The Toppled Bollard

In this piece I am trying to suggest to the reader that it is sometimes possible to be a bit blinkered.  Of course the reader is not blinkered, it is someone else, but this nudge can lead to a phone call from the reader to us.  Sometimes the reader says, “You are quite right - we do this…” sometimes they don’t admit it, but it is still a way of breaking down a barrier.

What is the most effective way of selling new books to teachers?

 

Last week I attended a conference at the Broken Glass Conference Centre, Corby, on selling books to teachers.  At luncheon I found myself seated alongside the supremely distinguished marketing director of (what he informed me) was a renowned educational publishing house.

 

It was an honour for me to be in such august company (he added), and I determined to make the most of the situation, ingratiating myself by paying for the wine, going back to the self-service to get some mint sauce for him, and listening to every word in a subservient manner.

 

The Great Man told me that he had little need to be at the conference because he had long ago got the measure of what teachers want.  However the young whippersnappers on the fifth floor had told him “to catch up with latest trends in marketing.”   He said the phrase with a snort which caused guests at nearby tables to look around in a mix of alarm and disbelief.

 

“So how do you advertise?” I asked naively, anxious to know of a methodology that could have lasted for thirty years.

 

“Send them the catalogue, highlight the new titles.”  He held out his glass. 

 

“You don’t use a range of media?  Don’t you try different approaches to writing the advertising copy?”  I asked, obediently pouring more French red.

 

“Goodness me, no.” he replied.  “The catalogue has worked for 30 years, no need to stop now.  Don’t change a horse in mid-sentence.   New approach?  Rubbish!”  He made this final comment in a manner that caused several other diners to pick up their plates and move further into the room.   “Teachers know what is good for them.   New book from us, they’ll buy it.  Mark my words.”   The bottle was empty; he held out his glass.    

 

“This is educational publishing,” he continued when I returned with another bottle, “not the market place.   We don’t sell benefits – never needed to before so why now?   Tell them it’s new, tell them the author, tell them the price, give them the contents.  What else is there?”   I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the drink, the food, or the methodology of advertising to teachers, so I paid my respects and took my pudding at the other end of the room. 

 

 

Tony Attwood

 

PS: If you feel that, contrary to the comments above, the use of alternative media and different styles of writing might increase sales, please do email Chris@hamiltonhouse.com and she’ll forward you a copy of the report “Methods of Selling Books to Schools”   It’s completely free, very informative, and rather jolly.  At least I think so (but then, I wrote it).

I have now ventured into the second Toppled letter of the new season - having been told by colleagues that the last one was incomprehensible.  Maybe this one makes a little more sense.
The headline is … “We only do email marketing now - direct mail is so passe” (with an accent on the “e” but I can’t get that to work on this blog.

 

Last week I attended a lunch time presentation at the Toppled Bollard on the future of the economy.  Apparently it doesn’t have one. 

 

Everyone present had to say in a few words what he/she did for a living, so I said, “I get teachers to do what you want them to do”.   One man at the event (a Mr Black) also said that his firm sold to teachers – so naturally I went and had a chat.

 

Black told me that he had stopped doing mailings to schools because direct mail was so passé.   He told me I ought to wise up and join the 21^st century and get into email.

 

I told him that my company was so far ahead of the rest of the world when it came to email marketing that we had fallen off the edge and had to wait until it spun around so we could jump back on next time around.   He gave me a strange look, but I can take such things in my stride.

 

“We researched the issue in a telephone survey in March,” I added, and we found a very high  number of schools prefer all correspondence in the post.  In fact 80% of schools still correspond with pupils’ parents via letter rather than email.

 

“I agree it is vital to stay in touch with teachers and develop a relationship,” I said.  “Email can be great, but not every teacher can be reached in this way, and that’s why the number of customers you get can via email can be modest.  Each mailing might only cost you a penny a school – but that’s no much comfort if you only get a handful of sales.

 

“But it’s so cheap,” he said, “and so post-modern.”

 

“Ideally you should do both email and shared mail,” I said, “but if you have to do one, I’d stay with a shared mailing.  It can be as low price as email, but with much higher response rates.” 

 

He made a noise rather like a tone deaf goat humming the Marseillaise, and wandered off to talk to a couple of bankers on the far side of the room.

 

 

 

Tony Attwood

 

PS:    Over the long term shared mail is an ideal way of keeping up interest, and encouraging people to buy from you for the first time – and it has the benefit of reaching teachers from as little as 4p each.   See www.shared.org.uk for more details or give us a call on 01536 399 000.

In 2002 I experimented with the idea of changing the way in which sales letters could be written, by introducing the notion of a long-running slightly amusing story, in the place of the traditional “I am pleased to enclose our latest catalogue…”

The idea took off, and our sales went up considerably as a result.  Also we found that even those who didn’t use our services, remembered exactly who we were, and when they had a reason to change direct marketing company, would give us a shout.

In 2008 I finally stopped running the series, feeling that maybe you could have too much of a good thing.   And ever since I have been receiving comments about “why aren’t you doing the funny stories any more…”

So, after a year off, I have decided to have a go again.  Here’s the first of the new run of “Toppled Bollard” stories, as they are known.  (The Bollard was the made up pub that featured in the stories.)

Here’s an unproofed copy of the first of the new stories…  It goes out with a second page, advertising the free report we offer.

The style of the Toppled Bollard Restaurant, (rendezvous to experts from the world of direct marketing) is, it is widely agreed, unique.   That this is so is undoubtedly down to the management of the establishment who see those who approach its gates as a cross between the Neanderthal and the orang-utan.  But diners at the Bollard are resilient folk and respond with their own entertainment.

 

For this indeed is a part of the kingdom where fashion dominates, and to arrive wearing anything but the latest style is to risk ridicule and social isolation for months

 

To begin at the beginning, prior to a Bollard lunch one must be seen in the right emporium drinking the right drink at precisely the right moment before moving over the road for what we might call “the match”.   In the Sanitation Engineer’s Retreat, for example, any attempt to demand a “pint of your best bitter landlord” is liable to end in decapitation. But the visitor need not fear, for this is a public house in which (for a modest token) young boys and girls scurry thither and yon offering to place your order at the bar in the correct language thus avoiding social embarrassment and the loss of a limb.

 

I must admit that I myself, being a bachelor, (and therefore lacking the comforts of a good lady offering home cooking, and all the other attributes of family life into which we will not go at this moment), eat at the eel pie shop opposite the Deceived Duchess.  After that I may partake of a restorative pint of the hostelry’s exquisite mild ale before venturing into the Bollard simply to watch  the jolly japes of the early arrivals. 

 

Once inside, the real festival of the day begins as we skin our eyes in an endeavour to keep up with the latest fashions and current trends.   Direct marketing is not, as many a misinformed popular magazine would have you wrongly suppose, about shouting NEW! and 70% DISCOUNT!   It is totally a matter of appearance and style.  Let no one tell you to the contrary!

 

This week the Blueberry-Fawcett Flat Cap is top-of-the-league in headwear, and the dandy who sports it is certain to be admired by the man in the Bollard Restaurant. True, the Military Whitelace is preferred for those of a certain age, who desire more than anything to regale their fellows with tales of yesteryear when they once got a 342% click through rate, but this is not a hat for the younger man.

 

As for socks - socks this year are worn inside out.  A red stripe denotes the height of fashion and a certain rakishness,  Matching gloves are not seen south of the Trent.   Shorts are worn low, knees high, the waist is waspish.  Elbows touch ribs and often eyes, sleeves billow.  The mouth is open, the tongue hangs out.   Shirts are art nouveau and the hat should swirl and swoop around the head aided by a lavish brim swathed in flora and plumage.  Anything else is considered insulting.

 

Tony Attwood

 

PS: Once you have the dress code sorted, you might like to consider the latest findings on exactly why some firms are getting great responses in their direct marketing campaigns and others not.  To find out, either request the report, or give me a call on 01536 399 000.

Actually, sorry, that headline is wrong.  You don’t.  You get a free emailing to teachers, a free extra mailing and a free listing on the School Procurement Website for a year.

These things are all free, gratis, complimentary, on the house.  But the house has no food.  Not a crumb.  Not a sausage.  Not a bean.  Sorry.

However some of the teachers who get your shared mail leaflet also get an email from you.  These emails go direct to the teachers who have opted into this service – which means not all of them get it (but the real whizzo teaching enthusiasts do get it).   No charge.  Not a cent.  Zero.  Nothing.  Nil.  Nought.  Square root of minus two.

Then another set of your leaflets (up to 10% of the original number booked) are mailed out to teachers at no charge.  Not a penny.  Totally without cost in any form.

Finally details of your product or service are included for a year on the School Procurement Website, complete with links to your email and your own web address.  And here disbursement = 0.  It’s free.  You don’t pay.  Not today, not ever.

If we add to all this the unique fact that our shared mailings carry a cover page from the School of Educational Administration to the administrator, you’ll get the picture that our shared mailings are, well unique.  Inimitable.  Incomparable.  Matchless.  Peerless.  Without equal.

But, I hear you asking (although not literally you appreciate) do shared mailings work?   A good question and one I am asked often.  Regularly.  Frequently.

The fact is that HHM has, over the years, used shared mailings to sell tens of thousands of our own products to schools.   We’ve learned what makes one item sell and another one flop – and we are more than excited (champing at the bit you might say) at the prospect of you phoning up and asking us to have a look at your leaflet and comment on how a few minor changes might make it work all the better.  (That bit is free too).  We really are getting quite energised by it all.  Quite worked up.

Tony Attwood

PS: If you have received letters from me in the past you’ll know that I used to sign off with a silly phrase such as “no horseman will call”.   As an attention seeking ploy it worked, but endlessly seeking attention is rather unbecoming.  So I don’t do it no more.  Not never.  Ever.  Well, only on Tuesdays when there’s no dancing.     Call me on 01536 399 000 if you want any of this to be unravelled.

Common sense suggests that you can’t advertise one thing by advertising something quite different, and yet that is what we have done for years with the Toppled Bollard stories.  This one was headed “Advertising Holidays in Cornwall”.  As usual the journey is somewhat surreal, but the end takes us to the real start.

Here’s the piece…

It is rare that a day passes on which I am not asked by a member of the marketing fraternity to write an advertisement for one or other of our esteemed local tourist organisations.  Of course I turn down most such demands – one can spread one’s talents too thinly after all – but occasionally a plea catches my eye, pulls at my heart-strings and I accede to the request.

Such was the case when I was asked by the Cornish Tourist Bureau to boost visitor numbers with a few well-chosen words.   Having spent many a happy holiday in our most southerly county, I agreed and repaired at once to my local hostelry in order to undertake the necessary research for this project.  

Research is, in my view, the key to all successful advertisement writing, and in this regard my fellow imbibers did not fail me.  Opinion in the Toppled Bollard was clear: Penzance is known both for having the highest murder rate in Britain and for its wonderful food. 

According to my colleagues these two characteristics of the local populace often combine and it is not uncommon for Penzantine chefs to be stabbed in the kitchen for making a small error of judgement over a local recipe.  This seemed a good starting point for an advert, the sort of local colour that today’s intrepid explorers love, and I noted it with glee.  

Talk then moved on to the issue of the Cornish vendetta.  These normally start as simple local disputes, as for example in February this year when the favoured ox of Prince Gwennap – a local ruler – disappeared one dark and stormy night.   Five weeks later the death toll was 1,900, Helston and Falmouth were depopulated, the local bovine supply had dried up, and chefs were forced to turn to halibut – with limited success and the subsequent demise of many of those working in the hotel and catering industry.  

I was also told that the men involved in such disputations refuse to shave until honour is re-established while the women nail up the blood stained shirts of their victims on the outer walls of their homes as trophies.   With such local colour I felt the advert worked well.  

Tony Attwood  

PS:   For some reason one or two local folk have since expressed disquiet about my campaign, claiming I have confused Cornwall with Corsica .   It was thus while resident for several jolly weeks in “Black Snithy”, Helston’s magnificently preserved Victorian prison, that I wrote the enclosed “Four Point Plan”.  It contains in summary everything I know about raising response rates when selling into schools.  I hope you find it helpful.

Many years ago I wanted to ensure that everyone who was a potential customer of Hamilton House Mailings plc, at least knew about us, and thought nice things about us, even if they were not our clients. 

Of course most of these people would not be our customers - we were not looking to get 50% of the direct marketing market.  But I wanted a situation that would mean that when they were thinking about changing suppliers, our name would come to mind in a positive light.

The route that I chose was both simple and unique.   I decided to write a sales letter laced with humour to all our potential customers.   I did it, and on the day it hit I started to get a really good response.

Clearly the idea worked.   People liked the idea of a funny story as a sales letter.   But what about the follow up?

I tried a couple of different pieces over the next six weeks, and then an idea hit me on the nose.  If I treated my sales letter as part of a on-going story, I could not only keep the humour running month after month.  It would make the writing easier, and it would bring a continuity to the whole idea.

So I decided to set the stories in a public house.   Seeking a name for the establishment, I asked myself what distinguished our part of the country, from anywhere else?  What would our mythical local pub be called that reflected our town?  

Driving home that night I realised the answer.   On any one day, most of the Keep-Left signs in the middle of the streets of Corby are knocked over, having been hit by trucks, cars and (mostly) over-excited pedestrians.  So I called the pub The Toppled Bollard.

Now, years later, I constantly get phone calls, which run along lines like this.   “I’m not a customer of yours, but I’ve been reading your Toppled Bollard stories for years.  Very funny.  Anyway, I wanted to talk about doing a mailing to…”

And I say to them, “Look, this is junk mail you are talking about.  You are supposed to say, ‘You are destroying the rain forests.  Stop sending it to me.  Where did you get my name from anyway?’   But you are not saying that.  You are telling me the name of a pub that I made up and put in a sales letter.   It’s not even in the headline but you know it!  Do you mean that you have actually been reading all this?”

 And they laugh and admit that yes, they have.  And they have remembered.  And they know what Hamilton House Mailings is, and I confess that the Toppled Bollard is a myth, and I can’t take them out there for a pint, but there is a very nice restaurant just down the hill in the People’s Independent Republic of Rutland, if they’d like to visit.

And we have a jolly chuckle, and then settle down to business.

(Of course it is not always like this.  About once every six months I get an anonymous letter telling me that I know nothing about direct mail, and “do I really think anyone would ever buy anything as a result of *** like this?”   I quite enjoy those, mostly because they are anonymous.   There’s something about people who write anonymous letters that appeal to me…)

Since then I have helped a number of companies follow this route (the Toppled route, not the anonymous letter route), finding them a local issue to write about and a series of characters whose stories they can tell.

It works and it is fun.   So I thought I would go back and revisit some of the odd moments of the Bollard from years gone by.   And maybe talk a bit about which stories worked and which one didn’t.  And why.

There’s plenty of post-modern irony in this tale.   You’ll enjoy it.

I’ve just got to nip down the hill for a quick one, and then I’ll be back telling the full story of the Bollard and all who pass by her door.  “Don’t touch that dial” (as they used to say).

Meanwhile if you would like to converse with me on topics Bollardic, or come to that, anything else, give me a buzz.  01536 399 000 usually works.  I always enjoy a chat.

While taking my regular afternoon brain restoring power-tea of champagne and coconut muffins at the Toppled Bollard last week I was thrilled to cast eyes on my old chum and celebrated Bolshevik Syd Braithwaite-Cynchronize-Swymme 

Syd’s translation of the poetry of Laura Riding into Old Norse remains to this day one of the masterpieces of the genre, and it was as a direct result that he earned his position as Scrabble Correspondent of the Daily Prod.   He is however even more famous for his work with the “Friends of Fate” – a group of itinerant web bloggers who were the first into Dorking after its liberation last Thursday.  

The “Friends” – with their distinctive uniform of bright yellow blazer, green yachting cap, white jeans and perfectly shined shoes – famously made a triumphal entrance ahead of a division of Royal Navy Engineers who had taken a wrong turn on the M23. 

The locals responded with wild delight, waving buckets and projecting paper aeroplanes emblazoned with their email addresses on the side. 

In recent years Syd has spent much of his life on Salisbury Plain undertaking experiments in time travel on behalf of the Ministry for Transport.  “In the Ministry,” he told me as we settled down to an afternoon’s light repast, “we have five divisions.   Big signs, medium sized signs, little signs, traffic lights and counter-terrorism. 

“The Minister’s view is that if you want to bring Britain to a stop you simply disrupt our highways.  Within three days there will be no petrol at the pumps and no booze in the supermarkets.   This will lead to widespread civil unrest and the end of etiquette as we know it.”   

As part of his work to stop this eventuality Syd is employed undercover as a front of house manager for the Palais de Jive in Woking, where he keeps an eye on the notorious “End of the Wedge” gang, known for rotating the sign posts and distributing copies of “The Complete Hooligan” – a pamphlet that advocates the hunting to extinction of all Ministry staff on the grounds that they are collectively  responsible for the failure of our railways and chaos on the M25.     

Syd has also worked as War Correspondent of Exchange and Mart, spending much time on the south coast, where he is known as the only man who can wear a beret north of the 50th parallel without a sense of post-modernist irony. 

On the other hand if you want to know anything about direct marketing, do call 01536 399 000.   We’re awfully nice people.

Welcome to the World of the Toppled Bollard - a place beyond time and space, stuck between dimensions, and just below the eiderdown.

It is the secret world nerve centre of direct marketing - and you can find out more about what it really does by calling 01536 399 000.

Or not.  As the case may be.

Tony Attwood.  

Director, Dept of Certain Things.