17/03/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Normally I can smell a mistake at 100 paces - goodness knows I have made a few during my spell in direct mail. But the new Experian promotion has me stumped. Is it a disaster area, or a bit of post-modern irony or the cleverest campaign of all time?

If you’ve had a promotion from them - please do let me know. Here’s the details.

It is a big postcard. It reads…
——————————————

First impressions count.

Make a truly powerful impact every time.

As part of a successful agency, you understand the importance of checking the accuracy of your marketing data before committing valuable client budget….

Our FREE, no obligation Data Healthcheck will compare your marketing records with Experian’s expert business data sources… to give you a valuable view of your client’s data cleansing and enriching needs…

——————————-

All fine, except that we received 9 of these this morning. There were minor errors in the company name and address, but the most telling point was who these items were addressed to. Six of the nine people were no longer with us. One left in 1994, one in 1995, one in 1996, one in 1998 - the other two left in the early years of this century.

How could such a strategy make sense (given what is being sold)? And if it is a total utter mess, how come they kept on their database a person who left us 14 years ago? When someone leaves, surely they are deleted from the database? Because if not, well, then you could have a disaster.

But please do remember, I am not sniggering at Experian’s error, if so it is, and in a forthcoming mailing I’ll confess my greatest mistake. It is just the nature of the error that bemuses me.

To stay in touch with all the news in direct marketing, please email direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Tony

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

Posted in Uncategorised | Print | Comments Off

26/02/2008 by Tony Attwood.

The Guardian this week carried a story about a simple but brilliant piece of hospital research.  The researchers wanted to know if an incredibly simple modification to what people in hospitals do when working with intravenous drips could cut infection rates.

Please don’t give up on me at this point - there is a real marketing issue here - and this is not about some complex medical procedure.  All the researchers instituted was a tick list.  The research set out to prove whether there were less infections when the medical team had a tick list covering all the basics - such as wash your hands, put on the gloves, and so on.

The result of the research was amazing - in a period of 18 months the level of infections dropped by 75%, 1500 people lived who (by the results being obtained before) would have died, and over £100 million was saved in terms of further medical intervention.

All from a simple tick list reminding people to do the obvious.

Now in marketing we don’t deal with saving people’s lives, but we do have to deal with money.  Just imagine what impacts we could all make through such tiny changes as this.  

There is just one problem.  While, in the medical sphere, there is a tradition going back hundreds of years of experiment and  research on the job starting from one principle and working out.  Of course I can’t talk about your work, and I’ll be delighted to receive your comments telling me I am wrong, but my experience in general is that very few marketing people do this type of research.   Certainly the great gurus of marketing tend to give little analogies, and check lists of do’s and don’ts.  No one encourages simple, but well thought out experiments outside of university departments.

Maybe its because “research” sounds too grand.  But as the tick box story (which is quite real - page 16 Guardian, Feb 23) shows simple ideas can be tried out to see what effect they have as long as the results are measured. 

20 years ago I sacked a designer and copywriter from the publishing company I was running because they had taken a promotion I had devised as a one colour one side piece on bond paper, and turned it into a two colour 3 fold item with tear off strip by the order form.  They didn’t go because they had done the research - that was fine.  It was that they produced a further 10 such pieces without waiting for the results of the first.   The results showed that my simple design cost half of theirs to produce, and brought in 8 times the level of orders.

My personal view is that we could all make a huge difference to marketing if we just said to ourselves - I wonder if things would work better if we did this….  Let’s try it for a week, and measure the result and it was that thinking that led to my creating www.theory.bz which draws together a lot of the research that has taken place.

If you ever do feel moved to try some research - or indeed if you have done so - and you would like to share your results, please do get in touch -  01536 399 000.   Tony Attwood

Posted in Uncategorised | Print | Comments Off

14/02/2008 by Tony Attwood.

The amount of mail being received by schools towards the end of last year was far less than most people imagine, according to a survey by Hamilton House Mailings plc.

Many heads of departments received at most one direct mail advertisement per week. The survey was conducted during the Autumn Term 2007 and analysed the direct mail received by both primary and secondary schools in England.

Most notable was the huge variation in the amount of mail received in different subject areas.

While some subject co-ordinators and heads of department could go for weeks without receiving any advertisements, a small number of teachers got 3 or more a week. Interestingly the teachers who received the most mail were not the same ones as received the most mail two or three years ago.

Music teachers, for example, are now among the most heavily mailed in schools, whereas three years ago they were receiving very little mail.

Despite the fact that Hamilton House has regularly warned about the fact that headteachers in secondary schools get large amounts of mail that is screened out by the school administrators or the Head’s PA, there has been no decline in this area, with heads getting 10 times or more as much direct mail as the most heavily mailed head of department.

While it is worth mailing headteachers on certain occasions, most of the time the mail is better directed elsewhere.

The Report Direct mail to schools – A survey of the mail reaching schools in the Autumn term 2007 is available as a download from the Library section of the Hamilton House website for £5.00 plus VAT at http://tinyurl.com/2dqunt A full list of all the articles on the site is shown at http://www.hamilton-house.com/gateways/articles.html

Posted in Uncategorised | Print | Comments Off

13/02/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Each day I take a small number of calls from people who tell me about their marketing, and who ask me to suggest what else they might do, or how they might change what they are doing in order to up their profits.

It’s part of the work I really enjoy, because each company is, of course, unique. There’s no charge for the service and there’s no obligation on the caller to become a customer of ours, nor for them to take any notice of my comments (although fortunately for me some of them do become clients as a result of the chat.)

Anyway, since the start of the year I have been recording the subjects we have talked about - and three topics come up over and over again. I thought I’d break away from the daily round of comments about how the industry is growing and what Postcomm are doing, and look instead at these three areas. Here’s the first one….

….which is database.

Databases are considered rather dull by many firms. They are there, but not really used - very few people who call me actually handle the wretched thing themselves.

But tweaking the database can, in many cases raise profits considerably. For a small investment many firms have been able to double their response rates.

What happens is that someone (we offer to do it, but the company can do it themselves if they wish) needs to analyse the mailing list that has been used against the orders coming in.

So, to take a simple example - imagine you are selling to accountants. You have a list of 10,000 accountants who you mail from time to time. 1% of them reply each time. An analysis of the master list and the buyers might turn up this interesting stat: 10% of accountancy firms on the list have over 10 staff, but 50% of the purchases are made by firms with over 10 staff.

This can have all sorts of implications. It can mean that one has to send something different to the little firms. It can mean that one needs to mail the smaller firms less, and the bigger firms more. Whatever it means, it is true that the mailer could cut the mailing costs by 90% but still retain 50% of the sales - which would mean a huge hike in profits although a downturn in turnover.

Another interesting approach with a database is to analyse it against a recognised master list. Again taking accountants, this could be put against the standard Thompson list, and the results might show that 30% of the addresses are wrong (that is they have gone away and are perhaps being forwarded from a previous address), 10% are duplicated, 15% have the wrong postcode (and so are not getting full mailsort discount), 5% of which are not accountancy firms at all. 40% might have phone numbers of faxes missing, 30% might have the wrong employee size, and so on and on.

The implication is that if one can sort all this out, the cost of each mailing is going to go down. There is actually no cost for doing this sort of analysis - although there is a charge for making the corrections.

What is so interesting is that most firms that use databases do so without undertaking any of these analysis - the lists just get older and no one really checks how good the lists are, or whether it is necessary to change the list, or just mail part of it. I guess because it all seems to be too much of a difficult task to look at - and there is always something else to do!

I’ll move on to the second topic shortly - but in the meantime if you want to have a chat about any aspect of your direct marketing, do give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

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

Posted in Uncategorised | Print | Comments Off