Good ad: raising response rates in direct marketing

I regularly get both postal direct mail and emails which either have “Strictly private and confidential” or words to that effect on the envelope or in the subject line.

Invariably they are adverts, quite a few of the emails are scams.

The question that comes to mind is, “how on earth can an advert (whatever it is for) sent through a mass medium, be personal?”

I would strongly urge anyone thinking of putting “personal” or anything like that on an email or sales letter, to think again. It doesn’t seem to do any good, and in some ways looks rather silly.

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

The world of marketing seems to be moving again. Reports from companies that deal in such matters suggest that there has been a 124% increase in digital marketing jobs in the UK posted on websites that advertise such jobs.

The UK is now apparently the second biggest hirer of digital marketing people, behind only the US.

Interestingly adverts for people to write blogs went up 138% over a year ago, which suggests that firms are at last recognising that good content on a blog is worth its weight. Email marketing was up 57%.

So what is going on?

For years there has been an emphasis on technology, technology and technology. Everything has been about having a presence in this that and every other devise.

This indeed is how it has always been. People wanted to know how to personalise emails, long before anyone got around to finding out if personalisation made much difference (it doesn’t).

But what does make a difference is good, interesting, well written copy. And that is the one area where a machine doesn’t help you much.

Those people who do put up the good copy get the growth and it is those firms that engage in this process who are hiring people to write it for them.

Hamiliton House (as I am sure you know) has been banging on about copy quality for years, and for many firms the route to getting such copy is via Velocity. Details are on www.velocity.ac

Tony Attwood

Two great subject lines today

Slow progress

and

What nonsense!

Both of those forced me to open and read. I had no idea what the subject matter would be – but I had to look.

And that is part of what we are all trying to do.

Tony

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

I have just been reading a little piece on headlines that are too clever, and it makes a real point – up to a point.

It argues that cleverness is not bad, but that sometimes being clever in the headline can lead to a diminution of response rates.

They take the argument forward by saying that this headline

Headlines on Deadlines (Part 1): How to consistently write effective headlines without working late

is far worse than

This just tested: stock images or real people?

And one can see what they mean. But I think there is a bit more to the first headline that doesn’t really make it work. It actually isn’t very good. “Headlines or deadlines” is the sort of simple play on words that never seems to work – and although the split infinitive in the second part of the headline maybe commonplace in speech, the fact is that split infinitives never help clarity in written work.

How to write effective headlines without working late

is actually a much better headline than the first example, because it gets rid of a not very effective word game (rhyming head and dead) and gets rid of a bit of bad grammar that makes understanding more difficult.

However I would still make one more change

How to double response rates by changing your headline

is the best of all – but then I would say that since I wrote it.

If you would like to talk about headlines and writing copy do call 01536 399 000. We write adverts for a significant number of clients large and small – and the prices are often very much less than you might imagine.

Tony Attwood 01536 399 000

Here’s an email that falls into the trap of being too general in its heading. It then uses bullet points – without realising that bullet points are one of the fastest turn offs in marketing. Everyone uses them, no one reads them.

There are a few exceptions to the rule, but basically, bullet points have exactly the opposite effect of what you might suppose – they simply stop people reading.

Here’s the ad. Does it excite you, and make you want to read? It didn’t mean because it didn’t give me a really big exciting reason to read on.

Tony

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I have never seen a personalised email like this before. Well done to the sender – although I have to admit I chose not to open the email.

Judge for yourself!

Tony

(PS, you can read all our reviews on www.goodad.co.uk and follow us on Twitter @HHMailings)

==========================

Subject: Eventually did I find you again Tony

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This message was sent to tony.attwood@aisa.org. If you no longer wish to receive these messages from Millenium Institute, please click here. Millenium Institute – Suite 5332 51 WORLD TRADE CENTER Panama City Republica de Panama.

Sometimes it is just so tempting to talk about oneself and one’s product, because, well, that is what one is selling. The product.

And yet really one ought to be talking about the BENEFITS that the product or service brings to the customer – because that’s the way to make adverts work.

In the advert that follows, taken from today’s in box, the benefit is tucked away as an implication in the third paragraph. The subject line is not a benefit – in fact it is either grammatically incorrect or utterly meaningless.

But then you could say, so is my subject line today – (Me, me, me) – except that my subject line aims to draw you in to read this, whereas the subject line below doesn’t have that virtue either.

Perhaps the biggest problem here is that the email is so obviously written with personalisation technology, dropping in the blog’s web site address as if it were the site’s name – which of course it is not. But this problem could have been overcome with careful writing about benefits in general, and (better still) avoiding using the personalisation program that the writer obviously has.

For me, the email advert fails because in the end I don’t believe the writer knows anything about my site, even though she claims to. The ad is printed in full below

Tony (you can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings) or by joining our regular email news group. Send an email to Creativedirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and click on the confirmation you get back.
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Subject: let’s cooperate together

Hi Tony,

My name is Annette Speed and I’m the webmaster of SEO Net Media

I have vast selection of websites and while doing SEO work with one of My partner’s website I’ve found blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk

As a SEO expert I’m very interested in telling you how exactly blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk can be visible & rank higher in all major search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo!

I hope you’re interested and please let me know if you’d like more Information – I will be happy to oblige.

Thanks,

Annette

SEOnetmedia.com

If you have read more than one or two of my reports on selling via the post and via emails, you will know that I always feel that a key issue is grabbing attention. While most people who write their own promotional material focus all the things the product or service does, I think one should spend most time on grabbing attention – because without this everything fails.

So I am always interested in the way people attempt to grab attention – even if I don’t think it works too well. Here’s one such…

Now in looking at this I should explain that the website that appears on the subject line is indeed one of mine.
.

Subject: www.blog.woolwicharsenal.co.uk: Did you receive this email? Please confirm

Did you receive the email copied here below sent to you last month?
Please confirm good reception.

Cordially,

Martin Vermont

——————————–

Below this appeared his email address and the original email. I did look, because, I suppose I have a real fear of missing impotant emails.

But that doesn’t mean I thought it was a good promotion, for the simple reason that it was a trick. I thought it might have been an email from a customer or potential customer I had missed. When I found it was an advert I had missed I was annoyed. A bit like those people who used to write the envelope address by hand, or in a handwriting type font, in order to get me to open it, thinking it was from a friend.

Yes I opened it. But the moment I saw it was not from a friend, I was particularly annoyed, and any chance of response went.

So, for me, it works in the sense of getting attention, but not in the sense of making me feel positive about the company sending it.

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings or via our regular email news feed – send an email to CreativeDirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Out of the billions of emails that flood into my in-box each day, only one subject line stood out today.

Here it is

11 Horrible and Amazing Ideas

I actually opened the email up and … it was blank. To see any of it I had to click on the link back to the sender. OK, they wanted to do lots of HTML and wanted to count numbers, but they could at least have given me a bit of an introduction, given that I was so interested.

But no, I don’t click through when I don’t know what it is about. Which is a shame for them, because it is a fun headline.

Tony Attwood
All our past reviews are on www.goodad.co.uk
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.

This advert arrived in my in box today – and I do find it a little concerning and annoying.

Switch to email to
avoid stamp price hikes

Find the email addresses for your current contacts

Prepare for the 30% price rise on stamps at the end of April by making the switch from postal to email.

The fact is that 99+% of direct mail does not use stamps – people either use franking accounts, PPIs, or most likely Advertising Mail, or similar rates. These are hugely discounted against stamp mail, and although increasing are only going up by a tiny percentage.

So the only people who do direct mail with stamps will be either those who believe that somehow sticking a stamp on the envelope helps (generally speaking it doesn’t – although there are some who still propagate this view) or those whose businesses are so small that they have not opened an account or got a franking machine.

Generally, in my view, frightening people or even just worrying them, doesn’t work – nor do solutions to problems that they don’t have.

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings and on www.goodad.co.uk

Tony

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

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