You know your business. You know what you want to sell. You know what your unique selling point is. You know what it is like when you talk with teachers.
But despite all this knowing, there is a problem. Because the one thing most of us don’t know very accurately is the impact of our advertising on people who have never heard of our company before.
Of course you may feel that most people have heard of you – in which case you have another problem: convincing these people who know about your firm but are not buying from you, to change their approach, and sample what you sell.
And we are not helped in this by that fact that it is incredibly hard for all of us to look at an advertisement or web page we have created and see it through the eyes of one who has seen it before, but chosen not to take matters further.
Such a person glances at an email advert for a second or two and maybe also the web page for the same amount of time, but then stops.
Now at this point, people often say to me, “But you write these long rambling emails… are you saying no one reads them. So it must be better to write shorter adverts.”
That looks logical, but unfortunately people receiving emails do not act logically.
For the fact is that most people receiving emails do read the subject line and maybe the headline, or in the absence of the headline the first few words of the text.
At the moment my inbox is full of emails with subject lines that say, “First page of Google, guaranteed” and which start, “Looking to get SEO done on your website? We are a UK based Digital Marketing company with 20 years helping businesses… etc etc.”
As soon as I see that or any variation on it I hit delete.
So the key point is to write something as a subject line which is completely different from everyone else, and then open up the email in a way that is different from most other advertisers.
That draws the reader in, and the reader will then skim down the page reading the first few words of each paragraph until they find something that catches their attention. Then they will either read that paragraph or go back to the start or click on the link to the website.
That in essence is how new customers are attracted, and the simple fact is that if the email and website are not written in a way that works with that process in mind, the reader will rarely be drawn in.
But it is harder than it looks because we are all too familiar with our own emails and web pages to be able to see what we have produced as a stranger would see it.
Which is why Schools.co.uk makes this free offer: drop a line to Stephen@schools.co.uk or call 01604 880 927 and we’ll look at your email and your website and then, if we think any changes could be made which would improve your response rate, we’ll set them out for you in a report.
Better still, the whole process is absolutely free and will contain suggestions you can implement yourself.
As to why we do this, the fact is that most companies that do ask us to do a review of their email and/or web landing page are so pleased that they come back and ask us to send out their advertisements for them, report back on the results, and then add further tweaks to the advert if need be.
I do hope you will consider getting in touch.
