During the writing of the Toppled Bollard stories which appeared as direct mail shots I began to invent some characters who started to appear regularly within the pieces – most noticeably Billy “The Dog” McGraw, the landlord of the Toppled Bollard.   Over time he became not only a publican, but also an Elvis impersonator, and a man who had a dog that spoke Greek.

As technology moved on, and the world of blogs came along, I decided to expand on this devise and have started to introduce eccentric characters into a blog I write on the subject of Arsenal FC.   The blog is there to publicise a couple of books about the club and has, over time, become very popular.  At the time of writing this (August 2010) we get about 330,000 hits a month from the site.

One of the more eccentric characters invented was Bogus Cheese – the name is meaningless and has no significance for Arsenal supporters, and it just popped out of the air one day.

But Bogus has a point he (or is it she?) takes on the critics of the football club.   My site is very pro-Arsenal, and very pro its famous manager, Arsene Wenger.   But there are some football fans who are against him as a manager, and so Bogus Cheese is used to lead the attack against them.  The language is eccentric, and has got more eccentric as time has gone on, with the writer seemingly fixated on naming every cheese that ever existed during the course of the articles.

So does this approach help sell the books?   Not directly, no, but it certainly helps build the audience for the site, and when we return to more serious matters it is then that the sales develop.

The following comes from an edition of the blog from August 2010 – you can read the latest on www.blog.emiratesstadium.info

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My dears! My dears! What a moment, what a day!  Welcome welcome!  Camembert to you all.

One of the many tricks of the Anti-Arsenal Arsenal web sites is to make endless criticisms while making few predictions.

However several of the old “Wenger is an alien, turf him out now” sites did, through the summer, let their guard slip somewhat when they started predicting that huge numbers of Arsenal season ticket holders would not be renewing this season, because of their dislike of our great Lord Wenger, all praise be.

What a slip!  What a Danish Blue!  How could they be so careless?

The sources of this eccentric, strange and frankly bizarre story were simple in themselves…

1:  People had been writing to the blogs saying, “I don’t want this season ticket any more while Wenger is at the club – does anyone else want it?”    Trading in Season Tickets is of course a crime under the Law of the Land, or maybe just the terms of the Season Ticket, but either way it is a Bad Thing.

2: Someone had applied for a season ticket and found he moved up 40,000 places on the waiting list overnight.

3: At every match you see spaces so Arsenal must be lying.

Actually dear reader the “Arsenal must be lying” bit is there anyway, without the first half of the sentence, but the AAA sites felt it a Good Thing to put the two bits together.  Oh Koenigsberg!

Any road up, as we say in Wood Green, their prediction was, the club would at last feel the backlash of all right thinking supporters who have Had Enough of this regime and wanted a return to the days of being honest hearty English lads who give their all and speak the language proper.

So, the prediction is made.

Now I am writing this my dear-i-os before I set off on the long and winding road across town to our spiritual home, but I predict that all around me will be the same old faces.  A little older, a little more wrinkly (and that’s just Pat Rice – what a lad, what a stayer, what a boy!)

The number of season ticket holders who have given up their tickets will be, I predict, under 2000 across the whole ground.  The waiting list really is 10 years (I predict, hand on Cheddar), and the number of empty seats will remain due entirely to people not getting to the games because they live a long way away.

So, my chums, my pals, my dear bit of old Gorgonzola, my Lancashire Blue, why would the AAA make such a wild prediction?

The answer of course is that a lot of the silly smoked Cornish are in fact Man IOU fans who can’t take the fact that in their stadium anyone who wants to can buy a ticket anywhere in the ground, season or daily.  In fact I am told they even take Oyster cards.

(Breaking news is that the Glazers are not paying a penny back on any loans and the cost of the loans is going up again, while the little fella from the far eastern shores where reality is unknown has had enough of Liverpuddle and taken his goats cheese elsewhere).

The world is ours, my old Welsh rarebit, we are one of only three clubby type things that has sold all its seasons, and one of the other two (the very tiny totts) don’t count because their ground is so small that if an ant stamped on it, it wouldn’t even notice.  And anyway who ever heard of people paying for anything at the far end of Seven Sisters?

So thus we march onwards under our glorious Lord, our Leader, our Hero, our Dearest Pal, our Great and Glorious creator of the Unbeaten.

I look forward to exposing another AAA racket next week.  Be there or be square as you hep cats say, what?

One of the big battles we have fought over the years is with companies that think it is a good idea to have a covering letter supposedly from the chairman, which starts, “I am delighted to enclose the new edition of ….”

In my view it is a total waste of time and space.  Hence the letter that we sent out in 2002.

This is one of a long series of “Toppled Bollard” letters I produced for Hamilton House, which one way or another, challenged every aspect of direct marketing, and the way one addresses both customers and non-customers.

The key to this one is the fact that people getting printed items mostly read the headline, the first few words of the first para, the same for a few other paragraphs, and the PS.

I hope you like it, and the other letters on this site.  If you are interested in experimenting in advertising, do give me a call on 01536 399 000 or drop me a line at Tony@hamilton-house.com

A word from the chairman

It is with overwhelming delight that I find I have been asked once again to take up my pen and inscribe a few words on this “cover page” of the latest set of mailing list information from Hamilton House.

Of course when I say “inscribe” I don’t mean I literally take up the quill plus blackened printing paste.  These days my PC is loaded with CreataWrite 2002, a stunning little program in which a rather jolly rat leaps out of the toolbar every 32 seconds and suggests four new subjects, in case I should be running out of ideas.  In fact I see that at this moment the rodent (whom I have named Ricky after the rather dubious character in one of those TV spy series starring Alec Guinness) is inviting me to discourse on the digestive system of the neogastropod,  the Defence of Fort M’Henry, stemmed turns (which I believe has something to do with skiing) or Gary Glitter (which I presume doesn’t).

I vividly remember that moment in the spring of 1971 when I penned my first few lines on the subject of selling into schools via direct mail.  I found myself nervous in the extreme  – and somehow the long nights of creating  stories for Doctor Who hardly seemed a just preparation.   Yet as we have all found since those ancient days our average post-person, valiant though he or she may be, is no match for a Type 40 TARDIS, even with its dimensional stabiliser on the blink.

Even now after all these years of scribbling I am painfully aware of how hard this writing business is.  The publication of a collection of my one-pagers a few years ago under the title “Right Back” (a witty reference to my friendship with a member of the Arsenal Ladies team of the time) suggested to many that I found the art of making it up as I go along, a doddle.  The tales of the Toppled Bollard, the strange events with the Smarties, and that infamous retelling of the story of Louis XVI (and here I must thank everyone who nominated that letter for a 2001 Cyclops Award) made it seem as if these notes just jump out of my fingers without a bead of sweat appearing on the brow.  But no.  Brain surgery would, I fear, be nothing compared with the torment of the weekly column.

In some ways, the world has changed greatly since the first Hamilton House mailing list was released on an unsuspecting universe.   The Doctor’s adventures, for example, have vanished from our screens, although I am told some of the old tales still gain an audience numbering several hundred on satellite TV in the early hours of each Sunday morning.

But in other ways, life is much the same.  Elvis continues to live in the rear section of a B52 on the dark side of the moon, there is talk of putting the corpse of Mussolini in charge of the railways, and 98% of all known politicians appear to live on the planet Zorg.

May I thank you for your attendance to my occasional ramblings.  Those of a devious nature can read more on www.salesletters.co.uk

Tony Attwood

PS.  Apparently I was supposed to take this opportunity to tell you about the various changes that have occurred in our school mailing lists.  Sorry about that.

This web site is publishing some of the humorous sales letters written by the Hamilton House Mailings team during the past 10 years or so.   This particular piece had an interesting history in that a spoof web site we put up alongside the sales letter clearly caused some annoyance and we were asked to take it down pronto – which of course we did.   The publicity from the affair was worth more than any advertising we could do.

It was not the first time we had a brush with the authorities – when on an earlier occasion we published the book “Genghis Kahn Meets the Royal Mail” there was a fuss from one of the direct marketing trade associations claiming that the booklet demeaned direct marketing and that we would be removed from the trade associations if we didn’t withdraw.

But again, the publicity we gained far outshone any problems that we had.   Here’s the sales letter that went with the latter campaign.  Given that governments of all parties have been thinking of selling the Royal Mail – or a part of it – some of the humour is lost.  But when first written at the start of the 21st century it still seemed a rather radical idea.  Also I quite liked the joke about postmen suddenly getting up and delivering mail in Belgium – not to mention the warning about aliens.

Some of the services that we were advertising have gone now, replaced by email offers.  Shared mailings to schools still remain, as well as email marketing to schools (see www.emails.gs) and of course there are email campaigns to businesses and consumers too (see www.yesmail.org.uk)

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Hamilton House Mailings buys The Royal Mail

In a dramatic and unprecedented move Hamilton House Mailings Ltd has purchased The Royal Mail.

Since the announcement of this buy-out I have been inundated with requests for information on what we intend to do with The Royal Mail.

Firstly I should explain that Hamilton House Mailings has made this move to protect the future of shared mailings.   Through shared mailings you can mail schools, libraries, GPs, bookshops, colleges, nurseries, and universities, for far less than the cost of postage.  Information reaching me in my suite on the 48^th floor of Hamilton House has indicated that certain influential parties were trying to get our ability to reach tens of thousands of addresses at such low prices stopped.  We had to act!

Indeed it is not just the fact that on standard prices it is possible to mail schools for as little as 8p per address, that has upset some organisations.  Our various discount schemes mean that prices do get even lower than that!  With discount months, cashback, Edex Days, Risk-Free mailings, Stand-By mailings, Thank you to Customer Days, Long Haul Mailings and even discounts if you include a Prize Draw on your leaflet, the prices can come down as low as 3p per address in certain cases.  This, I believe, has caused some people in extremely high places to worry.

What’s more, there is the constant threat of competition.  You will know, of course, that my colleagues and I are no stick-in-the-muds.  We know that competition does, in certain industries, on certain occasions, from time to time, act as A Good Thing. We know it was invented by Adam Smith.  Or Milton Keynes.  Or someone of that ilk.  And we remain grateful.

However competition has its dangers.   Imagine, if you will, what the world will be like under postal competition.  A postman (or woman) waking one morning in Belgium (or indeed Finland) might well decide, for the sake of change and adventure, to start delivering or collecting mail in Basildon or Giggleswick.  And there would be nothing we could do to stop them!

The matter could escalate.  I have been reliably informed that alien beings are even now gathering on a planet circling Alpha Centuri, awaiting the signal to come and take over our precious “afternoon delivery”.  With six arms each they will be faster at sorting the mail than current staff, that is true, but this surely is not the point.

Thus we have acted and the future is secure.  I thank you for your attention.

Tony Attwood

PS:  For more information on the purchase of The Royal Mail by Hamilton House Mailings please see our new web site [Note at this point there was a link to the site we were obliged to remove] Or call me on my direct number: 01536 399 013, or indeed email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

PPS:  For more about the astounding discounts we are now offering on shared mailings please call 0156 399 000, where I can assure you none of the sales team has more than two arms.   Each.

This week at a business lunch at the Toppled Bollard a regular customer asked me if I had lost weight.

I was course delighted.  I explained that yes indeed, since Corby had just gained its first health and fitness centre – the quaintly named “Sons of Mars & Daughters of Venus” – I had indeed been getting fitter.  Indeed since the gala opening I had been a regular visitor.  At first I had been unsure whether I could keep the strict regime up, but positioning the new centre next to the Toppled Bollard had, I felt, been a good marketing ploy.  “I need to set an example to the younger staff,” I told him as he settled into his second pint and I gently lapped the mineral water.  “A fit and healthy chairman is a morale booster to the rest of the team,” I added knowingly.

We turned to business matters.  “Recent promotions to schools have been disappointing,” he announced.   “Any idea why?”

I asked to see what was being mailed and he brought out a copy of his company brochure.  It was well produced, informative, full of products that schools buy, all at keen prices.  It was as good as it gets.

“What about the covering letter?”  I asked.

“Written by the chairman,” he said passing it over.  Compared to the brochure it was a sad affair, obvious, lacking in direction, self-important, repetitive, tedious, boring and dull.

“I’ll write one for you,” I told him, wondering if I should now start shopping at Gap as part of my new super fit, slimmer, image.

“But I can hardly return to the office this afternoon and go to chairman and say, ‘I’ve just had a chat with that Tony Attwood at Hamilton House, and he thought the reason sales were down was because your covering letter was no good.”

I took the point.  Some of these chairmen can be quite difficult.   “Perhaps if he started to work out a bit, might take his mind off things?  Then he might not notice if you slipped in one of my letters for one of his?”  We agreed it was a possibility.

Wonderful things these health clubs.

A Toppled Bollard letter, using the traditional Bollard self-deprecation techniques to offer a free service.   These letters are just one of the techniques that Hamilton House has evolved over the years.  If you would like to talk about this, or other techniques, do give me a call on 01536 399 013.  No cost, no obligation.  Tony Attwood

Why the failure of catering arrangements on our railways is having a negative effect on my sales

Last week I was asked to visit a potential client.   Although I invited him out for lunch at the Toppled Bollard in Corby, he declined, insisting instead that I visit him.  He didn’t have time, he claimed, for the niceties of business lunches.  I tried to explain that a lunch at the Toppled Bollard had very little to do with niceties, but he would have none of it.

“You mail schools and universities,” he said no sooner had I arrived.

I agreed that was true.    “That’s what I thought,” he said, standing up.  “Thanks for coming to see me.”

I looked at him aghast.  The first class return ticket with wine and accompaniments on the train had cost me £89.50.  Worse, the additional four course breakfast, clearly advertised as available on the timetable, had been off.   Feeling decidedly shaky from a lack of nutrition, I attempted to re-open the debate.

“Education is an £35 billion market,” I said.  “Schools don’t just buy school books – they buy computers, chewing gum remover, carpets, lighting systems, laser cartridges, paper clips, security systems, filing cabinets, print and everything else an office uses.  I’m sure it is a market you could exploit.”  I thought that was a good line.  I read it in my Observer Book of Selling Direct Mail to Difficult People.

He was not convinced.   “We tried them before, it doesn’t work,” he told me.

“But if you didn’t get a very good response rate before perhaps it was because your leaflet needs just a tiniest bit of tweaking,” I suggested timidly.

“Nonsense,” he replied.  “Our leaflets sell brilliantly when we mail businesses.”

“Ah,” I announced, now on firmer ground.  “Just because a leaflet works well to companies it doesn’t mean that the same leaflet is best suited for schools.  Why not let us have a look at it?  We’ll write a report highlighting any changes that we think you could make which will enhance response rates.  We can also write a covering sales letter that is very much aimed at the teacher rather than the business person.”

“And how much will that cost me?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, attempting to hide my smile at having delivered a winning line.  “The report is free irrespective of whether you buy from us or not.”

“Then it can’t be worth anything,” he told me, as he ushered me out the door.  (Memo to self: must buy that new book on Tao and the Art of Selling Mailing Lists that I saw on Amazon last week.)

Tony Attwood

PS: If you would like to have your leaflet reviewed free of charge just send to Hamilton House with a covering note.  You’ll get a written report on how we think you can reduce your costs while increasing your response rates.  On the other hand if travelling by train, always remember to take your own sandwiches.

“We tried direct mail – it was a total flop” was the first ever humorous letter I tried.  Unfortunately I have lost details of the date but it was sometime around 1990.

The reason that the date has long since left me was that the letter was such a huge success we kept running it (often with variations) for years, while experimenting in between with new versions.

I’m putting it up today for no reason other than the fact that I have just located on my computer from that era this copy.  I think it still is quite fresh and interesting, even after all these years – but then I would say that, as I wrote it.

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We tried direct mail – it was a total flop”

Last week I attended one of those lunch time presentations on the future of the economy.  Inevitably I was positioned next to a businessman who I didn’t know, (but who for the sake of argument I’ll call Brown).   In between the speeches we got to chatting, as one does.

On hearing that I ran a company that sold mailing lists Brown told me that his firm had tried direct mail once but it had been an absolute disaster.    (He is one of those guys who has the ability to speak in bold italic underline).   Determined (as always) to consume any meal I haven’t paid for I refrained from leaving at that point, and asked Brown what line of business he was in.

“Plant hire,” was the answer.  Clear and concise.  No messing with that.

“So I guess you have a very clear idea of who your potential customers are,” I ventured, tucking into the lamb and hoping desperately that it wasn’t Hamilton House that had supplied the list in the first place.  I don’t do refunds over a free lunch.

To my relief he agreed that he not only knew who he needed to reach, he had used his own list of all 400 or so of these possible customers.

“So you mailed all 400 potentials,” I said.  (You could tell I was getting nervous by the way I started each paragraph with ‘so’).  “What was the result?”

“Pathetic,” said Mr Brown.  I looked up, thinking for a moment he might have been commenting on the quality of the red wine of which I had taken a gulp, but sadly he was still on the subject of direct mail.  “We picked up four new jobs – that was all.”

“And am I right in thinking that each job you get tends to lead to quite a sizeable profit?”   He nodded, taking a swig from his glass.  I waited, but the failure of the recent French grape harvest appeared totally to pass him by.

“Ah,” I said, starting to sound somewhat like Sherlock Holmes, but at least avoiding another ‘so’.  “That mailing to 400 potentials probably cost you around £200 including printing and postage.  But those four jobs must have made you thirty times that.  So why didn’t you repeat the promotion?”  OK, I said ‘so’ again, but at least I had reached a positive conclusion – which I thought was rather clever.

“Because the chairman said four replies is pathetic – and it is.”

And there was really nothing more I could say.  I doubted that I was going to be able to convince him of the dubious nature of the wisdom of chairmen, nor to show him that he really could grow the company with an advertising budget that probably cost less than the company’s coffee bill.  I gave him my wine and made my excuses.

Tony Attwood

PS: If you’d like to try using direct mail, or would like lessons in how to talk in bold italic underline, please do give us a call on 01536 399 000 or fill in the card.

An example of a Toppled Bollard sales piece.  It really doesn’t matter what you are selling with a letter like this.  As a one off, or as a first letter or email in a series, it won’t work, but as part of an ongoing communication campaign, it should give a laugh, and let people know you are, despite all appearances, humna.

Life could be really easy if it weren’t for the words.

Handling staff and freelances is a problem.  As a publisher I am often called upon to handle the issue of pesky authors who get too big for their boots.  Here I describe how I handle them – and I am sure that you can adapt my technique for your own personal usage in your company.  Let me know how you get on!

With writers, it  is vital to get a firm grip on what goes on at the start of the book – what we like to call the “front matter”.

You can always tell the front matter because it is numbered in lowercase roman numerals, as opposed to the mere text of the book which is numbered in the much more commonplace and downmarket Arabic numerals.

First you will need your frontispiece – a nice illustration which need have nothing to do with the book as a whole, but is copyright free (and thus without fee).  Choose it with care, and the author challenges you, tell him/her that without the frontispiece the book will become a laughing stock.  That sets the scene for the whole publisher-author relationship.

Opposite the frontispiece is a verso page (the frontispiece being, of course, recto, for obvious reasons which are too delicate to mention here).

The title page contains the title – we must be very clear about this.  I sometimes give the author a mention on this page, but it’s not obligatory.

Next up you can have the contents – usually one of the publisher’s main activities (and here you must absolutely never rely on the author who won’t have a clue what he/she has written about).

Interestingly the table of contents is not only in the front matter but can also include the page number of the table of contents.  This is known as self-referencing, and is considered a good thing.

Within the context of the contents subheadings and nested subheadings (that is subheadings that are due to give birth) are generally seen to be of significance and are also considered to be good things.  Handle them with care.

Next up comes the foreword, which is often best left to a mythical person of supposed importance within the context of the book.  I tend to introduce Sir Hardly Anyone at this point who is (depending on my mood) General Secretary of the Society of Certain Things, or Head of Nutrition at Weetabix Ltd.  This choice seems to cover most books.

Each edition of the book should have a new foreword which comments on how things have moved on since the foreword of the last edition.  All previous forewords should be retained in reverse date order, for verisimilitude.  Indeed it is not unknown to start with seven or eight forwards to get a sense of gravitas at this point.

Now we are getting into the meat and two veg of the book, for we come to the  Preface.  This is where the author will try to push in, claiming that he or she is the best person to write the story of the book.

But you must resist!  Invent another celebrity to write the piece, and tell the author it will look awfully self-centred to have a writer’s foreword.  If the author presents you with a copy of a book where the writer has indeed written the foreword take the book, hold it at arms length, scowl and then say, “well, I rest my case, but if you really want it like this…”

Beyond this we have the Acknowledgement.  Even if there is a thank you in the Preface you still need the Acknowledgements.  These are a way of saying that certain people did things, but these were not considered of enough importance to be in the Preface.  In fact the Acknowledgements section is the perfect place to insult everyone you have ever felt like insulting.  The smaller the typeface the greater the insult.

Following this we come to the Introduction.  Authors are generally considered fairly inept when it comes to Introductions, and it is best not to let the author loose here, for he/she will only ramble on and on about the history of the light bulb in 19^th century Carlisle, or the role of the beef sandwich in the discovery of the pulsar.  Best if you handle it.

You can however let the author have a go at a dedication, as long as there is an agreement to keep the dedication down to ten pages or less.   If you get a dedication which starts, “This book is dedicated to The Right Revered Isaac Wob, who was Bishop of Bloemfontein back in the days of that little adventure with the farmers we now like to call the Boer War…” then you know that the delete button is going to be needed.

And so, the Prologue. Amazingly most authors are generally so besotted with their writings that at this point they forget that the Prologue is written by a character from the book.  Equally they don’t realise that just because Frankie Howerd always began, “It came to pass…” this is not de rigour.  For safety, write it yourself.

Beyond this we have the publication date, the edition number, the copyright information, the ISBN, and the printer’s key – which clearly is your domain.

When all this lot is put together it should take you up to the normal 198 pages – which means you don’t have to bother with all that troublesome stuff from the author.  And that certainly cuts down on production time.

I trust that is clear, but if you need further help, do let me know.

This piece was written as an illustration of how one can move away from the standard  approach to a covering letter to a catalogue, to something quite different.  The point being that no one reads the standard stuff anymore, but they will read this…

I’ve suffered now its your turn

Every year my three daughters give me a birthday present.  And a bit later a Christmas present.  Nothing unusual in that, you may think, but my daughters have views on what their Dad should be able to do and the form of education that he now needs.

One of the things they reckon I ought to be able to sort out is electro-mechanical gubbins like how to put my text messages in both upper and lower case, and how to install overseas channels on the digital satellite system.

These are of course extras to the basic function of a Dad these days, (which incorporate  removing footprints from the inside the car windscreen, and keeping the battery topped up with distilled water.  In vain do I suggest that my daughters ought to be able to control their passengers (“but he was being sick Dad!”) and sort out their own battery (“the guy in the garage said this type of battery never needs topping up,”) so I always lose.

Anyway, because (more by chance than anything else) I somehow know just about enough to keep a car on the road, they torment me in the more recent areas of  technological advancement.

So to keep me up to speed with such issues they give me a present – a present that invariably needs programming, installing, opening, closing, adjusting, setting, reformatting, focusing, and generally sorting out.  If I tell you that last year they gave me a digital camera, and I took three films of my nose before I realised I was holding it the wrong way round, then you’ll appreciate the problems I have.

This year I thought it would be fun to see if other people suffer from the same sort of problem.  So enclosed with today’s catalogue you will find a little package.  Your first task is to open it.

When you have done that you will notice that you have been given a clock, but the timing on the clock is wrong.  So I want you to change the time.  If you can do it all by yourself, then you win the Hamilton House Techno Brilliance Prize of the Year.  Fundamentally the prize is worthless but you have won it.

If you fail, then you win the equally worthless Techno Failure Prize of the Year.   And you can share that with me.

But I want to assure you that I know the frustration that all this can bring.  So in the PS I have put the answer.   No cheating though, or I will be very upset.

Happy reading of the catalogue.  Please keep buying from us.

Yours

Tony Attwood

PS: Press Time, Press London, Press Set.

Last week I took a lady from a well-known national charity out to lunch.  She was looking to undertake a mail shot to promote the charity’s commercial catalogue.

There was also talk of a promotion to encourage people to go on a sponsored bungee jump as a way of raising additional funds.  I was looking forward to the possibility of some interesting new business for Hamilton House.

We settled down in the Toppled Bollard’s new Pig and Stoat bar, a rather jolly addition to my local hostelry with a history dating back several hundred years, and (I have always suspected) staff to match. But suddenly my guest asked, “What makes Hamilton House different?”

Unfortunately, I never do very well on general questions.  The real answer (that we are efficient and effective, realistic in our promises and responsive to our customer’s needs, as well as being experts in getting teachers to buy what our clients want to sell them) sounds like rather tedious self-promotion.  I needed a new angle.

“I see our work,” I said, “as akin to the work of Thomas Edison.”   I can’t actually recall why I said this.  It just seemed to come out.

My guest looked unimpressed.  “The inventor of the light bulb?” she asked.

I tried to explain.  “When Edison set up his laboratory, he planned to invent something every ten days.  He just decided to do it, and then he did it.  We work in the same way.   We decided to become the leading marketing companies in relation to radical new approaches to selling direct,  (writing promotional letters, emails and blogs, building the most effective lists and so on).

Then we did it.

“And he invented the phonograph,” my guest stated emphatically.  Somehow I was struggling to relate my opening to my main theme and Edison didn’t seem like such a good idea after all.

“Indeed,” I said (for it is always best to agree with a potential customer.)  “But it is not the specific inventions that have impressed me.  It is much more the notion of deciding to do something – like invent – and then going ahead and doing it.  We wanted to devise a new and more effective approach to direct marketing and we did it.”

My guest nonchalantly ordered a glass of sparkling water, rather wisely opting against the Chilli à la Corbiere which was listed as dish of the day (as indeed it had been for the last two weeks).   Then she summarised the situation thus far.  “You are saying that to understand what makes your services different I should compare you to the man who coined the phrase ‘1% inspiration, 99% perspiration’.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “you’d like to see the warehouse – when we’ve finished lunch.”

Tony Attwood

PS:  Call 01536 399 000 to debate mailings, fulfilment, email, blogs, promotions and sales letters, whilst avoiding all talk of the first commercial development of a power distribution system, not to mention the development of the silent movie.  On the other hand you can call me on 01536 399 013 to talk about football or the weather.   It won’t increase your revenue, but passes the time of day.

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Background: Hamilton House started to revolutionise the concept of writing copy for direct marketing and email in the late 1990s.  We developed the view that it was possible to push the boundaries of direct marketing further and further, and in so doing become more and more effective.

There are of course issues – one can’t just charge in with an email or letter like the one above – one needs to introduce the project more slowly.  And different people need different approaches – but generally we found we were able to make it work over time with every group we targeted.

As such the Toppled Bollard stories represent the most radical approach we ever developed, and they have always worked brilliantly for us as a marketing tool.

If you would like to talk about how your response rate can be doubled by writing to clients in a very different way, please do call 01536 399 000.

How the fate of Louis XVI was nearly replicated by 134 Smarties

This year the annual awards of the School Marketing Alliance for Reaching Teachers in Educational Settings (Smarties) took place in the Toppled Bollard in Corby – a jaunty venue and one that offers a thrilling setting for a meeting of the nation’s top educational salesmen and women.

The catering staff put on their usual display of haute cuisine – the shepherd’s pie contained an additional shepherd, and the spotted dick contained an extra spot.  Life for the crème of the profession was good.

This year I was not honoured, I regret to say, with an award, being inexplicably overlooked for “best sales letter for a story about a pub”.  But being a local, and thus unlikely to overindulge in Toppled Bollard house white, they did ask me to make the closing speech.

My exposition (“Raising response rates in direct mail into schools”) was delivered to a packed house.  I took the opening shouts advising where else I could be at that hour of the night as the traditional banter of an industry welcoming one of its own long-serving sons to the top occasion of the year, and settled to my theme.

There were, I told the guests, 37 obvious ways in which most mail shots could get better response rates.  Method One I suggested, involved raising response rates by reducing the glitz and glamour of the full colour multi-folded digitally compressed graphically coded, coated art printed 128 page catalogue, and replacing it with a single sheet of one colour one side A4, accompanied by an attractive, zappy, fun sales note written (not to put too fine a point on it) by me.

It was at this point that I noticed a gaggle of delegates (I can use no other generic term to describe the grouping) led by senior directors of the Bollard Print Co, who it turns out were sponsors of the event.  As they advanced on the podium armed with what appeared to be a noose, I gathered that they did not take kindly to advice which would (it could be argued) reduce their turnover.

Quick as a flash, and showing my renowned ability to improvise in dodgy situations I brought my remarks to a close, congratulating the staff of the Toppled Bollard on their hospitality, noting only in passing what a shame it was that the waitresses were now all asleep.

Thus sadly those present did not get to hear my views on how educational direct mail response rates can be raised while costs can be reduced.  So instead I have written up my notes and made them available to anyone interested in a series of articles on www.hamilton-house.com Just click on “How To” on the left and scroll down the list and you will find the education section.

Those of a technologically challenged disposition can phone me on 01536 399 013 and I’ll talk to you.  Either way I will send you a copy of the speech I would have made had I not been “interrupted by events” (as Louis XVI so famously had it in 1789).

Tony Attwood

PS A summary of what actually happened to Louis XVI in 1789 and subsequently is also available from the same source, for those with an interest in mindless violence.