Tony Attwood's Blog

According to a piece in Brand Republic, one of the bit sellers of emails (TMN) has seen a “marked reduction” in email marketing revenues.

This surprises me because at our end we (Hamilton House Mailings) are seeing a growth in email marketing. I believe this is largely due to the fact that in the last year there has been a growing awareness of how email marketing can be made to work, which has resulted in significantly higher response rates for many campaigns.

I believe that at first a substantial number of companies seemed to take the view that you could simply take a piece of direct mail and transform it into an email, while others worked on a strong visual presence within the email.

However with more and more people having systems that mean that they screen out the illustrations within in, what that has meant is that many promotional emails do not carry any sort of positive look – because all there are, are “x” marks where the picture should be picked up from the web site behind the email.

The way around this – and this is what we have seen much more of this year – is to work on very exciting subject lines and headlines that are clearly not going to be affected by any filtering system that the recipient has in place.

My colleagues and I are always happy to talk about such matters both on the creative side and the supply of email lists. There’s details of our email lists on www.yesmail.org.uk – where we cover business lists, consumer lists and educational lists.

Tony Attwood

Given that I don’t buy pharmaceuticals from companies that advertise via junk emails, and I don’t know why anyone does, I wonder why the companies bother to send me so many emails.

In fact they bother, because even a response rate of one sale per 12.5 million is enough to make them good money.

Earlier this year researchers from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego did a study of spam by hijacking the Storm network that itself uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. Storm is said to have over 1 million machines under its control.

On the basis that they were only going to find out what it is like to be in the business by being in the business, the researches created several proxy bots to act as conduits of information between Storm and the 75,000 hijacked home PCs that send emails, sending out their own fake spam.

Two campaigns were run. One copied the way Storm works spreads using viruses and the other advertised a fake pharmacy selling what you’d expect it to sell.

The fake pharmacy looked like Storm’s site but always gave an error message when potential buyers clicked a button to submit their credit card details.

469 million junk e-mail messages were sent over all resulting in 28 sales – a response rate of less than 0.00001%. That would have given an income of around $100 a day. With the size of the full Storm operation that would make $7000 a day.

Because this is less than is reported in the more hysterical sections of the press it is possible that further attacks like this which could harm the spam operators.

Reassuring to know that people aren’t quite as silly as we are sometimes led to believe.

Tony Attwood – if you would like to talk about any aspect of direct marketing, give me a call on 01536 399 000

Although I track the number of hits this blog and other blogs I write get each day, I have never bothered to track what happens to the content after I have put it up.

And so it came as a surprise when one day I found an entire blog of mine reprinted on another site, without any acknowledgement to me.

Now it seems this is not uncommon. According to Biz Report (full reference at the end) Attributor Corporation in the US tracked online content from 100 publishers to see what happened to it.

It turns out that the content is used and re-used – so that most readers have more chance of reading it on another site, than reading it on the original.

There are ways around this. Most sites don’t carry copyright notices, and this can help. But more than that, the more idiosyncratic a site, the more likely it is not to be copied. Of course you might want your material copied – but the problem is that the people copying are unlikely to give you any mention or credit, so it tends not to do you any good.

But that does not make blogs pointless – a significant level of work comes into my company as a result of the various blogs we have – and I have read research that shows that blogs are more cost effective that google ad words as a form of on line advertising.

This blog is a reprint from a daily digest of direct mail news – you can subscribe to that free of charge by sending an email to direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

More information on the story:

http://www.bizreport.com/2008/11/thousands_in_revenues_lost_due_to_pirated_content.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=18112008

This year we’re cutting the costs of direct mail that we mail in January providing we can prepare it during December. The key point is that these mailings don’t have to go out during December – they can be held over for mailing until January – all we need is to have the materials to be able to fill the envelopes etc.

Where we receive the materials between 24 November and 12 December, we give a 20% discount on the envelopes and labour. If we supply the address list for either a business or educational mailing there is also a 20% discount there. Postage is obviously at the normal rates.

There’s a limit to how many of these jobs we can accept over this period – we offer the discount to try and spread the load between December (which is normally quite light for us) and January (which is often very busy.)

If you think you will have materials that you want to send out in January and which will be ready for us to process in late November or December, please do ring our sales team on 01536 399 000.

When you’ve mailed people several times and they still haven’t bought anything from you, there is always the temptation to mail the same stuff again. After all this time they might just be ready to buy – just as lots of other people have done before them.

As a tactic it can work – but it suffers from diminishing returns, and ultimately you get to the stage where you have mailed the potential customer half a dozen times or more and they still don’t reply.

What’s happening at this point is that the recipient is seeing the email or the direct mail piece and within a second is thinking, “oh its, XYZ Ltd, seen that, not relevant, in bin” and that is where it goes.

The only way to get around this is to write something utterly different – not just a simple change of phrase, but a whole change of direction.

But the big problem with this solution is that it looks very scary. I say this deliberately because I have had more rejections from clients of the emails, letters and brochures that I have written for them, which are seeking to solve this particular issue (that the reader has already seen the promotions many times) than anything else I write.

“But it doesn’t talk about us,” says my client. “This isn’t the image we put across,” “we don’t write like this,” and so on. “I don’t think we could say that,” they say, and I ask, “why not?” and they say, “It’s just not us.”

And the point is always – “how much do you want these sales?” I don’t lie in these pieces, I don’t promise things that are not true. I don’t make wild claims. But I just go “somewhere else” and that can bring in the sales. But if somewhere else is too scary, then ok, don’t go there. You can always save money by not mailing the people you have mailed already, because the chances are they are not going to buy if you send them the same stuff again.

What made me think of all this was the text I wrote recently for Perform, the theatre company. They, I am glad to say, didn’t reject my radical change of approach, and tried exactly what I said. Today I got an email from their MD, Will Barnett, which said that organisations “who have been ignoring us for years are suddenly picking up the phone…”

It’s always nice to know one can still do it.

So overall I’d say, yes it is possible to sell to those who have resisted in the past – but it takes a bit of rethinking. If you are stuck with this problem of reaching people who have heard from you many times before, do give get in touch. A good way to start is to let me see what you have done before (just email Tony@hamilton-house.com) and give me your phone number and details of the people you are mailing, and I will call you back.

This was the question put to me at a meeting of the East Midlands marketing elite as we gathered for our monthly meeting at the Toppled Bollard – Corby’s best known hostelry.

I launched into my speech by proclaiming that the originators of brilliant direct marketing campaigns generally employ 50 per cent genius, 40 per cent guts, 20 per cent irrelevance and 10 per cent dyscalculia.

My point is that with direct marketing it is easy to slip into the middle course so that one never takes the risk of either offending a reader or being accused of wandering “off message”.

But the problem is that such an approach tends to result in a certain level of blandness. This doesn’t matter when the product or service on offer is exciting, stunning, remarkable, overwhelming and better still, unique. But sadly we don’t always have such items to advertise.

When the product is one that is up against others of the same ilk then (I believe) we need take a different line – a line that of itself grabs attention, and makes the reader think, “?!?!” or words to that effect.

Certainly I can say that the most effective adverts I have written have wandered off the central highway, and had those who commissioned them shaking with a mix of disbelief and fear as they contemplate showing my work to their bosses.

Of course it is quite possible to write direct marketing adverts without going to such extremes, but still, a little frisson (which my dictionary helpfully defines as “an almost pleasurable sensation of fright”) doesn’t go amiss to my mind.

I know that sometimes you might receive emails and letters from Hamilton House Mailings which don’t always get straight to be the point. Indeed occasionally I get calls from people saying they aren’t quite sure what the point is…

So today, just for a change, I thought I would jump straight to the nub of the matter and say that….

Hamilton House has storage space available in its warehouses, at a rate of £2.75 per pallet per week.

There are no charges for receiving the pallets nor for loading them to return them to you. The only extra charges are transport (although of course you are free to organise your own), and retrieval of items from the stored pallets to meet a specific request.

There’s not even a minimum time period – although there is a minimum overall charge of just £50.00 plus VAT.

As an additional service we do also complete orders for some of our customers who use this facility, receiving orders, picking the goods and sending them out. Obviously the price here depends very much on the goods in question, but we are happy to talk this through.

For more information on this, please do call me on 01536 399 000.

There’s information on a wide range of Hamilton House direct marketing services on www.hamilton-house.com

Many people talk about “open rates” in email marketing – implying that they are able to judge the number of people who have actually seen an email, and that there is a clearly understood definition of what the word “open” actually means.

Our research has revealed several things – including some information on what the crooks are doing with emails. That might seem a bit off topic, and I’ll leave that bit until last but it does give a clue as to where the market might go.

In the meanwhile, here’s what we found out about “open” rates.

Depending on the software you use, open rates can mean any of these things:

· The number of emails actually received by people you emailed (even if the email went straight to a delete box through the use of some “message rules”). This will be the number sent minus those that never arrived because the mail box was full, or the system down, or the address discontinued.

· The number of emails clicked on by readers – but this clicking could mean clicking to delete the item as much as clicking to read it further.

· The number of emails where the recipient has clicked to reveal blocked images that are on a website that links to the email. The problem here is that our trials and research shows that when we put in such a link many people read the email without clicking, and others just delete it at once – thus the stats can be quite misleading. We feel the latter option (delete at once when the “reveal pics” message is shown) is growing, because of the increased awareness of the sophistication of cyber crooks (see below).

So the situation is unclear, and it is made worse by the fact that some software actually seems to record open rates twice for some emails. For example an email received might be clicked on once to open it up, but then if one clicked again to reveal the images or to go onto a site linked from the email, that produced a second “open” statistic. So the number of “opens” would include some emails where one recipient counted twice.

It’s all a horrible mess – made worse by the example of Outlook Express. Most people using OE can look at the content of their incoming email without clicking or doing anything else. Typically one window shows the sender and subject line and another shows the email itself. The recipient can read, and then delete. Is this “open” or not? No one can agree, no one knows.

Now I should add that I know that the response of some email statistics software companies is to say, “yes, there is a lot of rubbish out there, but ours works”. And I am perfectly ready to believe this – but all I can say is that we have not been able to lay our hands on any software which we can trial, which gives us sensible results.

The situation is exacerbated by the growth in agencies that handle email distribution for companies, rather than sell software that allows you to do it yourself. They email for you, and give you a set of statistics which cannot be verified. Worse, they often fail to define “open” – particularly in reference to Outlook Express where one can see the email without actually clicking on it.

The one statistic that does have a consistent meaning is “click through” – obviously defined as the action of clicking on a link within the email to a web site. The software can measure this clearly and straightforwardly and always gives us consistent results.

Indeed the fact that this statistic always works throws further doubts on all the other stats. If we can always measure “click through” and can verify the measurement through a set of tests, why do the “open” figures vary so much?

This raises another issue: what is the point of “open rates” at all? If I “open” your email, read a line, think it is rubbish (no offence) and press delete, and you count me as “opening” – so what? I haven’t read much, I haven’t clicked on the link…I don’t like what I read. What have you learned from this statistic?

I can see the point at one level – if 80% of people you sent the email to “opened” it but only 1% clicked on the link, we could say that your subject line was obviously good, but you lost it all in the message. But to do this I would need to be sure that “opening” was a real choice, and wasn’t incorporating within the count messages that were simply delivered.

In reality, because emailing is cheap, it is possible to sort this out in a much more positive and clear way by undertaking a set of experiments based around either
· the number of enquiries or sales you get or
· the number of people who click on your link.

To turn to the other issue that I raised, SC Magazine has published an interesting piece (full details below) about emails from cybercriminals. They point out this scenario…

· The user clicks on the link and is directed to a site where a Trojan file automatically downloads onto the user’s computer.

· The trojan then downloads an additional spyware file that captures sensitive information, such as bank account numbers (known as spy-phishing).

http://www.scmagazineuk.com/Cybercriminals-move-with-the-times/article/112273/

Now what strikes me is that by and large people are getting more and more cautious about email. They will look at emails (and using the Outlook Express example above they will do this without actually clicking on anything), and then decide if they want to read on.

At the moment I believe most professionals feel that they can recognise a criminal email when it pops up and hits them between the eyes because it is so obvious – the Nigerian scam, the sex pills, the tax refund, Britney Spears pictures, the bank website update (please re-enter you account details and password)…

What we all know is that the writers are sophisticated in their IT skills, but we rely on their lack of other skills – such as knowledge of grammar, an ability to spell…

But supposing the criminals start to get more sophisticated in terms of their ability to copy legitimate sites and in their use of the English language?

At that point fewer people would be willing to click on a link even if it looked perfectly reasonable and related to their profession. In which case the only way to sell by email will be to give information and offer not only the link to the online shop but also a phone number, a fax number and an address.

In fact, most serious players in the market do this, but a fair number of smaller firms don’t supply such background detail at all, and this could ultimately be their undoing.

In a sense I am predicting a movement in email marketing which moves away from all the high tech “click here” approach of the last few years, and back to treating the email as if it were a bit of direct mail, which is forced to rely on words to excite the readers. The links can still be there for readers willing to take the risk, but over time I suspect fewer will be willing to give a website a try, no matter how well the email is presented.

To conclude, if you supply a piece of software that measures open rates in emails, and you are willing to allow Hamilton House to test it for a week in a way that allows us to verify the answers, we’d be delighted. If the results fail to be consistent, then we won’t tell anyone, but if the results actually match our figures we’ll happily report the news through our news groups and on this web site.

If you’d like to explore ways of marketing your company through email marketing, do give me a call – no obligation and I’ll be happy to discuss with you the in’s and out’s of selling any particular product.

Tony Attwood: 01536 399 000

We are all used to getting junk emails. We can all recognise them a mile off. Bad grammar, every sentence ends with an exclamation mark, pictures that don’t load properly, crazy linguistic style, multiple colours and huge headlines that are almost bigger than the screen, use of certain set phrases that no one would ever say in a billion years, fake personalisation, broken links…

It’s a bit like describing a desk. Desks come in a million different shapes and sizes, but I know a desk when I trip over one. Same with junk emails – I know one when I see one.

Thus we look, and think – “junk”. Which is fine when it is junk – but not when it is a serious advert written by someone who does not know how to write adverts. Then the sender really goes down in our estimation.

About 50% of the email adverts that I am now sent to review, end up with my saying (in the nicest possible way) I am sorry, but I think you would be better off sending nothing – this could do you real damage.

Of course such ads can bring in one or two enquiries, but they will probably alienate many more people. Especially those who know a spot about the law – for example, that you are supposed to give the name and address of the company that is advertising, that you mustn’t send an advert for a private product to a person at work without their permission, and so on.

At the very least I would always say you should follow these four basic rules:

1. Collect half a dozen really good email adverts together and print them out, and ask, “why do I like these?”
2. Get a professional writer of email adverts to look at your piece before it goes out.
3. Test the email on a number of people who you can trust to give an honest opinion, and ask them questions including, did this look like junk?
4. If writing it yourself, only send out a small number at first.
5. Unless you are sure of your own skill get a pro to write it for you. It might seem a lot of money to pay, but it really can do a lot for your business.

Notice my slip – yup there were five points not four. Can’t win them all. (Now ask, have you ever seen a bit of total junk with a throw-away comment like this at the end? Just one of many ways of making your writing stand out from the rubbish).

Tony Attwood

There is a report doing the rounds at the moment, which has been commented on in several places, in which the following question is asked:

“What is your best performing mailer (postcard, voucher, 6×9 etc) and is the recent postage hike and weakened economy forcing you to re-adjust your direct mail strategy? If so, how and why?”

Apparently lots of people answered by saying that the postcard was best for retail, marketing, healthcare and software.

Which on the face of it, looks amazing. Except for one problem.

As a study of the psychology of perception shows, how a person reacts to a mailer depends very much on how well they know the sender. In one way this is obvious – I read postcards from my daughters word by word, I keep them, I read them again. I’m soppy that way.

A postcard from a firm I’ve never heard of selling something that I am not responsible for buying doesn’t get me going at all.

As I say, that’s obvious. But what is not so obvious is the fact that we make our decisions as to how to treat these item according to how we perceive the sender. That affects the amount of brain power we give to the piece. Then, whether we read the piece or not is further affected by how much brain power it demands (lots and lots for colour pictures, far less for text).

So without knowing whether the postcards were sent to customers in love with their suppliers or just to a cold list, and without knowing whether the postcard contained pictures and other high demanding things or not – we are not getting very far.

Likewise we don’t know if the people who said “postcards is best” actually tried testing against anything else – like A4 letters. And if they did, did they keep the content the same.

And then we don’t know if (perhaps by chance) they obeyed the rules of the psychology of perception on the postcards but not on the letter.

In short, we know nothing. It was, at least as reported, a wholly useless piece of research. There are snippets in there which are worthwhile but not enough to start giving us proper stats on which to make a judgement.

All this is bad enough – but the worst thing is that this piece of research is just how much people everywhere are repeating it without questioning it. No wonder quite a few firms in the US felt the rise in postage prices was affecting them if they really are following this type of generalised advice.

Tony Attwood