26/09/2008 by Tony Attwood.

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.

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11/09/2008 by Tony Attwood.

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.

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01/09/2008 by Tony Attwood.

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

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