece on bond paper, and turned it into a two colour 3 fold item with tear off strip by the order form.  They didn’t go because they had done the research – that was fine.  It was that they produced a further 10 such pieces without waiting for the results of the first.   The results showed that my simple design cost half of theirs to produce, and brought in 8 times the level of orders.

My personal view is that we could all make a huge difference to marketing if we just said to ourselves – I wonder if things would work better if we did this….  Let’s try it for a week, and measure the result and it was that thinking that led to my creating www.theory.bz which draws together a lot of the research that has taken place.

If you ever do feel moved to try some research - or indeed if you have done so – and you would like to share your results, please do get in touch -  01536 399 000.   Tony Attwood

The amount of mail being received by schools towards the end of last year was far less than most people imagine, according to a survey by Hamilton House Mailings plc.

Many heads of departments received at most one direct mail advertisement per week. The survey was conducted during the Autumn Term 2007 and analysed the direct mail received by both primary and secondary schools in England.

Most notable was the huge variation in the amount of mail received in different subject areas.

While some subject co-ordinators and heads of department could go for weeks without receiving any advertisements, a small number of teachers got 3 or more a week. Interestingly the teachers who received the most mail were not the same ones as received the most mail two or three years ago.

Music teachers, for example, are now among the most heavily mailed in schools, whereas three years ago they were receiving very little mail.

Despite the fact that Hamilton House has regularly warned about the fact that headteachers in secondary schools get large amounts of mail that is screened out by the school administrators or the Head’s PA, there has been no decline in this area, with heads getting 10 times or more as much direct mail as the most heavily mailed head of department.

While it is worth mailing headteachers on certain occasions, most of the time the mail is better directed elsewhere.

The Report Direct mail to schools – A survey of the mail reaching schools in the Autumn term 2007 is available as a download from the Library section of the Hamilton House website for £5.00 plus VAT at http://tinyurl.com/2dqunt A full list of all the articles on the site is shown at http://www.hamilton-house.com/gateways/articles.html

Each day I take a small number of calls from people who tell me about their marketing, and who ask me to suggest what else they might do, or how they might change what they are doing in order to up their profits.

It’s part of the work I really enjoy, because each company is, of course, unique. There’s no charge for the service and there’s no obligation on the caller to become a customer of ours, nor for them to take any notice of my comments (although fortunately for me some of them do become clients as a result of the chat.)

Anyway, since the start of the year I have been recording the subjects we have talked about – and three topics come up over and over again. I thought I’d break away from the daily round of comments about how the industry is growing and what Postcomm are doing, and look instead at these three areas. Here’s the first one….

….which is database.

Databases are considered rather dull by many firms. They are there, but not really used – very few people who call me actually handle the wretched thing themselves.

But tweaking the database can, in many cases raise profits considerably. For a small investment many firms have been able to double their response rates.

What happens is that someone (we offer to do it, but the company can do it themselves if they wish) needs to analyse the mailing list that has been used against the orders coming in.

So, to take a simple example – imagine you are selling to accountants. You have a list of 10,000 accountants who you mail from time to time. 1% of them reply each time. An analysis of the master list and the buyers might turn up this interesting stat: 10% of accountancy firms on the list have over 10 staff, but 50% of the purchases are made by firms with over 10 staff.

This can have all sorts of implications. It can mean that one has to send something different to the little firms. It can mean that one needs to mail the smaller firms less, and the bigger firms more. Whatever it means, it is true that the mailer could cut the mailing costs by 90% but still retain 50% of the sales – which would mean a huge hike in profits although a downturn in turnover.

Another interesting approach with a database is to analyse it against a recognised master list. Again taking accountants, this could be put against the standard Thompson list, and the results might show that 30% of the addresses are wrong (that is they have gone away and are perhaps being forwarded from a previous address), 10% are duplicated, 15% have the wrong postcode (and so are not getting full mailsort discount), 5% of which are not accountancy firms at all. 40% might have phone numbers of faxes missing, 30% might have the wrong employee size, and so on and on.

The implication is that if one can sort all this out, the cost of each mailing is going to go down. There is actually no cost for doing this sort of analysis – although there is a charge for making the corrections.

What is so interesting is that most firms that use databases do so without undertaking any of these analysis – the lists just get older and no one really checks how good the lists are, or whether it is necessary to change the list, or just mail part of it. I guess because it all seems to be too much of a difficult task to look at – and there is always something else to do!

I’ll move on to the second topic shortly – but in the meantime if you want to have a chat about any aspect of your direct marketing, do give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

The Business List Audit which was created by the DMA to try and overcome the high levels of “gone aways” found in B2B lists, has collapsed.

The DMA claimed that only 12 out of 250 firms joined the scheme after it was launched 5 years ago. The scheme included the need for list companies to provide samples of their list to the DMA compliance team for verification.

A significant part of the problem – and one that the DMA was warned about when it launched the scheme – was that just checking the accuracy of a list was only one tiny part of the B2B direct mail issue. There is certainly an argument to be made that proper guarantees by the list supplier is a big issue. Further there is the question as to whether an individual list is really right for the promotion.

Hardly any companies that sell lists offer to look at the promotion that is going out, in order to see that it makes sense when used against the list. Thus the postal system is filled with badly written and/or wrongly targeted pieces – and the DMA Audit system said nothing on these issues.

To blow a trumpet I have sitting next to me as I write this, Hamilton House always offers to take a look at promotional copy and comment on it in terms of its impact to the chosen market, and the chance of success with the selected list. Most of our clients express surprise at this extra free service – which is very much not the norm across the DMA. If you want to use the service do give us a call on 01536 399 000 – or just email me the piece with details of the list you are thinking of using and your phone number, and I will call you back.

Tony Attwood

The most effective medium I have ever found for cold approaches is phone-mail-phone. You phone the person you want to get, check the name and tell him/her that you are going to send a piece in. No long chat, no detail, no questions other than checking the name and postcode. Use a native English speaker who knows enough about the UK to know how to pronounce such words as “Bicester” and “Leicester”.

Then send the direct mail, with its really exciting headline that forces everyone to read on.

Then phone up and say, “hope you got it – it had the headline xxxx”. (Don’t say, “did you get…” because the person will not remember that way – but if your headline is wonderful it will work.)

That works – but the problems are

a) it is expensive

b) it can slow you down, because you are sending out only as fast as you can do two phone calls.

I mention this because the National Client Email Marketing Survey has reported that 39% of firms think direct mail and telemarketing the most successful campaign media that can work alongside email marketing. 34% putting integrated email and telemarketing (without direct mail) in second place.

However, the DMA claim that on average companies only had email addresses for 50% of their database.

The DMA study also found email delivery rates were “slightly down” from last year, which it said was due to increased volumes and heightened competition in the sector. (Personally I think it is down to the fact that 98% of email is spam, and so the amount of stuff going straight to the junk box is rising).

There’s more about direct marketing on www.hamilton-house.com -

Tony Attwood