Tony Attwood's Blog

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.

Today I received the same email 25 times. It was not the normal sort of internet stuff advertising something that is irrelevant to me, but quite a well written piece relating to the field in which I work.

But not only did I get multiple copies, the sender had put a request that I respond to acknowledge I had got the email.

Worse still, this sender has done this to me three or four times before.

Not properly deduplicating a list is an inexcusable sin, since good transmission software will do this automatically. The problem is this sender is almost certainly using something like Outlook to send out multiple copies, rather than a proper program (you can tell because the “to” line says the name of the sending company, rather than my email address).

Of course if someone has several email addresses then it is harder to de-dupe, but this company emailed me at the same address over and over.

That is bad enough, but putting a request for me to acknowledge receipt is really annoying. It takes an extra click to get rid of that request. But there’s a separate point on receipts, and one that some firms seem to ignore.

This company puts this in every time it emails me. I never reply – but I keep getting these emails. So why ask for acknowledgements? All decent software will tell you when you hit a dud address, so what’s the reason?

Who knows, one day I might want the services that this company sells, but instead of thinking “oh, didn’t I get something from a firm that does this…” and then going back and finding them, I now know I will never ever deal with them as they have annoyed me so much.

That really is a key lesson in email marketing. Try hard not to annoy people. If you don’t think about that, your email campaign could work in exactly the opposite way from the way in which you want it to work.

If you would like to talk about marketing using emails, please do call 01536 399 000.

You might also enjoy our report, How to write advertising that works today, which is available free at http://goo.gl/6Jy1U

Tony

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

Is there really one way of doubling the effectiveness of your advertising?

With all the technological changes that his us each day, it is sometimes easy to lose track of some fundamental points.

Such as the fact about headlines. Headlines are the most read thing in a direct advertisement, be it an email, a postal mail shot or a web page.

Headlines need to be engaging and interesting – forcing the reader to read on. Generalisations such as “50% off special offer!” don’t work because they are general. It is like saying, “For all your telecoms requirements”. It doesn’t draw us in.

Closed questions don’t work either. Such as “Would you like to bring in more sales each week?”

What works are interesting questions (“What is the most polluting car on Britain’s roads” or “Is there really one way of doubling the effectiveness of your advertising?”

When writing an email, the headline doesn’t have to be the same as the subject line (there is a need for subject lines to be short, because of the way many people have their email systems set up). But both need to be interesting.

Headline writing is an art – when I write a piece I usually spend as much time on the headline as I do on the rest of the piece. So don’t rush it.

If you would like to have a review done of any of your advertising, send me over a copy as an attachment to an email and I will call you back with my thoughts.

If you want to try someone else writing your adverts for you, then that’s fine – that is what we do as part of the Velocity service or on a one-off basis. Call 01536 399 000.

And if you want to think further about writing sales letter, emails, web pages, blogs and the like there is an article “How to double response rates” on http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/How%20to%20double%20response%20rates.pdf

I wrote last week about background advertising; the approach to keeping your company’s name in front of teachers, even when they are not thinking of buying. The aim of course is to make sure that they think of you when they do come to buy. (In case you missed it, there’s a full report on background advertising to schools on our blog – see the link below).

Background advertising is helpful – but you will also need to market your product or service very positively to teachers from time to time – and that’s what I want to turn to today – foreground advertising.

Perhaps the most powerful approach to foreground advertising that there is, is known as EPE – which is short for Email / Postal / Email.

EPE starts by sending an email to the teacher that you want to reach in which you highlight the benefits of your product and give a link to your web site. At the end of the piece you also say that you will shortly be sending out some more information in the post.

Part two of EPE involves sending out that postal campaign – normally a letter and a brochure or a leaflet.

Finally you send a second email which says that the brochure has been sent, but that if the teacher didn’t get the letter then you will happily send another one. You also give the link to the web site again.

The EPE process is especially powerful when the emails and letters are addressed to teachers by name. The service works because it allows you to reach teachers three times, without the teachers feeling that they are being swamped by promotions, and encourages those who normally only read emails to look for your postal promotion, and vice versa.

Best of all you don’t have to invest a fortune in EPE, because it can be tested with a small trial mailing at the start.

A trial run of 500 schools including two sets of emails (where ever possible to the personal email addresses of the teachers you want to reach), followed by a postal campaign and then a second email, costs just 59p per school.

If, once you have seen the sales generated by the 500 school trial, you decide to go ahead and undertake an EPE campaign to a further 4500 schools the price per school for this promotion drops to 49p.

You can of course select the types of school that you want to mail by age range, funding, location etc, as well as the role in the school of the teacher you want to reach.

The prices include email transmission, use of the relevant lists, postage and packing. In fact the only thing not included is the printing – although we can of course quote for that if you wish.

The full report on background marketing to schools is on…
http://www.blog.educationmarketing.org.uk/2012/01/03/how-some-did-well-in-school-marketing-last-year/ For more information on that, or on EPE please call 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

There are some people in the search engine optimisation industry who seem to suggest in their advertising that not only can they get your site to the top of a particular search, having done that, your site will stay at the top of the list for that search.

I am not at all sure this is a fair promise.

Last year Google sent a lit of sites down the lists and although they had a pause at the end of the year, I don’t think they have finished.

Indeed as a result of Google changes some sites have lost 50% of their income – but there is a solution. It is called a “complete make over” of the site.

This involves taking out poor articles that seem just to be there to take the site up the search engines. Indeed anything that seems to exist just for the benefit of search engines needs to be questioned in my view.

Likewise a site that is packed solid with adverts and links is likely to drive readers away, and it is just possible that one or two people will eventually write to a search engine to complain about the site being top of the list.

What you should do however is not only update and develop your content continuously, you should also check for all the links on your site and make sure they are working.

Finally absolutely avoid pushing lots of key words into a site, just to get up the ranking. It is a simplistic trick, and like all simplistic tricks, Google et al are used to it. Key words should always be used meaningfully within the content.

In short, more and more sites that try to trick Google are coming unstuck. Good links in and out, good and helpful articles, and lots of them, and a site that is regularly updated, are what Google likes.

You can read more of our comments on www.blog.hamilton-house.com and follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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

We can none of us afford the sort of promotional activity that Google engages in, but it is always worth keeping an eye on Google because they tend to know exactly what works. Put the other way around, Google tends to avoid marketing that does not work.

So here’s their current idea. Google is paying bloggers to run posts promoting its Google Chrome browser.

Which is rather interesting because Google has always been officially against paid links – although this is what they are getting here.

But it seems that they really do know a good idea when they see one, and blogs that mention their product in a positive way is apparently seen by Google as a good thing.

What is interesting is that some of the bloggers text really isn’t that good (at least in my opinion, and in the opinion of a couple of other commentators who have picked up on the story).

I suspect Google know that while good copy is better than average copy, average blog copy is better than none at all.

The fact is that it is increasingly widely recognised that blogging is a very good way of getting the message across.

There’s more on blogs at http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs

And you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood