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

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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.

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11/02/2008 by Tony Attwood.

The Business List Audit which was created by the DMA to try and overcome the high levels of “gone aways” found in B2B lists, has collapsed.

The DMA claimed that only 12 out of 250 firms joined the scheme after it was launched 5 years ago. The scheme included the need for list companies to provide samples of their list to the DMA compliance team for verification.

A significant part of the problem - and one that the DMA was warned about when it launched the scheme - was that just checking the accuracy of a list was only one tiny part of the B2B direct mail issue. There is certainly an argument to be made that proper guarantees by the list supplier is a big issue. Further there is the question as to whether an individual list is really right for the promotion.

Hardly any companies that sell lists offer to look at the promotion that is going out, in order to see that it makes sense when used against the list. Thus the postal system is filled with badly written and/or wrongly targeted pieces - and the DMA Audit system said nothing on these issues.

To blow a trumpet I have sitting next to me as I write this, Hamilton House always offers to take a look at promotional copy and comment on it in terms of its impact to the chosen market, and the chance of success with the selected list. Most of our clients express surprise at this extra free service - which is very much not the norm across the DMA. If you want to use the service do give us a call on 01536 399 000 - or just email me the piece with details of the list you are thinking of using and your phone number, and I will call you back.

Tony Attwood

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04/02/2008 by Tony Attwood.

The most effective medium I have ever found for cold approaches is phone-mail-phone. You phone the person you want to get, check the name and tell him/her that you are going to send a piece in. No long chat, no detail, no questions other than checking the name and postcode. Use a native English speaker who knows enough about the UK to know how to pronounce such words as “Bicester” and “Leicester”.

Then send the direct mail, with its really exciting headline that forces everyone to read on.

Then phone up and say, “hope you got it - it had the headline xxxx”. (Don’t say, “did you get…” because the person will not remember that way - but if your headline is wonderful it will work.)

That works - but the problems are

a) it is expensive

b) it can slow you down, because you are sending out only as fast as you can do two phone calls.

I mention this because the National Client Email Marketing Survey has reported that 39% of firms think direct mail and telemarketing the most successful campaign media that can work alongside email marketing. 34% putting integrated email and telemarketing (without direct mail) in second place.

However, the DMA claim that on average companies only had email addresses for 50% of their database.

The DMA study also found email delivery rates were “slightly down” from last year, which it said was due to increased volumes and heightened competition in the sector. (Personally I think it is down to the fact that 98% of email is spam, and so the amount of stuff going straight to the junk box is rising).

There’s more about direct marketing on www.hamilton-house.com -

Tony Attwood

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