Tony Attwood's Blog

I have been arguing for some time that after five years or more of email being the dominant form of direct advertising, postal mail has made a come back.

But my comments have brought the response that postal direct mail might be ok for the big corporates, but small companies simply can’t afford to advertise through the post.

I disagree – but more to the point I think that such comments reveal that we have lost track of the noble art of testing a campaign.  Let me explain why.

In days gone by, few people went dashing straight into a postal campaign, mailing out 5000 or 10,000 leaflets or brochures at a time.   Mostly they preceded the mailing with a test run.  Then if the test run worked they would move on to the full mailing, secure in the knowledge that promotion would work.

Quite how large the test mailing had to be depended on the response rate required to make a profit.   There is a formula for this but whenever I have quoted it, it has generated more confusion than illumination, so I’ll leave that until the end – and instead give a couple of examples.

Let’s imagine you want to get a 3% response rate to a postal mailing.  With this you can mail out 200 letters at random, and if you get 6 replies you know you are on course for your 3% – so you can go ahead and mail the full list.

This experiment will cost you about £100 – when you come to mail out large numbers the cost will drop as you will get postal discounts so the profit will rise.

But you should not think of this as £100 written off.  Even if you don’t get your full 3% response rate you will probably get one or two sales, which while it won’t make you a profit will reduce the cost of the experiment.

Because of this, companies that are masters of postal direct mail tend to do regular experiments with their postal mailing, often sending out several variant promotions at the same time, to find the best one.  As we have shown in the past, changing just the last two lines of a sales letter can have a major effect on the response rate.

The only problem with this approach arises if you need just a tiny response rate to make a profit.   Imagine that you make so much out of each sale that you only need a 1% response rate – then your test run should be 600.   If you make money selling to just 1 firm in 300 then you need to mail 1800 in your test run.

If you would like to talk about postal mailings, mailing lists and the ways to write the copy, please do get in touch on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

PS: the formula for working out the number of items you need to send out in the trial is 6 divided by the percentage response rate required.  Six is taken as the base number, as it is just about the minimum number of replies that can be sought which will be statistically reliable for mailings of up to around 30,000.

Getting a campaign off the ground and reaching a pre-set target number of customers often involves a fair amount of experimentation.  And sometimes there isn’t much time to do the experimentation and then get the result wanted.

For example, you might know exactly what you want to sell, but there might be several different elements within the product or service that could be the lead message.

You might want to promote on the incredible value you offer.  Or maybe the variety and choice.  Or maybe the fact of your firm’s reputation.  Or perhaps the benefits that accrue from using your product.

What we do know is that you can never promote on everything at once – and therefore testing is needed to find which is the lead issue that actually brings in the most sales.

Also there might be a debate sometimes on who you want to promote to – which person in the organisation is really going to make the decision?  Or should you promote to two people at once, so that they can come together and decide to buy from you?  Again experimentation is needed.

Working through all these options can take time, and time is not always something that you have.

We recognise that our Velocity service (www.velocity.ac) is geared to working at a steady pace, increasing the effectiveness of your marketing month by month.  What it is not geared up to is giving you a huge amount of marketing at the start so that you can undertake all these experiments and find out exactly which one works best for you.

Where this is the case we have the Accelerator.  Here we put forward a campaign with a set period of time (usually between two and four months) which has the clear aim of getting a set number of customers or clients for you in that time for a set fee.

Thus the Accelerator programme really attacks the market (without overloading it) using a variety of resources, and with a clear end in sight.

A typical Accelerator programme might therefore say that the aim is to generate 100 clients spending £3000 each with you, in four months.   Or perhaps 1000 clients spending £50 with you.  The programme will fit any target you have – we just have to agree it with you.

We then take that aim on, and work to it over the four months, for a set fee.  If we achieve the target easily, we’ll still keep going as agreed to bring in even more clients.  But if we slip behind we will redouble our marketing output – without extra charge to you.

A typical Accelerator programme can cost anything from £2000 to £10,000 depending on the volume of work, how much goes via email and how much by postal direct mail, and so on.

If you are interested, please do call 01536 399 000 and we’ll talk it through.

The key thing to remember is that the underlying approach of the Accelerator programme is the same as Velocity, but with a set target over a set amount of time.  It is the target that drives what we do.

Tony Attwood

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

I recently got an email from a firm that goes out and finds email addresses for people that you want to sell to.  Nothing in that for me, since my company does much the same, but one line in their advert interested me.

They claimed that each email address you add to a database is worth around £75.

Now there was no analysis of this figure, and no explanation as to how they got it, but it got me thinking.  How do you put a value on email addresses?

Let’s assume that you know that Company X is a company that could be a customer of yours.  You know the company name, and getting the address is easy.  Getting the name of the right person to talk to, and the email address of that person is harder, but not impossible.

So it can be done.  But let’s say it costs £5 to get the email address and all the other data.  Is it worth it?

Once you have that email address you can email the individual regularly – as long as you can find something to say, and can write it well.

Let’s say that you want to write once a week, 50 times a year.  That would cost you maybe £22.50.  By email, once you have the system set up, the mailing is free.

So if we take the lifetime of an email address as two years, then the value of each email address is £45.00

The other way of looking at this is not just with email but with any form of direct promotion.  Let has say that you need to find 20 potential customers and email them for a year to get one decent sale.  Given that the cost of finding an email address might be £5 then the investment is £100 (there being no cost in the email transmission).  So assuming you make over £100 on a sale, then you are making money.  And you should be able to do it again.

These are of course estimates, but it does show that email addresses have a value, and are worth investing in.

If you would like to know more, please do call.

Tony Attwood

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

I wrote about going up the rankings on Google the other day, and Ian Stirling wrote to me with this point:

I would add one thing.  Activity,  I notice when we do emails about events and lots of people click, in a short space of time, on to the ‘Events’ page its ranking goes.  Not for weeks but for days.

I would completely agree with this. We run a couple of web sites which are used as experimental test beds for this sort of work – I have mentioned them before, they are both about Arsenal FC and they are listed at the end of this piece.  Between them they now get around half a million page visits per month.

We know exactly what sort of story will get people in, in high numbers, and each time we run one of these our positioning rises, as Ian says, for a while.

We know that people will hit the site if we say that player x is about to sign for Arsenal, and indeed when we ran the story “Jádson Rodrigues da Silva in talks with Arsenal” we got exactly the effect we expected.  A huge hike in hits, and a rise up the rankings.

Can this be done on all sites?  I think the answer is yes – but one needs to study the site and the area of interest and see exactly what gets the rise in hit rates.  In one way it takes us back to the old addage that the key words for selling anything are “sex”, “free” and “chocolates”.  Use the right words and the response is good and you go up the rankings.

One bonus is that having gone up the rankings a bit, although there might be some slippage afterwards, quite often not all of the slippage is lost, simply because by being higher up the Google list, more people who find you through a search click on your link, and so you stay that bit higher.

Here’s our Arsenal sites:

www.blog.emiratesstadium.info

www.blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk

Do call if you would like to go further with this issue.

Tony

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

What are the three things that take you up the Google rankings the fastest?

I know that every time I try and write about this subject I am corrected, and I will admit from the start that all my knowledge is just based on what has happened to the 100 or so sites that my company runs and the work we have done with a few dozen companies in this field.

So, based on my observations and practical experimentation on getting sites up the rankings in Google etc, I think high ranking sites are helped by

1.  Fast loading pages

2.  Lots of text saying relevant (but not low quality things)

3.  Links in to your articles and out to other people’s articles.

If you have got different experience I would love to hear from you, but let me amplify on points two and three.

Lots of simplistic text written by amateurs doesn’t help much, and some search engines have utterly removed sites of this nature.

Further, the old notion of a list of links to other sites being helpful seems to have long since become redundant, and what Google et al like are links from within articles to other articles.  Certainly when one of our sites got a link from a BBC.co.uk news page into an article within ours site, life got a lot more interesting.  We then linked back to their article, and that seemed to help again.

As I have intimated above I would not claim we are experts on search engine optimisation, but I think we know a bit, and each time I am corrected here, I do take note of the comments made and investigate further, and use the evidence provided to the benefit of our clients.

As a result of this, customers on our Velocity contracts (through which we work with them in partnership on all aspects of their marketing, including writing and sending out their emails etc) also get the benefit of our insights on their web sites and their rankings, including the re-writing of landing pages etc to help response rates and search engine position.

If you would like to know more about Velocity it is on www.velocity.ac or call 01536 399 000.

You can also follow all our commentaries on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

In almost all the research undertaken on customer loss, the most common reasons found for customers leaving one company and going to another is that people forget.

In short, they see a new advert from another firm, think that the product looks good or at least worthy of further investigation, and then they start buying elsewhere.

The second most common reason given for using an alternative supplier is, “I didn’t know you did it.”  In other words the customer knows you sell x, but doesn’t know you sell y.  So they buy y from elsewhere.

And the third most common reason is that someone somewhere has said something a little amiss, a little short, or a little untoward.  It may not have been intentional – and indeed it might be the customer who was having an off day, but that is still the third most common reason.

So the question arises, how does one overcome such problems?

I believe there are two ways to do this.

First, write to your customers regularly. I stress “write” here, and not phone, because phone calls are interruptive, and it is difficult to develop a rapport with a client when interrupting their work.  Most phone calls like this tend to be of the “Is there anything we can help you with?” type, and generally they don’t work.

Writing can take on two forms in this regard: talking about products and talking about background.  Both are worthwhile and in fact I would always recommend alternating one with the other.

Talking about products can involve talking about innovation, price, special offers and the like.  But it can also be about things you can do with products, and successes that have been noted in using your products.

Talking about background can involve giving hints and support in relation to the industry you are involved in (this email could be seen as an example of that) but can also include a more humorous approach.  Humour is not for everyone, and you need to be happy with the approach, but where it is used it guarantees to make your company stand out from the crowd at once.

The second approach to overcoming the problem of customer drift involves changing the company attitude. If your view is that your customers are loyal and would never go elsewhere, you are not going to put in place programmes to keep the customers with you.

But if you acknowledge that all customers are liable to drift, then you will start looking for ways to deal with this.

I often hear of companies that say, “they must know we sell product Z, because it is in the catalogue”, but this assumes that people love you so much that they will plough through your catalogue to find that product.  My experience is that they won’t – especially if someone else is sending them promotional material relating just to that product.

Customer retention is an art, just as finding new customers is an art.  If you would like to talk about it please do call 01536 399 000 or email me back.

Customer retention is also a fundamental part of the work we do through the Velocity programme (www.velocity.ac) through which you can pay a monthly fee for your marketing, and we will work closely with you looking at every issue raised by your marketing, and putting together and carrying out a programme that meets all your needs.

I do hope you found this quick review interesting – do give me a call if you would like to take things further or if you have a question.

If you would like to stay in touch with all our commentaries you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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

If you have a postal mailing job you need doing, during August Hamilton House will undertake it with a 30% discount on the labour, envelopes, and (in most cases) addresses.

But you don’t have to have the mailings posted until September – or October if you wish.

To clarify the address situation – if we can supply the addresses from our normal database of business or school postal addresses we will give the discount.  We will of course talk it through with you so you know exactly whether you can get the discount or not.

But with envelopes and labour – we have a standard prices, and if we can do the job in August, we’ll apply the discount.

However as noted above you don’t have to have the mailing posted until September.  As long as we can do the job in August we can hold it in our warehouse and post it out when you want – at any time until the end of October.  All you have to do is pay the invoice for the work done, by the day it is due, and pay the postage in advance of the mailing date.

If you would like to know more, do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

I have often written to say that with B2B and B2C email marketing it is often necessary to build your own list.

This can be done, but it takes a little time, and generally involves gathering the email addresses of customers as they buy, while doing some telephone research on potential customers.   (If you would like to talk about either or both approach let me know – we often get involved in this sort of research work and can put together valuable lists of customer and potential customer email addresses).

But, as I say, such work takes a little time, and can cost a little money.

Which is why the notion of being able to buy in an email list of potential customers is so attractive.

Now we all know that each campaign consists of three elements: the creative material that you send out, the offer and the mailing list, and in any test we need to know which of these three elements we are looking at.

I’m in the fortunate position of being able to utilise creative copy which I know works, because it has been tested elsewhere before.  And I know the offer that we have works (an offer of a free report on how to do email marketing) again because we have tested it before.  I offer this report free simply to get the email addresses of interested people.

Past experience shows that with a semi-decent list such an advert can bring in a 5% response rate – occasionally even more.

In this case however we got a response rate of 0.01%.

The list in question was purchased on disk.  It contained 50,000 email addresses and cost us £250.  And now we know it brings in a result of 0.01% when offering a free item.

We did this experiment as part of our eternal research project into how direct marketing works and to keep an eye on what our competitors are offering, and inevitably in such a explorations, we will waste a bit of money and get some bad results.

So it was not too disastrous a situation for us – we expect this to happen sometimes.

But it could be a big problem for a company that has not been involved with email marketing before, for such a firm would not know if the problem was caused by the email list, email itself, the product or the copy.  Experience suggests that most firms tend to blame email, and then stop using it.

I’ve proved to my own satisfaction over and over again that email marketing can work, but the copy, the list and the offer all have to be right.

Getting all three right is what we do through our Velocity programme, and through individual projects.  If you are interested please do call 01536 399 000 or see www.velocity.ac

You can stay in touch with all our writings on direct marketing via Twitter @HHMailings

Tony Attwood

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

Research recently published by Marketscan confirms the view that I have been suggesting for some time – that direct mail is on the way back after its decline a couple of years ago.

60% of respondents to their survey said they are using direct mail in isolation or as part of an integrated campaign.

More of a surprise is that 57% of respondents using telemarketing either on its own are as part of an integrated programme.  I find that a surprise unless the majority of those involved are using telephone work as part of the research (getting the right person’s name, email address etc).

Email was only used by 33% of respondents.

I would suspect the latter low figure comes from two problems: one being the fact that in most areas it is now necessary to go out and reserach one’s own lists – the email lists that can be bought off the shelf are really quite poor.  (We are just doing an experiment with one such list and I’ll report our findings shortly).

The other is that writing good email copy is not common sense or intuitive.  It can be done, but it is not that easy.

If you would like to talk about the mix, the lists, the creative or the price of a cup of tea in Trafalgar Square do give me a call.  I always like a chat.

Tony Attwood

01536 399 000