Tony Attwood's Blog

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?

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

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

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…

http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/Five%20Ways.pdf

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, 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.

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

http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/OpenRates.htm

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.

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