05/01/2009 by Tony Attwood.

The question simply is, do you start the old process running again, or do you change things around?

One of the big problems is that many people at this time of year are still feeling as if this is a bit of a new start. The resolutions could still be current, the intentions to do things in a better way are still there.

Which means they are looking at life - and business - in a different way.

That in turns means that an advert style or approach that you have not tried before could do well at this moment if you use this as an opportunity to change.

a) Doing an email advert instead of direct mail or vice versa

b) Changing the way your blog looks - either with a new layout or a different approach to the text

c) Talking about something else in your advert - something you have not talked about before.

d) Or change the style - if you are always impersonal, try being personal. If you pack the advert with pictures, try a different approach with a mostly text orientated advert.

As always if you would like to get an outsider’s view on your advert or your advertising approach you can give me a call and I’ll be happy to talk through the general points, or if you want to forward me a copy of a particular advert I will have a look at that and call you back. You don’t have to take any notice of what I say, of course, but you never know, it could help.

Tony Attwood
01536 399 013

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16/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

If there’s one big thing I have learned this year it is that blogs can have an enormous impact – or they can be a flop. It all depends on how the blog is written.

What my colleagues and I have been doing is writing a series of blogs in different ways, and then measuring the number of readers we get. To add to the test we invented the rule that we would not do any promotion for the blogs at all – people would have to find them by searching through Google and the like.

In the most simple terms the finding we have is this: it is possible to get very high audiences for blogs, without any advertising, if the blog itself covers the selected topic in a way that is different from most other web sites. The blog also has to be regular – in an ideal world daily, but certainly never less than once a week.

To go on from there, the blog has to be lively, and slightly out of the norm – if you have a fear of not saying something because someone might get upset, then quite probably blogs are not for you.

For our experiment we set up blogs in four different fields: teaching, popular music, administration and football. Our aim was to see if we could find underlying rules which applied to those four categories. Ultimately we did – although it has taken a lot of experimentation to do this. (I should add that the blog you are reading is not part of the experiment – and indeed doesn’t obey the rules we have discovered. There is debate going on in our own company as to how we now change this blog to reflect the findings!)

The football blog
www.blog.emiratesstadium.info - for Arsenal fans. There are thousands of blogs world-wide on Arsenal FC. Many of them are incredibly professional-looking, with photographs, effects, shading and every other twist and turn that modern blog programs give.

After much experimentation we found that the appearance was by an large irrelevant, so long as people could read the site. What affected the readership was the uniqueness of the over-riding theme, and the personality of the writer. So in this regard we adopted the approach that the manager of the club (Arsène Wenger) was always right. We also developed an interest in the finances of football in general, and over time evolved a series of nicknames for other clubs – nicknames that were unique to this blog.

The current readership is 50,000-60,000 unique readers a month – a figure that is on a par with the most popular websites in the field – and that achieved in a six month burst where the style and approach of the writing was changed to a constant support for the management.

The administrators’ blog

www.blog.admin.org.uk - for school administrators. We started this by delivering serious news items to school administrators, but with modest success. In April 2008 we changed this to the Diary of an Administrator - a daily account of life in the school office. This started out with a wicked sense of humour and ended up being surreal. The diary appears six days a week (the weekend combined into one entry) reflecting the working life of the writer. The school in which she works is mythical, but has elements that reflect what many administrators find (a headteacher who is more often out than in, teachers who request work be done always at the last moment etc) Currently 9,000 readers a month – which is high considering that there are only 29,000 schools.

The music blog

www.bob-dylan.org.uk The Arsenal blog suggested that even in a market that is saturated with comment one could gain an audience from a standing start if the slant of the articles was different from that published elsewhere. To verify this we have recently started the Bob Dylan blog which does nothing other than analyse Dylan songs from the perspective of the music and lyrics (as opposed to relating them to who played on the record and what happened in Dylan’s life at the time). There has been no advertising, no promotion – not even a mention in other Dylan blogs - we’ve simply written the blog about 3 or 4 times a week for the last five or six weeks. After two months we are running at around 750 readers a month. Rather interestingly, some of our articles are already appearing high up the google rankings - again rather unexpectedly given the billions of pages there are on Bob Dylan.

The schools blog

www.blog.schools.co.uk - for teachers in general. This had been sitting at around 2,000 readers a month, when it was delivering occasional pieces about school life in general. We then experimented with a much harder hitting approach in which we have highlighted the problems facing schools which are caused by government agencies with whom the school has to interact. The new theme is “the teachers are doing great things, but are let down by government agencies”. The thought was that if the findings of the other blogs are correct, this strong line would lead to a rise in readership - and indeed within a month readership doubled.

If you are interested in blogs do take a look at what we have done. If you would like to discuss the development of a blog for your company, do get in touch – we’re always happy to talk. Call me on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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14/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

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

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25/11/2008 by 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

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