Tony Attwood's Blog

Gathering email addressees of customers is obviously a benefit. But why do so few firms do it?

If you have a list of the email addresses of both your customers and your potential customers, you can contact them regularly, at a very modest cost.

Of all the things that one ought to do in terms of marketing, this is the one that I believe should be just about top of the list. It brings in results, and is fairly inexpensive.

That seems fairly obvious, which is why it is interesting to note that the majority of companies don’t actually have such lists.

Many excuses are given for not having a list: people get annoyed if you email them too much, we’ve tried getting the list but people won’t tell us, the person placing the order is an administrator, and we want to email the buyer, the list goes out of date too quickly, we tried emailing but our service provider said we were spamming…

As you can imagine, we’ve worked on all of these issues at different times and managed to resolve them all. I won’t take up your time here and now going through the answer to each one, but if you want to email or call me I will be pleased to let you know my thoughts.

But such objections still leave one question unanswered. Although it is not that hard to get the right address of customers, how does one get the email addresses of non-customers?

In fact there are three ways of doing this – and again I am very happy to talk them through. Which approach applies to you depends on what you sell, but it really can be done.

Apart from the fact that emailing customers and potential customers brings in more work for a modest outlay, the creative work that goes into such emails can be placed on your web site or blog. Over time it will be picked up by potential customers searching for your type of product, and this in itself can be another form of very low-cost advertising.

I really do recommend developing such lists. To talk through any of these points please call me on 01536 399 000 or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

I am a great enthusiast for blogs, simply because I have made them work. Twitter is ok too – there’s 3000 followers on the Twitter site associated with my test blog, and I guess they must like being there, because the number keeps growing.

But Facebook?

I have my doubts, and those doubts were highlighted by the finding that although some top brands have Facebook pages, many don’t bother to answer customer questions. In a survey in the USA questions posted on the Facebook pages of Victoria’s Secret, Radio Shack, and the like were simply ignored. (Of course some places do get it right and reply quickly, but others deleted questions that were posted on their wall, regardless of whether the retailer answered the customer’s question or ignored it.

Indeed it now seems that some places having opened their Facebook page, have now shut it again.

But then we live in a world in which 2/3rds of consumers report changing who they buy from each year, because of poor service. I suspect it is the same in the B2B business world too.

Facebook like all other approaches to marketing, needs continuous monitoring. Just as it looks bad to put up a blog, and then not write anything on it, so not handling the ins and outs of Facebook doesn’t work.

One commentator on Facebook issues said that firms, “need to realize that two days in Facebook time is like two years in real-time. Consumers are used to real-time engagement with friends on Facebook, so it’s unnatural to spend days waiting for any kind of response.”

One place to start: the report noted that only six companies in the test included a phone number or an email address on their Facebook pages!

Personally I would still say, don’t even think about Facebook until you have got the Blog up and running. I am by no means an expert on Facebook, but if you want to talk about blogs or Twitter, do give me a call. 01536 399 013. (Our blog is at www.blog.hamilton-house.com)

Tony

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

If you have ever had a situation in which you have found a member of staff spending more time on Facebook than is spent doing their job, you’ll probably realise where I am going with this one.

If you have ever found a member of staff rubbishing your company on his/her Facebook page, you’ll probably have got angry.

Facebook can be a problem. And just how difficult Facebook can be as an issue can be shown through two highly contrasting issues.

First, the chair of the Headteachers’ association in the UK said last year that the biggest problem UK education faces is Facebook. He was referring to the habit of parents putting malicious comments and gossip about schools and teachers on Facebook. In response to the threat many schools write to parents and demand that they take offending pages down.

Second, in the US there is a growing number of companies that request social media user names and passwords from employees or job applicants. They also are known to sit down with employees or applicants to review their social media pages or ask that the pages be printed out for review. It is said (although not widely publicised) that university courses that are over subscribed with high quality candidates, will look at the candidates Facebook page to see if it co-incides with what is claimed in the application document.

The habit of employers asking for passwords has caused concern and there is talk of legislation in the US to prohibit this practice. But there is a growing tension on both sides, I feel. People want the right to express their views about those who employ them, or teach their children. Employers and employees want protection against malicious gossip.

HHM doesn’t have a Facebook page. We have lots of web pages and blog pages instead. Should we have a Facebook page? If you think so, please just click reply and tell me, and everyone else on the group, why.

Tony

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According to reports in New York, the city is about to establish its own internet domain appendage – .NYC. The idea is that it will make the city “a beacon of innovation”.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has agreed and a contract is being set up with a company (curiously not in the city) to sell the names.

Which raises two questions. First, are any UK cities going to do this (there is presumably nothing to stop London setting up .London as a domain number if it really wanted to – as far as I know). Are unusual extensions worth it?

Over the years my company has experimented with various extensions, and tested the argument that for a UK company .co.uk or .org.uk is the best there is. Generally I would agree, and where we need a new domain I always look first for a .uk Thus when the part of our company that runs courses set up the School of Educational Administration I found www.admin.org.uk was available and we took that. When we launched the Professional Writers’ Diploma Course we couldn’t find anything to do with “writing” that was available, but www.exceptional.org.uk was, and that fitted.

But sometimes there are no .uk addresses, so rather than build a long convoluted address we do look elsewhere. Our postal and email marketing service Velocity is at www.velocity.ac and our service selling personal email addresses of teachers is at www.emails.gs These work very well – the emails.gs address for example often leads people to say “What is gs”. I then explain that it is South Georgia, near the Falklands, and that such addresses are available to buy, providing no one on the islands wants the address. “Since the islands have no population, normally there is no problem,” I explain. (I don’t know if this is strictly true, but it is a good story).

So to my mind, having an unusual extension on an address can work well and be noticed. .uk is good if you get a really good name – otherwise search around. Or persuade your local authority to set up an appendage of its own. (I have suggested .Northants to my local council, but they don’t seem very excited by the idea).

Tony

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

So forgive me a little bit of chest pumping when I say that I was one of the first people to suggest that story telling makes a good ad format in postal and digital advertising.

I mention this now, because it seems that story telling as advertising is taking off – but I was there experimenting with adverts which are stories about 15 years ago, with a series that became known as the Toppled Bollard stories. They were about 300 words long, were sent out as single A4 page sales letters through the post, and told of my exploits as a not very good salesman with a propensity for visiting a very dissolute public house (The Toppled Bollard).

The campaign was a huge success for Hamilton House, but what was interesting was that although the stories drew people into the company, when they commissioned writing they rarely wanted a story.

I’ve written quite a few stories for clients since, some as one offs, some as blogs that last up to a year, and experimented with other ones myself. The story of a company that installs toilets into public buildings and which finds itself on the wrong end of an alien invasion. The story of a marketing company in which one member of the team boasts that he could write a successful campaign for even the most disreputable run down company in the town. The story of the glass company in which the owner decided to improve the company’s image by giving the firm an Italian name – with unexpected consequences. The story of meeting a lady at a party who hunts woolly mammoths in Russia, and warms them up with a hair dryer. (Actually that story is true – not just some wild invention on my part).

I like these stories because I like writing humour, and I have no doubt that it works superbly well, but of course other formats and styles are possible. No one has ever asked me to write a set of adverts as a murder mystery, but I am sure it could be done.

Anyway, now it appears Revlon is giving the format a try according to Marketing Magazine. Specifically, it said, the ads will feature its brand ambassadors Olivia Wilde and Emma Stone and have them focus on ‘storytelling’ rather than models wearing the products. “This is a fresh step forward for us; it’s very different from what we have done before,” Julia Goldin, the company’s global chief marketing officer told the publication.

I can only hope that the Revlon move will encourage firms working in the direct marketing field to give it a go.

Tony Attwood

If you would like to know more about our work there are details on www.hamilton-house.com or you can call 01536 399 000.

One of the interesting innovations from Google of late is their decision to give companies starting up new campaigns a personal assistant for a month to help them get their Ad Words campaigns running.

Always keen to pass on information about how direct marketing works we’ve decided to take up the offer, and we’re going through the whole process with Google, letting our personal assistant put forward the ideas and running with them.

The one big thing that has shot out immediately is that their style of writing adverts is absolutely not the style of writing that I would use. Indeed looking at our adverts that are up on Google Ad Words at the moment I find myself cringing.

But a test is a test, so we’ll see how they go. If we don’t get the sales in return for the cost I will of course change the ads and see what happens next.

One other interesting point made to us by our helper is that if we keep the campaign running at the high bid rate that they recommend that will greatly affect our position in the rankings on Google. And I have to say that seems to have happened very quickly. It is almost a way to buy yourself a higher ranking!

Following this exercise we shall be making Google Ad Words part of our Velocity campaign for any firms who sign up to Velocity and want to include this type of work. We are running quite a few campaigns through our month’s trial and we’ll make all the evidence we gain from this available to our Velocity customers.

I’ll report back further as more information comes in.

Meanwhile you can follow all our commentaries on www.blog.hamilton-house.com
Tony

Reports from Marketing Vox suggest Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.”

They quote Matt Cutts of Google saying that a penalty will be introduced in the coming weeks in order to “level the playing field,” between sites with great content and sites that have okay content but do a better job with SEO.

This might be a part of the revamp I mentioned the other day through which there will be more emphasis on the meaning of site content rather than catchy individual words. As Marketing Vox says “The goal is to better recognize the value of information on websites and select which data to show in search results.”

So the focus on keywords will go, and everything will be about good information. I must say this is making me really happy, because the whole emphasis that HHM places on sites is good information on the sites that we work on.

Tony Attwood

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

There is a line on our web site that says “Be different, be continuous”

There is another phrase that is sometimes used in marketing books which goes “Repeat the line, repeat the line, repeat the line”.

Basically they are similar bits of advice which in summary say, “Come up with a good marketing angle, and then use it over and over”.

You don’t have to come up with new ideas all the time, but you do have to come up with something – something that distinguishes you from the competition, a unique selling point that really is unique, a style that no one else uses…

And when you have it, stay with it, so people remember you that way.

In direct marketing this is easier to achieve that in many media, because so much direct marketing is so poor that anything that is decent by itself attracts attention and really gets the message through.

What you really need to do is either make what you sell the story (because it is interesting, unusual, different) or make the advert the story (because it is interesting, unusual, different).

Then you create all your adverts in that style, until the campaign ends. You don’t suddenly drop the approach and start telling people facts. You get them interested and excited. The facts will be on your web site, or in your catalogue.

If you would like to talk about this further, do call me on 01536 399 000.
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

Following my article about how you should be careful how you try to get yourself up the rankings, I now notice that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is about to change all the rules totally.

The new approach is called “semantic-search” and the idea is to reflect the value of information on websites, rather than simply focus on keywords. In other words Google think they now have a way of looking at a whole web page and seeing how useful it is.

In theory the Google Ads that are placed in relation to searches should be more relevant because the search results themselves are more relevant. This means (if it works) that Google Ad Words should bring in more results for each £1 you spend, because you are more likely to have your advert seen by the “right” people. (We are experimenting with a new series of Google Ads at the moment, and I’ll come back with the result in a few weeks once we see if there is anything different happening).

Now some people don’t think this is much of a change – some argue that Google is already doing most of this. But then there are others who say, yes, Google has been doing this for some time, but now it has got the technology right and it is releasing the information publicly.

It was Sir Tim Berners-Lee who first looked forward to the day in which “computers can perform the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web,” and that seems to be where all this is going.

But whatever your view one thing seems sure. More and more what Google values is web sites that have really interesting information on them which the reader wants. It doesn’t like snippets, re-publishing of old articles, links for the sake of links etc etc.

And what I like is that this is the strategy that we have taken with our experimental football site with such effect. We noticed from the start that many sites were just republishing other people’s articles without any new insight or thought. So while we have never been averse to taking other people’s articles as a launch point, we have tried to add our our input. And it seems to have worked. (Type Untold Arsenal into Google if you want to see what we are up to).

Good quality interesting content takes you up the rankings, or so it seems to me.

Tony Attwood

The trouble with people who claim that they can get your web site up the rankings is that they often don’t tell you how they do it. And the problem with that is that quite a few of their tactics can actually harm your site dramatically.

For example, if you have good links in and out, you go up the rankings. The web site that I have run for three or four years on which I do my experimenting has links into it from four very high ranking sites – and as each of those came on line we saw a huge shift in our popularity and our position in the rankings.

But some people will like to buy their way in by paying sites with good rankings money to put in a link. And if the search engine spot you doing this on any scale, you could be damaged. Some sites (such as the clothing giant JC Penny http://www.jcpenney.com/jcp/default.aspx) got removed from Google totally for this last year.

Another banned technique is called cloaking which involves giving one set of content to a search engine but having different content for the visitor. In this the web server sends different content based on whether the request is coming from a search engine or a Web browser. You know if you have hit one of these if you do a search, click a link and find yourself on a page with very little content, but lots of links.

There are other tricks – but the key thing in my view is to ask for exact details on how the search engine optimisation works, and look at examples.

If you come into our Velocity programme that is exactly what we do. We show you how we do it, and we tell you what we do.

Of course taking you up the rankings is just one of the things we do in Velocity – the details are on www.velocity.ac

Or call 01536 399 000.

Tony