Tony Attwood's Blog

Remember when teachers, civil servants, police officers, ambulance staff, nurses, midwives, doctors and fire fighters crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, took billions in bonuses and paid no tax?

No, me neither.

But according to the reports following the budget schooling has been given a total of £1.2bn, plus 100 extra free schools, and childcare places have been doubled to 26,000 for England’s poorest two year olds.

It’s a fair old package, and clearly some people are going to benefit quite a bit from this upturn in expenditure.

I suspect the firms who are going to do best are those that kept going with their full on marketing during the last two years, because they have now got a head start.  But it should be possible for firms who cut back on their marketing to catch up by using the right sort of copy and approach.

I think the key is going to be the combined use of email and postal direct mail – just to rely on email (especially for larger cost purchases) is not going to give the school the feeling that the supplier is a solid, well-placed firm that knows education, rather than a firm that has just appeared to cash in on the £1.2 billion.

I really believe that the combination of benefit driven writing (rather than announcements) sent through email and postal direct mail, allied to a blog and an ever growing web site is going to be the answer.

If you want to talk about any of this, please do call 01536 399 000.  But at least let’s be thankful that the money is starting to flow once more.

Tony Attwood

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

Companies large and small tend to face the same problem in relation to the creative side of their advertising.

Put simply: they have a graphic designer (either within the company or as an outsider working on projects as requested) but they don’t have a copywriter.

In such circumstances what can often happen is that the text of advertisements is either written by the graphic designer or by a member of the company.

The problem with this is that just as graphic design is a complex matter that needs quite a bit of training, so does copywriting.  But because we can all write, there is often the feeling that the copywriting is not needed.   The fee of the graphic designer is signed off as part of the cost, while the fee of the copywriter is looked at askance.

However text is just as important as design – and indeed in the best adverts text and design work together, with both taking into account the psychology of perception.

The psychology of perception is the study of how the eye and brain view either an email or a web site or a sheet of paper – and believe me this is not something that is common sense or obvious.  The eye, for example, doesn’t start at the top of the page and work down. 

So I would always say, if you really want to improve the response rate on any advert you should consider the text, and the design, and the issues of the psychology of perception all at one go.

If you would like to see how this is done, at no cost, in total confidence, and with no obligation, just email me a copy of one of your adverts and I will call you back, and talk through any issues I see there.

You can reach me on 01536 399 000.

Meanwhile, I do a short daily commentary on adverts I receive through the post or via email on the CreativeDirect news letter.   You can subscribe to this free of charge by sending an email to creativedirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com, and then replying to the confirmation email.

You can also follow us on Twitter @HHMailings.  

Tony Attwood

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

It has regularly been reported that Google makes endless changes to its search algorithm, most of them unannounced.  It is a battle of wits to outsmart those who try to manipulate the Google situation, to get their sites at the top of the page.

This is why it is always a dubious practice to hire someone knowledgeable in the “black arts” of tweaking a site just for Google.   Such people might well know what’s what today – but within a month of finishing the job you can find yourself left with a site that is slipping down the rankings.

What’s more, some tweaks for the sake of Google, might actually make the site less user friendly than it was in the first place.  In other words you go up the rankings, but then don’t get more sales.

Of course few firms suffer the extreme that I discovered with one of our clients a while ago – when I reported that I couldn’t get on their web site the company owner told me it was because he had one of the very best search engine optimisation companies working on it and they had probably taken it down for a short while as part of the changes.

I kept telling him that the site was down every day for a week, at which point he discovered that the guys had taken the money and run.

Now I am not suggesting that this happens a lot, of course, but I do think that for most companies search engine optimisation can be a lot simpler than you might think.

In essence it means writing lots and lots of articles about your products, service, and all the things around them – focussing much of the time on the way in which people might pose questions about your products or services.

If you want to go beyond that, try and get a real high flying site to link from themselves into one of your articles.

In the simplest of terms, that’s what you need to do.   Of course the writing of the articles takes a bit of skill and takes time - and that’s where we come in.   If you are interested, do give us a call.

We can even build the site for you – there’s details on http://www.hamilton-house.com/webdesign.html   Taking your web site up the rankings can also be part of the Velocity programme – we’ll be pleased to tell you more.

Do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Whenever research is carried out into why companies or individuals have left one supplier and gone to another the dominant answer is, “I hadn’t heard from them for a while” followed by something along these lines: “I saw an advert from this other firm, and couldn’t remember who it was I used to buy from, so thought I would give the new firm a try.”

 Those comments come up again and again.  In short they say, my regular supplier took me for granted, and so I went elsewhere.

 But there’s a third comment that is made when such surveys are done – and it is getting much more commonplace.  It says this….

 ”I got sick to death of them bombarding me with email ads all the time, so I went elsewhere.”

 Which leads to the question: where is the balance?  If you can lose customers by not writing to them enough, and you can lose customers by bombarding them, what do you do?

 The answer comes in two parts.

 First, you need to make your communications interesting.  Just hitting the reader with big pictures and tales of discounts doesn’t work.   You must find a way to say something interesting to the reader each time you write, that is more than just a price announcement.

 Of course what you write about will be dependent on what you are selling.  For some it will be a discussion on issues of interest, for others with new products emerging all the time, it might be some background on whatever is new.   But if the latter is the case, you must be aware that you can’t go around claiming that each new product is the best, must have, amazing deal that they have ever seen.  You are communicating regularly with people so you have to treat them with some respect.

 Second, it is not a bad idea to have two lists.  One which writes to interested people perhaps every day, or maybe two or three times a week and another that goes out once a week, or maybe a couple of times a month.

 I am often told that “everyone will get really fed up with us if we write to them each week”, but all the evidence shows this is not so, if you make your writing interesting enough.   But not writing very often is certainly a sure fire way to lose your client base.

 It really is a down to you!

 How to avoid losing your existing client base is typical of the sort of issue that we regularly discuss and resolve with our Velocity customers.  If you would like to know more, there’s details of Velocity on www.velocity.ac – or please do call 01536 399 000.

 Tony Attwood

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

No matter where you look, direct mail levels are on the rise, for the simple reason that customer activity in terms of responding to postal direct mailing is on the rise.

There’s several reasons as always, but the key is that we have moved from a position of 10 years ago where direct mail could be seen as junk mail which destroyed the rain forests (the fact that you can’t use trees from rain forests was of course neither here nor there).

Email is seen as cheap, cheerful and full of spam.  It can still work if the text overcomes the current email image, but you have to work at it.  Direct mail via the post is seen as more serious and more worthy of consideration.

Even the banks are back in on the act 582 different financial direct mail campaigns were tracked in September 2011.   A total of 68 different bank creatives were monitored in the

month. The highest mailing company this month was Lloyds TSB, which issued 16 different creatives, followed by Halifax, with 8.

Elsewhere Nielsen tracked 1,928 different consumer direct mail campaigns in September 2011.    347 different mail order campaigns were tracked.  Estimated sector direct mail spend for the month was £26.91m.

Interesting Campaigns This Month:

Nielsen also tracked 251 different food, drink, drugs, health & FMCG

campaigns in September 2011

Tony

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

Google is changing the way it reports searches.  It will give more emphasis to recent events and regularly recurring events.

So the implication within Google is that readers  expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago.

There will also be an advantage to pages that have frequent updates and regular changes of information.  

All of which means that the people and companies who update their web sites and blogs regularly are more likely to come out in a higher position in the rankings than those that leave their pages there.

You may feel this is unfair, since you are in a business that simply doesn’t move – but my view remains that it is possible to write about all forms of activity and productivity each day.   After all, one can hardly say that direct mail changes each day, and yet we find something new to say all the time (or at least that is my view of what is going on here!).

If you would like to talk about how to keep your blog or web site up the top of the Google rankings, do give us a call on 01536 399 000.   Likewise if you don’t have a blog, or you don’t have the power to update your web site regularly, we can certainly do that for you.

Building a web site can be incredibly low cost – details are on http://www.hamilton-house.com/webdesign.html

Similarly blogs can be very quick and simple and low cost to set up.  Details on http://www.hamilton-house.com/blogs

Taking you up the Google rankings is also part of the Velocity programme, if you wish to use that.  Details there are on www.velocity.ac

Tony Attwood

Sometimes good ideas come to an end – and that seems to be the case with free reports or “white papers” as they are sometimes known.

It is not that they are not read at all now, but rather that so many people have caught onto the idea that it is vital to make the reports more catchy, more interesting and basically more vital.  Too many people have offered very boring reports that are little more than adverts.

Estimates are that “white papers” are getting 22% less take up, as are “case studies”.

What is interesting however is that the vast majority of companies have not responded to this change and are staying with the strategies they already use.

But the big under-utilised asset for companies remains the web site which many who study the business see as the ”clear leader in online lead generation” 

According to Demandbase many firms still report that their corporate site is their top source of leads – more than report emails this way.  That doesn’t mean email marketing is not on, but rather that web sites work better – and the emails must be promotions that lead to web sites.

Eden Platform in another survey found that a standard web page can deliver much more value than most sites realise.  

In this study each page on a small business website produced an average of 55 unique visitors during the measurement period.

Amazingly, adding one new page of content to a business website each week can be as effective as having a £50,000 advertising budget, the study concluded.

Of course it is never quite as simple as this, because the site has to engage the potential customer and get matters moving from this point on – but that can only happen when you are adding new material all the time to the web site.

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

I recently saw some research into how many firms admit they have problems with their lists of customers and potential customers.

I was shocked.  Not because of the high numbers but because of the low numbers.

Just out of curiosity I have occasionally kept records of how many mailings I get either at home or at work arrive with my name written wrongly, or my company name written wrongly, or my address written wrongly.

The number is astonishingly high – around 40% of the mail I get makes at least one mistake.

And yet I know that some firms take the view that this doesn’t matter because the letter got to me.

I don’t think this is right – I think that we do notice when an address or name is written wrongly, and generally we are not impressed.  We also notice when we get duplicates.

Now I know that in saying all this I am opening up the chance for you to write back and say, “Hamilton House is not so good, you’ve been mailing xxx at my firm for years and he left 5 years ago.”

That’s not good – not good at all – and I would like to omit that totally.  But in my defence I would say the aim is not zero errors, but rather error levels that are below 5%.

The research by Experian suggested that 20% of firms know that their databases of customers are inaccurate, the same number admit they have lost customers because of inaccurate data, and over a quarter say they know they are sending out duplicate mailings to the same address.

That’s the problem – because it means that the rest don’t know they have a problem – and yet that problem is causing them harm.

If you are interested in how databases can work for you and make money you might like to take look at http://www.datapost.org.uk/

You can follow our discussions on Twitter @HHMailings and on www.blog.hamilton-house.com or call 01536 399 000

Tony Attwood

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

I recently found an exceptionally good reason to use Twitter – as a backup when a web site goes down.

Of course web sites don’t go down that often, but when they do it is a pain and a half – and it can happen to anyone at any time.

It recently happened to some of our sites, and one great way around the problem that we had was through letting people know what was going on via Twitter.  Of course not every reader of our site also subscribed to us via Twitter, but quite a few did, and we quickly found that they were passing on the news of what was going on to others.  Quite a discussion started in fact.

Being on Twitter is just a tiny detail in terms of marketing, but then quite often marketing is made up of tiny details.

If you want to talk more, give me a call on 01536 399 000 – you can also follow us on Twitter @HHMailings and read the blog: www.blog.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

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