Research into variations in response rates to shared mailings

  (c) Tony Attwood

This paper considers the issues that affect response rates in shared mailings to schools.  It was prepared to help to consider a whole variety of factors that affect response rates, and how we can set about measuring them.

1. How we do this research
2. Addressing the teacher you want to reach
3. The copy and the colour
4. Which schools you mail affects your response rate
5. The outer envelope and the covering letter
6. The number of inserts
7. The date of mailing
8. Do different companies generate different response rates?
9. How many replies might I get?

1.   How we do this research

Researching into response rates gained by companies using direct mail is undertaken in three ways:

a) By asking the school administrators how they handle direct mail in their schools

b) By measuring the response rates achieved by specific companies that use shared mailings to schools

c) By undertaking comparative studies of leaflets mailed by different mailing house

a) By asking the school administrators

The school administrators are the people in schools who distribute the leaflets within a shared mailing pack.   It is vital for each shared mailing company to keep the administrators on-side in terms of shared mailings – if they don’t want to distribute the mailing pack then the whole system fails!

Hamilton House tried a number of ways of communicating with school administrators, including in the 1980s selling administrative equipment to schools. In 1992 we tried a different approach and wrote to school administrators and asked them how they preferred direct mail to be addressed, and what they did with shared mailing packs. The results of these first questionnaires were so interesting that we have continued to issue questionnaires to school administrators ever since, and now issue a new questionnaire once every half term covering all aspects of their work. 

Because Hamilton House has developed the Diploma in School Administration in conjunction with University College Northampton, (funded by the Dept of Trade and Industry), our link with school administrators has become even closer and we receive emails daily from administrators talking about their work, and of course about they way they handle direct mail.

As a result of this study we have built up a picture of how our shared mailing packs are handled, and how school administrators handle shared mailing packs from other suppliers.  They have become an invaluable source of information and we have modified our own shared mailing packs as a result of these findings.

b)  By measuring response rates achieved by specific companies

Hamilton House Mailings includes within its group First and Best Education Ltd, a publisher of a range of e-books and photocopiable books.   First and Best leaflets appear in a number of shared mailing packs and each product is coded individually, allowing us to trace every sale back to its original leaflet.  In this way where we are asked to look at what has happened in terms of response to a specific pack we are able to bring into the equation the level of sales achieved by First and Best.

We are always happy to share the information we have gained from First and Best – indeed if you would like to see a copy of a typical First and Best leaflet, we will be pleased to fax you one. 

In addition, companies do share with us the response rates they have got from specific shared mailing leaflets.  Although we are never at liberty to publicise this information it does allow us to develop our knowledge of what works and what does not work within shared mailings, and we can pass this information on to our customers in more general terms.

c) By undertaking comparative studies of leaflets mailed by different mailing houses

This obviously would be the ideal way of doing the research, but it is the toughest because it involves sending out identical leaflets through two separate companies simultaneously – which requires the co-operation of another mailing house.   One of our customers did do this in 2003, and it seems the results were very much in our favour – but of course we don’t have access to all the details of the research and would not like to claim that we get higher response rates just on the basis of this one test.   We did do a two way test in 1984 using leaflets advertising products from Paperbacks by Post, and this did suggest that our approach to shared mailing gained a higher response rate than that of the other mailing house – but this was of course a long time ago.   We have since tried to replicate this sort of test but when we have tried to offer a First and Best leaflet to another mailing house they have not accepted the booking from First and Best.

2. Addressing the teacher you want to reach

All the sources of evidence that we have (for more details see “How we do this research”) tell us that indicating which teacher you want to reach, in large lettering on the top right of the leaflet, has a huge impact on the response rate.  

School administrators tell us that they look top right for this information, and when it is not there they normally do not read through the leaflet in order to consider who it might be for.  If you don’t write “Attn: The Head of Music” (or whatever is appropriate) in big letters top right then you are significantly reducing your chances of success.

Choosing who to write to is not quite as easy as it seems.  Many people tell us they write to the Headteacher “because it always pays to go to the top”.  Results suggest this is not always so.  Our figures show that headteachers are getting up to 17 times as much mail as deputy heads.   We have also found the Head of IT in secondary schools can get 16 times as much mail as the Head of History.

Now you might say that you have to mail the Head of IT with your product because he or she is the person who will buy it.  And of course this might be true. But what we can say is that where our customers have experimented they have often found to their surprise that mailing elsewhere in the school can bring in exciting results.

If you would like to discuss which member of staff your leaflet could be addressed to, please do get in touch.  You might like to note that second and third leaflets included in shared mailings are charged at about 25% of the cost of the first leaflet, and so the options for experimentation at a low price are there.   In addition you can have these subsequent inserts sent out in the shared mailing a week later so that the school does not receive several copies of your leaflet at once – again at no extra cost.

3. The copy and the colour

The text you write is of prime importance.  Most shared mailing leaflets tend to be A4, one or two sides - which means you don't have much space, and you need to choose each word carefully.  

Based on all the leaflets I have seen over the years, and what people have said about their response rates I would say you should:

• always have a headline that is directly related to the product and/or sells a benefit.
• give enormous attention to the text, and if necessary produce several versions and trial each one.  There is much more on on how the text influences direct mail response rates on www.mailing.org.uk 
• talk about the customer's needs and what your product can do for the customer. 
• talk about the customer not about yourself - even when you have lots of space it is fairly pointless claiming to be the biggest or the best or the longest established - what the customer wants to know is "what do you do for me?"   In a shared mailing where you have very little space, talking about yourself is  invariably bad news.
• Have an order form which offers as many methods of contact as possible - don't just give a phone number, because many teachers do not have easy access to a phone during the course of the day.   Make sure the order form offers as many ways of paying as possible - certainly include a "please invoice" box, as well as "cheque enclosed" and if possible a credit card option.

   
In terms of colour, there is a tendency to think that colour is everything - and I have heard that some mailing houses that don't seem to do too much research into mailing response rates do say to their customers that they should always go to full colour.

All I can say is that in experiments that we have done with the publisher First and Best, with Multi-Sensory Learning and with Careerscope (two other publishers that have also been in our group of companies) and with companies that have asked us to work with them, we have found in most cases that full colour actually reduces sales rates.

I appreciate that this seems curious, but I have replicated the result over and over again.  I don't say that it is always the case, but it appears to be in most situations - full colour in advertising to schools in shared mailings tends to reduce sales. 

The Careerscope case was particularly interesting - we were getting around 50 book sales on each leaflet sent to 5000 secondary schools.   Not sensational but a nice profit.   This was achieved with an A4 flyer, one colour two sides.

Without checking with anyone the marketing manager and the designer decided that it was "obvious" that colour and style would work better, and so changed the format and produced a series of leaflets in two colours, with perforation tear off forms, and folded to DL.   The response rate collapsed to about 10 book sales on each leaflet.  Careerscope moved instantly from profit to loss.

Of course in this case there were several changes - the change of size, the change of colour, and the addition of the perforation.   Other evidence which has been given by individual customers suggests that none of these changes do any good.

4. Which schools you mail affects your response rate

For many users of shared mailing services this is obvious.   But it is interesting that most people choose to mail all secondary schools or all primary schools.   But it is possible to split these lists, and this is often desirable.

• Secondary schools can be divided into secondary schools with sixth forms, and those without.
• Middle schools can be mailed on their own.
• Primary schools can be divided into the largest primary, medium sized primary, smallest primary, junior only and infant only
• Nursery schools can be divided into nursery units and nursery schools.

The point about these divisions is that we often find when we analyse response rates for our customers that their sales normally do not come evenly across the board.   For example, some people find they sell particularly well to the larger primary schools, others do well to middle schools, others to infant only schools and so on.

It is therefore often a good idea to take an informed guess as to which schools you think will be your most successful targets, and mail that subset first.   Although it is cheaper per school to mail all primary schools, mailing one group first allows you to refine your mailing and make sure you have got the text and design absolutely right, before spending your whole budget on one mailing.

5. The outer envelope and the covering letter

I have seen a couple of mailing houses suggest that by sending their shared packs out in a white envelope they generate higher response rates, but I have never seen any statistical evidence of this.

Hamilton House did try the experiment of mailing all its shared mailing packs in white envelopes for a number of months, but none of our customers reported any benefit.  In fact First and Best, the publishing company in our group, noticed a decline in its sales.

To try and explain this discrepancy it is worth considering both the original evidence for preferring white envelopes in mailing, and the way in which shared mailing packs are treated.

Evidence within the direct mail industry suggests that around 30% of business direct mail is thrown away without being opened, and it would appear that for the most part this is catalogue direct mail sent out in envelopes.  In other words if you receive an office supplies catalogue and you are not the buyer of office supplies, or you buy from another company and so don’t want to read this catalogue, then you throw out the item without bothering to open it.

But in a school with a shared mailing this does not happen.  The shared mailing carries a lot of different items, and hiding the fact that something that hits the schools weekly is a shared pack seems to me to be rather pointless – after all the school administrator will know what the shared pack looks like after a few hits, no matter how you disguise it.

The research which suggests that shared mailing packs do get a better response rate when sent in white envelopes therefore seems very dubious to me, both on the experience of sales of First and Best, and in logical terms.

Therefore what we did was address this issue by going back to polythene envelopes but putting a cover page which we thought would be really interesting for the school administrator – that is letting her see through the polythene envelope something that she really wanted to read.  She would then open the pack, read the item and then distribute the leaflets.

Writing something that the administrator wanted to read is not difficult – especially when very few people write for school administrators.  They have no magazine, the education paper (The Times Education Supplement) has nothing in it for them, and they are rarely in touch with other administrators.   Yet there are hundreds of issues that they are interested in – ranging from the Workload Agreement to changes in registration procedures in 2004.

We found that once we started to put a cover page of real interest to the administrator response rates started to go up and up.

The cover page on the Hamilton House shared mailing packs to the 10,000 largest schools in the UK is known as the “Administrator’s Newsletter”.  I am very happy to forward you some recent copies if you are interested.   It is issued with each shared mailing pack to secondary and the largest primary schools – which means it can go out anything from twice to five times a week.    Each issue covers a different topic.

Each copy of the Newsletter has an email address for administrators to write back with comments – and they certainly do use this facility.   The newsletters are written by two members of the Hamilton House team, along with outside writers who contribute articles on their specific areas of interest – from union recruitment to diversity policy.

For what it is worth, my view is that it is the advent of the School Admin Newsletter in the last few years that has done more to raise response rates in our shared mailings than virtually anything else.

6. The number of inserts

The number of inserts in a shared mailing can be influential – but only once you reach about 20 items.   We limit our shared mailings to 15 items plus the cover page.   Most other mailing houses seem to be around the same level.   We have not been able to find any change in response rates when one goes down to 10 items or even 8 (as we did for a year with a special option that we ran as an experiment).    Up to 20, the school administrator is either going to open the pack and distribute it, or she is not.   Above 20 she might open the pack, but then take a look at the volume and then give the whole thing up as a bad job.

There is more on this theme in the next section on the date of the mailing.

7. The date of mailing

We used to be able to tell customers when to mail and when not to mail.  But then the government started to introduce the 3 year budget, and schools started to go over to the 6 term year, and patterns of buying started to change.  We can still make some judgements – and as our mailing schedule shows we do have some times when we don’t mail schools at all, because we know response rates are so low at that time.

If you have not mailed schools before then generally speaking you might want to try your first mailing in one of these periods:

• Late September / Early October
• Straight after half term in November
• Mid January
• Straight after Whitsun half term at the very start of June

This is not to say that these are the only times to mail – or even the best – but they are the ones that have been known to work well and which are unaffected by recent changes in purchasing and holiday arrangements.

There is however a second issue with mailing.   Hamilton House is mailing schools every day of the week, with some schools at some times of year getting up to five shared mailing packs in a week.   

As we watch this volume of mail move through the postal system to the schools we work to try and smooth the flow to schools.   We know that school administrators don’t like getting too much mail at once, and so we try and even the level of mail out.    Of course we don’t have total control over the mail, since Royal Mail does have the power to take the mail we have posted over several days and deliver it all together – but most of the time in most locations when we post does directly affect when it is delivered.

Given this situation we do on occasion send out leaflets sooner than the stated date, and sometimes a little later.   This movement of dates is done in order to enhance response rates, and it does appear from correspondence with school administrators that this is working.

However we do understand that some customers find it a little disconcerting not to know exactly when their mail is going to arrive in schools, and therefore we have produced the following guide to despatch and delivery times.  What follows is complex, and you may feel you don’t have time to plough through all this – and certainly as a starter I can tell you that 90% of all shared mail packs leave our warehouses on or before the due despatch date.  If you want to know what happens to the other 10% read on.

Our school mailings leave our warehouse in sections.  This helps the smooth running of our services and allows Royal Mail the opportunity to keep the processing of our mailings running smoothly – which in turn avoids too much bunching of mail when it arrives in schools (see below).    Thus if you book into a mailing to all secondary schools some of your leaflets will travel in a pack to schools with sixth forms, and some in a pack to schools without sixth forms.   The pack to schools with sixth forms might leave our offices one or two days before the advertised date, the other pack might leave on the advertised date.  To add to the complexity, if anyone has booked into Regional Shared Mailings or the County by County options, those parts of the country will be mailed separately, and they may go out a day or so before or after the main posting.

But sometimes we have more than 15 leaflets booked into a mailing and where viable we run a second mailing.   If a mailing due for despatch on a Friday is split in half because we have more than 15 leaflets then we often mail one pack on the Friday and one on the following Monday to avoid our sending out two shared mailing packs to the same schools on the same day.

Although this is our normal procedure when we have 15+ leaflets, in a small number of cases with primary and middle schools we do reserve the right not to send out a second pack but instead hold the leaflet for the following week.    If you book into a sub-section of our primary school mailing (for example the largest 5000 primary schools) you will be told with your booking exactly which day your mailing will be going out.  If the mailing you book into is full you will be given a date one week later – and of course if that is not satisfactory to you, you can decline to book in.  If you book into the complete primary school mailing package then it is possible on occasion that a part of that mailing will go out up to one week after the booked date.  But you should note that we do guarantee that at the very least half of the mailing will go out on the due date – so this is not a case of the whole mailing being put back by a week.   What’s more, it is the case that most of the time our shared mailing packs to primary schools are not full, and therefore packs do go out to the whole primary selection each week on the date specified.   However if it is vital to you that all mailings go out on an exact date you must say at the time of booking.    We do guarantee in our terms and conditions that no mailing will go out later than one week after the due date, and our records suggest that late despatch by up to one week occurs in under 10% of our shared mailings.   Were we ever to be over one week late we are obliged under our terms and conditions to send out all the mail second class rather than mailsort.

The effect of Mailsort

Although our customers are (quite reasonably) most interested in despatch dates, the biggest variance on the arrival time of mailings is not the date we post but the processing of Mailsort 3 – the Royal Mail service used.  The Royal Mail can take anything from 3 to 10 days to deliver Mailsort 3 packages, and often does take the full length of time.  Therefore it can take getting on for two weeks for schools to start replying after we have despatched.  

We monitor arrival dates of our shared mailing packs across three counties in the UK – this does not give us a total insight into the workings of Royal Mail but it does help.   By and large we find that as long as we don’t post more than one shared mailing pack a day to schools, then more than one shared mailing pack a day does not arrive in schools.   But it must be remembered that we have no control over Mailsort – we can manipulate the system by picking the days on which we mail, but we can’t control what happens in the mailing centres of Royal Mail.   What we are constantly aiming to do is give the school administrator what they want – only one pack a day.

This may all seem like too much detail to you – and if you are about to go off to another mailing company with the feeing that Hamilton House never posts when it says it does, I would add one final point.   We have put all this information here because we think it is important that our customers know exactly how the system works and what happens in various circumstances.   We also do put into our terms and conditions various guarantees that you have.   The key point in all this is that we are changing mailing dates for the most part to avoid schools getting more than one of our packs on one day – and that, we believe, is helping our customers get higher response rates. 

8. Do different companies generate different response rates?

Does the mailing house you choose affect the response rate you get?

For many years now I have been arguing that yes, it does – but I have also been careful to say over and over again that although this is what I believe I can’t prove it.  I can come up with evidence that suggests that I might have a case, but no, I can’t write an advert that says “you will get better response rates with Hamilton House than through any other shared mailing company.”

It has been put to me (quite vigorously in fact) that if it were true that direct mailers get a better response rate through Hamilton House than through other mailing houses, then surely all the other mailing houses would be out of business – we would get all the shared mailings because we delivered the best response rates.

Such a point misunderstands the nature of the market.  Most people do choose a shared mailing house and assuming they get a good response they stick with it.   Let’s assume that you go to Company X and you get a response rate in a secondary shared of 1%, and this is profitable for you.  The chances are that you will stay with Company X.  

Now along comes Company Y saying “you might well get a better response rate with us”.   Before you change you have to have in place a good system of measuring the response rate on each and every promotion you send out.   Although this sounds obvious it is sadly a fact that many leaflets go out without a method of checking the response rate on every sale from that leaflet.  You have no proof that you will get a better response rate with another mailing house – and you are already doing ok.  You like the people at the mailing house you use – they seem good and professional – so why change?

Of course some people do change mailing houses.  Sometimes they change for cost, sometimes they change because they have been upset by some circumstances, and sometimes they change just because that is their company policy.   But in my experience only a handful of shared mailing customers change on response rates.

So the fact that everyone hasn’t moved over to Hamilton House doesn’t of itself suggest that there is not a difference between response rates.

When you are choosing between mailing houses you might well take into account the following factors

·         The guidance.  For many years we have offered a service in which shared mailing customers send in their leaflet ahead of mailing, and we comment on it.   This normally happens on a phone call – as soon as we have the leaflet we call the customer back.   Our approach is one based on what our copywriters would do if faced with this budget and this product to sell.    We try and come up with alternatives and suggest why we think these alternatives would work better than the original plan.   Judging by the comments made subsequently by people who take our advice, we get it right much of the time and we do raise response rates in this way.

·         The covering letter.  Given the number of emails and calls we get from school administrators, and given the development in response rates for First and Best, we think that the school administrators’ newsletter works well in grabbing attention and getting the school administrator to distribute our shared mailing packs.  I really do think this is having a great impact.

·         The cost.  If you find someone offering their shared mailings very cheaply then you may well be tempted to use them.   Prices do vary a lot – but an additional response rate of just one tenth of 1% can more than offset a small price reduction.  Some direct mailers will cut their rate card if pushed – unfortunately Hamilton House is not one of them.  We stick to our rate card for everyone – so if anyone tells you that they have done a deal with us that is not on our rate card, then I rather suspect something in the story is not right.

·         The number of leaflets in the shared mailing.  Most mailing houses seem to be using a similar number of leaflets in their packs and our research (noted above) suggests that, until you get up to very high numbers, the number of items in a pack doesn’t make much difference.

·         The envelope.  We tried going over to a paper envelope for quite a long time and couldn’t see any change in the response rates.   It would be good to see some evidence to back up claims that paper envelopes improve response rates in shared mailings.

9.  How many replies might I get?

First and Best advertises reports that are sold for around £25 each.  They use two sides of an A4 one colour leaflet printed on 80gsm bond.  A mailing to 5000 secondary schools will bring in anything from around 25 to 100 sales.   Experiments with heavier paper, coated art, additional design, folding and more colour all resulted in lower response rates.

I hope you found this interesting.  If you have any points or questions you can email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com or phone me on 01536 399 013.  If you want to make a booking into a shared mailing or have any other sales related enquiry please call 01536 399 000.