Branding – the nirvana of business

Having your business recognised as a brand is, for most business owners, nirvana.

It means that through saying your company’s name you not only get recognition of what you do, you also get recognition of your company’s values and approach.

A perfect example is Ben and Jerry’s icecream which has a brand image relating to being made by nice people, being environmentally friendly, being decent employers etc.

Branding on the scale of Ben and Jerry’s is hugely expensive, and beyond the realms of most of us, and yet branding is possible without the use of giant billboards, TV campaigns and the like.  In fact it is quite probably true that most companies could develop a brand image, if only the owners devoted time to the idea and worked on it.

My own work on branding Hamilton House centred on the use of humour and I would say it worked perfectly (if you have never seen any of the Toppled Bollard campaign which was at the heart of this approach, a few of the adverts have been reproduced on www.blog.toppled.info – and I tend to add another piece every week or so.)

But that’s just one way of approaching branding without investing a fortune.  Many firms don’t like using humour, and I would stress it is not the only approach (although it is just about the cheapest).

I thought of this when reading an article about the ancient rock band The Grateful Dead, who created a brand image for themselves by reversing the standard concert view of copyright.  In many rock concerts the entrance to the gig is dominated by extremely nasty people searching the audience for recording equipment and cameras.  It doesn’t generate a good brand image.

The Dead reversed this by encouraging people to come in and record the shows.   So many bootlegs became available that it a) encouraged more people to go to the concerts, and b) made people think “these are nice guys”.  The quality of most of the recordings however was so poor that many more people were then encouraged to buy the CDs.

The band also ensured that their music sounded different, and in my own small way I tried this with Hamilton House, making sure that our promotions looked completely different from everyone else’s promotions.  Being different is a great start when thinking of branding.

In short, I believe that creating a brand for your company is not that difficult, and need not be that expensive.  All you need to do is to want to do it, and then settle down to doing it.

It is one of the things we often talk to our Velocity clients about (www.velocity.ac if you are not familiar with the service), but I am more than happy to chat about how it can happen.  Do give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Ten factors

Last week I wrote a little piece about ten factors that I think we should all consider when writing a direct marketing advert.  If you missed it, there’s a copy at  http://www.blog.hamilton-house.com/2010/08/19/how-to-write-the-perfect-advert/

I’ve had quite a few emails back about this, so I thought it worthwhile going on with my second list of ten points.  (You’ll be pleased to note that then concludes the list – there are only 20 points that seem to me to be worth considering).

And I would stress, as I did before, that it is quite impossible to cater for all these points in one advert.  What I mean, in putting this list together, is that the more of these points you meet, the more likely you are to have success with your advert.

Here’s the list.  As before, it is mostly in the form of questions that you can ask yourself once you have written the advert and you are reviewing it…

11.  Is it personally related to the life or work of the recipient?

12.  Does it leave the reader on a high?

13.  Does it answer the reader’s desire for something?

14.  Does it promise a better life, or better conditions at work?

15.  Does the advert specify an over benefit?

16.  Does it ask the reader an interesting, open, question?

17.  Does the advert include what would seem to the reader to be a good deal?

18.  Does it make the reader feel good about your company?

19.  Does it amuse the reader?

20.  Does it get the reader to think about the issues you raise?

I am dealing with a few of these points on the Creative Direct news group (CreativeDirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com if you are not a reader of that news group and would like to be), and this list will be going on the HHM blog in due course.

If you would like to talk about the application of these ideas, or if you have an advert and you’d like my view on how it stacks up in relation to these 20 points, do get in touch.  You can email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com or you can call me on 01536 399 013.  No obligation, no cost, just you and me.

Tony Attwood

How to write the perfect advert

I have just come back from a lovely week’s break in Italy, and while sitting by the pool I asked myself this question (as one does)…  What are the ingredients that make up the perfect advert?

Put another way, how do you know if you have a perfect advert?

After three days and a rather nasty bit of sunburn I got 20 factors.  No advert could possibly have them all in, and there is quite a bit of overlap, but I thought you might like to read the list.  I’ll do a bit of expansion on it in due course, but here it is to begin with are the first ten points.

My list works mostly as a set of questions. You write the advert and then look at your advert and ask yourself…

1.  Does the advert create a desire in the potential customer to have your product?

2.  Does it tap into a potential customer’s preferences?

3.  Does the ad answer the question, “why should I buy this?” – or at least move the potential customer in this direction, if it is not going for an immediate sale?

4.  Does the advert answer the question, “Why should I buy this from them?” (assuming that the product or similar products are available elsewhere)?

5.  Does the advert develop your brand?  This is important because having a brand that is recognised is nirvana.  Once you have a brand recognition – even if it is just by a tiny number of people - it is a shorthand, a way of getting the style and approach of your product or service across to people just through the name of the company or product.

6.  Does the advertisement immediately grab attention, or is it possible that people will just pass it by?  Does the ad get even the disinterested person to look (in as much as I, a person who never uses comparison web sites, watch Compare the Market dot com adverts and remembers them).

7.  Does the advert elicit positive emotions from the reader?

8.  Is the advert memorable?  For example, I stopped writing Toppled Bollard adverts two years ago, and if you have never heard of the things you’ll be saying “so what?”  But the fact is I wrote a series of adverts on a particular theme, and I still get potential customers phoning up to talk about HHM working for their firm, and mentioning the Toppled Bollard even though nothing new has appeared for a couple of years.

9.  Is the advert meaningful to the customer?  Does it relate to his/her life, wants, needs, hopes, interests, concerns?

10.  Is the advert interesting or is it dull?  If only partially interesting, how can it be made more interesting.  (Some people answer this by saying, “well, ours is not a very interesting product…” and I reply, “nor are mailing lists very interesting – you have to work hard to make your product interesting.  If you see the product or service as dull, then the ads will be dull, and you won’t sell.)

So that’s part one, I’ll put up part two shortly.   In the meanwhile if you think these ideas could make a difference to your business, and you’d like to talk about having them integrated into your advertising, call HHM for a chat.  No charge, no obligation.  Just call 01536 399 000.

Tony

These days when people think of direct marketing, they think of email. Direct mail – that is mailing via the post – is seen as old fashioned and hopelessly expensive.

And yet…

Direct mail is making a comeback.

This is happening for several reasons, and here are a couple that you might like to consider:

1: The volume of direct mail being received both by businesses and consumers is down.  It is now around 20% of what it was five years ago.   So, as people receive less direct mail, the chances of each piece being read is much greater than it ever was.

2: Direct mail is uniquely placed for experimentation.   Because most campaigns are looking for a response rate of around 2% or 3%, it is quite possible to test the campaign by mailing out 250 items, to see what happens.   The cost of this is usually around £120 – which is far less than the average email campaign.

3: Direct mail gets much higher response rates that email.  So if we look at the £120 spent on a direct mail test run, we might well find that we get our needed response rate, and then can roll the campaign out to the full mailing list of say 5,000 or more, thus making a far greater profit than can be made through an email campaign.   Even when the trial doesn’t work, it is more than likely to get some response, so the actual loss goes down to £40 or £50 – and it is quite possible to try the experiment again.

4: While direct mail’s overall volume is going down, email’s is on the up, and response rates are getting to be hard to maintain.

5: On a cost analysis it is generally the case the direct mail gives a better return on investment than email.  Not always, but quite often.

If you have left direct mail behind, or it is no longer central to your way of thinking about marketing, you might like to revisit it.  One way to do this is through the article, “The 5 Ways of Doubling Direct Mail Response Rates by Being Different”.  It is free, and it is at…

If you want to talk about any of this, do call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

For years and years there has been a drive to make direct marketing more scientific

For years and years there has been a drive to make direct marketing more scientific, by insisting that everything should be measurable.  This approach took hold when direct marketing started, and has become even more intense with the advent of email.

The notion is that you might write a mailshot or an email and then perhaps vary it slightly.   Version A and Version B are sent out to randomly selected people on the same day at the same time, and the result compared.  If there is a significant difference between the two versions, then you can put that down to the change you made to the copy.

That approach is of course very valid, and I have used it myself for years.

But it can’t ever tell us everything, because there are so many variations to be tested.

Because of this I believe we also need a second approach – an approach that allows the creative team to fly with different ideas, without the need to test each and every one of them.

By way of example, let me relate what I did with a series of adverts for a client earlier this year.

First, I came up with a general idea of how the advert should work, and sent that out in week one.   In week two, approaching a second product, I changed the way in which I developed the advert.  And again in week three and so on.

This of course is completely unscientific.  But it is still of interest.

Obviously I am mailing on different days, advertising different products and working in different ways.  All that stays the same is the mailing list.  But I have a general feel as to what sort of response rate I might get.

In working through these adverts I gradually modified my approach, until eventually by the sixth advert I hit a much higher response rate than one would normally expect.

Still nothing scientific about it, but it was at this point that I came back to the serious testing mode.  I looked at the results, and constructed the theory that if I changed one element within the advert, the response rate would go down.  If I put it back in, the response rate would go up.  Over the next couple of ads I did just this.  Not scientific in the sense there was no split list, but a good scientific test. because there was a hypothesis that I was testing out.

The results were as I predicted, and now we have our model – our way of writing adverts for this particular product.

The approach has taken up the response rate by 400% – something I could never have achieved if I had simply done the traditional split testing.

None of which is to say that the split testing approach is wrong – as I say, I use it myself.  But it should never be allowed to sweep aside some good old fashioned “I wonder what would happen if we did this…”

That is, after all, how I managed to created the Toppled Bollard series of stories – probably the most successful campaign I have ever produced.  (www.blog.toppled.info)

Tony Attwood

PS I am now going on holiday – but my colleagues in the office will be pleased to help with all questions and enquiries.   01536 399 000 usually works.

What indeed is an open rate?

It is one of the most oft-quoted but least understood statistics when it comes to email marketing.

In a sense it seems thoroughly easy to grasp – it tells you how many people actually looked at your email.

But there’s a problem.  Consider the most common of email reading programs – Outlook Express.  Many people have Outlook Express set up so that they can read the opening of any email without actually clicking on anything.   How should an “open rate” measurement deal with that?  Indeed how can it, given that you are not clicking on anything, in order to read the email.

Unfortunately there is no agreement – which is why you can find some firms quoting incredibly high open rates for the reading of their emails, while others quote lower numbers.

To understand what open rates are, and how they work, we have an article: Open Rates, a Review of Statistics, which in non-technical language tells you just about all you’ll want to know.  Certainly if someone is quoting open rates at you, it is not a bad idea to have a look through.

The article is at

Tony Attwood

PS: I am about to go on my summer holiday – but my colleagues are all still doing their stuff at Hamilton House – do call them on 01536 399 000 if you would like talk through anything raised here.

When to send your emails

I’ve commented before on the issue of when the best time is to send out emails.  My thought has been that every time some particular part of the day or day or the week is announced as being best, then lots of firms flood into it, and that changes everything.

There are three factors involved:

a) The behaviour of the people you are emailing (different types of people open email at different times)

b) When everyone else is sending emails (if your email hits with loads of others, that knocks it back)

c) What you want the person to do (if you want them to call you quickly you need to reach them when that can be done).

Now the first surveys are coming in showing that the optimal day/time for sending out emails is a moving target. Monday is generally not so good (but this is a generalisation and the three factors above will cause this to vary) probably because most firms believe it is good (“get them at the start of the week when they are fresh”).  In fact Monday is often right at the bottom of the days to choose – and I have to say, my email in box is generally horribly full on Mondays.

In 2005 Friday was found to be a good day to get a higher open rate, but then after that report everyone started hitting Fridays.

As for the time of day, there is a general movement towards late in the morning, which is often a time I use – and which seems to work quite well.  Automatic systems are seemingly fixed to fire off the billions of emails at 9am, so it is good to wait until that rush is over.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday generally seem to fare ok, because they are straight working days, not the start of end of the week, and few reports have highlighted them as prime time.

However one recent report suggests that on a Thursday one should be ”keeping the message friendlier and less aggressive.”   Hmmmm is about the best reply I can do to this.

I still believe that it is the quality of the writing that affects the message, and that this is such a powerful tool, that assuming you have a decent mailing list, the effect of the writing swamps everything else.

If you would like to discuss bulk sending of emails, writing emails, and everything else to do with emails – do give me a call on 01536 399 013.  Alternatively there are details of our email services for business and consumer lists on www.yesmail.org.uk and on www.emails.gs for our schools lists.

Tony Attwood

Stop people unsubscribing from your list

I always argue that the most valuable asset a company can have these days is a list of customers and potential customers who have shown an interest.

Those are people who have had a quote, or asked for more detail or actually bought something.

If you have a list of them, and can gather that list together and send those people something every week, then you will keep them happy.

It is not an expensive operation (if you would like to talk about it, do give myself or one of my colleagues a call) and not that difficult to set up (although there are one or two key points to keep in mind).

But my customers often reject the notion saying – “You can’t write to people each week – they will all unsubscribe!  I was thinking of writing once every six weeks.”

What is interesting is that some people who say that are subscribers to one or more of the news services I run, through which people get maybe four or five emails a week from me.  Yet they don’t unsubscribe.  In fact our unsub rate is quite low.  (If you are not on one of these news services and would like to join there are details on http://www.hamilton-house.com/gateways/newsgroups.html – they are all free.)

But the unsubscription remains low, I believe, for two reasons.

First because I try and change the subject quite regularly, and second because I try and write in a lively way.  Of course you may feel that is untrue – in which case my apologies – but the fact is that the number of people leaving the list is low – even though details of how to leave the list are printed at the end of the emails.

So when it comes to stopping people unsubscribing, I think the answer is to give the readers information that might be of interest on a regular basis.  Not straight sales info, but background about your product or service.

True, no one will read everything, but you might get the reader interested enough to make him/her one day pick up the phone and buy something.

If you want to know more, call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Before you bulk email a list – consider this…

One of the facts that is sometimes forgotten about sending out emails is that service providers through whose systems emails pass, rate senders by how likely they are to be sending out junk.

In other words they allocate the sender a ’reputation’ mark.  The more they think you are sending out a load of tosh, to lots of people who maybe don’t want it, the more they are likely to block what you send out.

What they also do is check the content, looking for words which are directly associated with those sending out unwanted emails.  Get too many of those and again you could be in trouble.

As I have written before this can land everyone in difficulty – for as matters stand, a long piece which frequently gives the name of one of the people who is standing for leadership of the Labour Party, and who was previously Secretary of State for Education, and whose name has five words in it, could well result in you being given a bad mark and put on the naughty step (as it were).

ISPs are quite secretive about exactly how they handle such issues, so if you are sending out emails from your own email address over and over you need to take care.

The problem is that when there is a problem, it can escalate.  If you get caught out by filters on individual’s computers you can find that you end up in their non-read boxes.  And if that happens a lot, then it happens more.  The system spirals out of control – and all because you wanted to talk about the Labour leadership contest!

One of the other problems is that different organisations are using different systems, so there is no telling quite what is going to happen anywhere at any time.

The fact is that the best way to overcome these problems is to send out really engaging text that is not full of exclamation marks, capital letters and the email equivalent of shouting.  The more you are writing as a conversation the more you are likely to get the email through and into the inbox you want to reach.

The best group to reach are subscribers – people who have genuinely opted into your emails, rather than failed to opt out.

If you are using your own list, do everything you can to get as many people engaged with you as possible.   Stop giving people instant and immediate offers and instead try talking with them.  And best of all get rid of the people who have never opened an email you have sent and never clicked through.

If you would like to consider sending out emails to your own list via Hamilton House’s system, we’re happy to talk about this.  Not only can we send out the emails but we can also advise on the best way to write the emails, to maximise their chances of getting through.

There is more about this on http://www.emails.gs/ownlists.html or call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

You can’t get antibiotics for this

Occasionally I get calls asking how to run a viral campaign, and I do my best to explain, not just how to do it, but the problems that can arise.

“Viral” itself just means that lots of people look at your advert, video, site, article or whatever, and are so taken by it they pass it on to others.   Many virals are on You Tube – a film clip which is something that might not be allowable on TV is put up and everyone sends the link to everyone else, and everyone has a good laugh.

But firms are finding that such ads often fail to get any sort of leap in sales – billions of people watch the ad, but nothing much happens.

Old Spice and Evian have both had huge hits with their viral ads (reaching over 100 million views) only to find that they then lose market share!  Quite how or why is unknown (at least to me) but it happens.

Hamilton House doesn’t do TV, but we produce a lot of written material, and that is just as capable of being forwarded as a link to a video.  The number of hits might have quite a few noughts deleted from the end of what you get on a video campaign, but if you get the right piece on the web, and the word starts to flow, then you can get a lot of hits, and some good sales too.

Virals, be they articles, or videos generally have these factors in common.

1. The content unusual, or hard to find

2. In video the situation is normally funny, and surprising, sometimes shocking.  In writing it can be the same, or it can be highly informative for the minority at whom it is targeted.

3. Overall the message makes an impact and makes people want to send it on.  This can be the same as people sharing a joke (the joke teller goes up in the estimation of the listeners for knowing and telling such a good joke) or it can be that the information really empowers the reader who wants to pass it on.

You can see that doing a serious viral is hard – not least because of point 3 – people have to want to pass it on.

For example, if you read a free article on the internet that told you how to increase your profits in your particular industry, would you pass it on to your competitors?  Probably not – that’s the problem.

Thus just knowing that text virals can work is one thing – but making all three parts of the viral message work is another.

I’ve been working on it in two ways.  One is with humorous adverts and blogs (you might have seen www.blog.toppled.info which is a site containing a few of the humorous ads Hamilton House has done – many of which have become viral, although in a small way).  The other involves working with emotions.

As an example of the emotion approach, I experimented on one of my football blog sites.  The site relates to Arsenal football club, and a moment in its history which is seen by many fans of rival clubs as being a perfect example of this club’s cheating behaviour.  My article says, actually it was the other way round – Arsenal was behaving perfectly, while everyone else was cheating.

That may seem highly esoteric, but the short piece I have written has been downloaded and copied among the supporters time and again, because these arguments are important to such supporters.  It has worked, and it helps sell copies of a novel I published last year.

Convoluted yes, but it proves the point – it is not just humour but also emotion that can drive virals.

If you want to see the article I have referred to here it is at http://www.blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk/2010/02/02/the-fixed-promotion-the-corruption-and-the-match-fixing-how-the-football-league-does-business/ Remember it is written for an emotional and biased audience – but that’s the point!

If you want to know more, call me on 01536 399 013.

Tony Attwood