How to Market Books

Direct marketing means selling or promoting straight to the customer, without the intervention of an intermediary such as a retailer, wholesaler or sales agent. This may take place through a variety of different media (e.g., email, post, telephone, parties). What turns an advertising campaign into a direct marketing campaign is the inclusion of a mechanism for responding directly to the organisation advertising. Thus a party where a new range of cosmetics are shown or a catalogue distributed door to door both become direct marketing operations if an order form is made available or a website address is available for related orders, perhaps with an offer included for responses within a certain time period.

The precision of thinking and clarity of instruction required for effective direct marketing are valuable disciplines for any form of marketing, and can play a key part in setting the standards for an organisation’s overall marketing activities.

Today direct marketing is being used through a variety of different media and in new ways, often in combination. Integrating your message across multiple media can be a very effective way of establishing sequential customer relationship management (CRM): an initial email to arouse interest; a printed brochure on request; a follow-up telephone call to solicit an order. Direct marketing is also now highly significant within mass market retailing. Loyalty cards operated by supermarkets are a vast direct marketing exercise to support their brands aimed at their core market, and find out more about their shopping habits and aspirations. Political parties are using direct marketing to make specific pitches to groups they wish to influence.

For publishers, the high costs of postage and low overall response rates have often meant that direct mail is too expensive for lead generation, but it still has a significant role to play in customer retention and renewals, in buying situations where a niche market can be clearly identified, or where collaboration must take place before a decision is made (e.g., the educational and professional markets). Direct marketing using a combination of media, e.g., email, telemarketing and print, is an effective way of remaining in touch with the customer and building a long-term relationship. Selecting which is the best media to use comes down to knowing the audience and using the most cost-effective channels to reach them. And all the associated thinking is a very good start to marketing online.

One of the most significant characteristics of effective direct marketers is that they are well organised. This is a marketing medium that requires attention to detail more than huge dollops of creativity. But before any associated marketing activity is planned there are a variety of factors to be taken into consideration, and you will find your objectives easier to achieve if these things are thought about before you begin planning your campaigns, rather than as you are doing them. You will need:

We will look at each of these essential elements in more detail, and mostly in relation to printed material – and then with a short section on telemarketing; both practices illustrated through a relevant case study.

Once organisations could routinely communicate online with their customers, many assumed this would signal the end of printed direct marketing materials (direct mail and flyers). Not so. As data handling has become more efficient and market niches more precise, mailers can store and access sufficient information to deliver really effective and specific campaigns. And the huge increase in email means that many people delete ‘junk mail’ (or ‘spam’ as it is termed) without reading it carefully, if at all. An effective printed piece can still grab attention, as it is physically in front of them. Yory Wurmser, director of marketing and media insights at the UK’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) recently quoted an average 4.4 per cent response rate for direct mail compared with email’s average response rate of 0.12 per cent.¹

• you can be really precise about whom you want to get to and how to reach them;

• the financial rewards of contacting them are sufficient to make it worthwhile;

• the product you are promoting is impressive, and carries a status and weight that is best relayed through print;

All successful campaigns begin with a plan. What is your objective? Do you want a direct response or to spread information about your products? If the latter, will orders come back from other sources? Deciding what your objective is then dictates how you will measure the success of your activity. Are you seeking value of resulting sales or the number of responses? Not all successful campaigns need to generate sales.

Direct marketing can be usefully divided into two types: direct response and direct promotion. Direct response marketing invites a direct response back from the customer, so emails or mailshots advertising particular titles might ask for orders to be returned to the publisher. Direct promotion marketing is more concerned with spreading information about products, which may be variously fulfilled. The promotional message is still sent to the customer, but while the response may indeed be returned directly, it may also be fulfilled elsewhere, through the websites or shops of other organisations. Small publishing houses who promote to their customers, but are keen to avoid managing a despatch service themselves and hence content to rely on the services of third-party retailers to fulfil the resulting orders, are executing a system of direct promotion.

You need to understand both what has been achieved so far within your organisation and what is expected of you in future. A good starting point is to explore both the expectations and budget for the products in question. Try to find out the answers to the following questions:

• Are there any internal constraints (e.g., the requirement to sell a certain quantity by a particular date)?

• Are there any other backlist titles can you sell on the back of this campaign?

You need to think at the earliest stage about the likely audience you wish to approach and how they can be found. There has been a tendency for those considering direct marketing to think in terms of lists of possible customers, but a list is just the contact details of those who can be reached (and may not even include all those you would like to be in touch with). We prefer the term ‘audience’, which includes their profile and background information about who they are, how they behave and how you should talk to them. A detailed understanding of audience is invaluable at the creative development stage, and knowing detailed information about your current and potential customers allows you to project this onto external list sources, using like to find like.

The audience to which your marketing material is sent matters more than any other single component of a direct marketing campaign, because unless information is sent to the right people, it stands no chance of achieving a successful outcome. An understanding of audience should thus form the basis of all the elements of your campaign, from the media through which you will communicate to the tone of voice deployed in the copy.

Lists of customers are increasingly developed and maintained by publishers, with information that comes back from the market (‘undeliverables’) being used to update the database, usually auto-updating in the case of online marketing. You need to meet with those managing your data and ask them what they can tell you about your customers. You may also be working with external organisations such as professional associations or membership organisations, in which case you need to ask about whom you are approaching, and what their motivations and buying criteria are. For example:

Consumers today are used to getting added value in every purchase, through price promotion or perhaps the aura of exclusivity that early ownership brings. How effectively you communicate the benefits of purchase to your market will have a big effect on how willing they are to order or remain your customers.

You need an understanding of what will motivate your target customer to buy/recommend/ask for your product. It may be just your product, and the prestige endowed by early ownership or the solution it offers to a longstanding problem, or it may be the added value you are able to include (free carriage, strong guarantee, money off for an order placed before a certain date, additional free gift).

Thinking of an offer to consumers is an important stage in a direct marketing campaign, because focusing on how to attract attention generates excitement and enthusiasm. And once you have thought of a benefit to offer, it helps you write the copy. Another option is to make a choice of offers, so the recipient gets involved in deciding which one to take, and moves further along the route towards response. One final point on offers: in general try to offer added value rather than discounts. The perceived benefit of giving an additional book for orders over a certain price point may be greater to the customer than the actual cost to you. Offering a discount, on the other hand, has a direct impact on your overall profitability, and may create expectations for something similar in the future.

You have a wide variety of different media for reaching your customers by direct marketing. These include:

• ‘off the page’ advertising (space advertising in a magazine or newspaper with the response ‘off’ the page back to the organisation that placed it);

• poster sites (e.g., in the street or transport advertising such as in bus shelters, train stations and beside escalators);

You need to think about when your potential customers are most likely to be responsive to your marketing approach, as well as when you can best handle the work involved – and what else your organisation is sending out to the same market, to avoid over-communication.

Work backwards from the date you want your message to arrive with your prospects. If you are going to complicate your approach by including a ‘sell by’ date, or the market has a key deadline looming (e.g., the end of the school term), you must be very accurate. It is easy to allow slippage but it can be fatal to a campaign’s success.

Working back and allowing a little extra time, you should start thinking about the mailing at least three months before you want it to arrive.

Of course mailings can be accomplished much more quickly. An email campaign can be decided upon and effected within the space of an afternoon – but the sequential thinking about all the different stages still needs to be thought through. How will the customer respond? When is the best time to inform them? When you are ready to send may not overlap precisely with when they are most ready to receive.

Don’t forget to factor in how long it will take you to organise. Dr Dominic Steinitz has this formula for working out how long any online project will take: make your first estimate, multiply it by two and then add a unit. Thus if you think it will take, say, 2 hours it will probably take you 4 days. If you estimate 3 weeks it could be 6 months and so on. In my experience this is very accurate.

Direct marketing is above all a writer’s medium. Whether you have to write the copy yourself or commission it from freelances, it really matters. There is no eye-contact, no body language to coerce the recipient into purchase and so the words, and accompanying images, are hugely important.

In the digital era, a picture is also worth 1,000 words. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest all work better through images and the suitability of images for promotion will depend on the nature of the item you are promoting. Does it have graphic content or does it lead to the imagination of content? Strong images with strong calls to action work best. The exception is in email where writing an effective subject line in 50 characters or less is a skill in itself.

If the copywriting and image sourcing fall to you, begin by thinking (about the market and how best to present the product or service to them) rather than just writing. If you think as you write you will find it takes longer, and is more muddled. You need to think about how the words you use can persuade the market to take the next step you have intended. An outline of your overall strategy, with the impression you are trying to create, can grow into draft headlines and the basic message you plan to communicate.

The best way to learn about how to put together a direct marketing piece is to become a direct marketing user – if you are going to use direct marketing in a professional capacity you need to see how others are doing the same. Through this process you will start to notice that most direct marketing consists of four components (even if they are part of the same physical thing). In direct mail, for example, there is almost always:

• an outer envelope to get the information to the recipient – usually with a message on it;

• an accompanying letter, to introduce the contents of the package, the product being sold and the offer. This could be from the organisation or you could consider presenting it as a ‘lift letter’ from someone the market respects, an endorsement that can provide the credibility to help convince the audience (or you could have two letters);

In some mailshots these components may be amalgamated, for example into a long sales letter that has an ordering coupon along the bottom. Similarly, in an off the page advertisement, all the component parts must necessarily be part of a single space. An email or telemarketing call will be structured in a similar way. But even the simplest direct marketing format will combine the features of the four items listed above:

• invite response, however the intended audience will find it most convenient to respond.

Remember the overall level of response will always be in inverse proportion to the level of commitment required, so you must make ordering as trouble-free for the customer as possible. If you can supply goods on approval, do so. If not, ensure there is a complete guarantee of satisfaction, such as a money-back offer, restated on the order form. If you cannot accept large orders from institutions without payment in full or a credit check, explain how this helps protect them as well as you.

It’s sound advice to spend time reading ordering information from those who manage the process well. For example, insurance proposal forms and the annual tax return are excellent examples of clarity. Both provide reversed-out white space for anything the customer has to complete; you can see at a glance whether all the required information has been given. If working online you can make questions compulsory (although this may deter response, and site metrics will show you at what point people gave up).

We won a DMA 4 Gold award once for an insert for British Telecom where the insert card was L shaped and the response device was the perforated shorter edge. People were happy to tear off the shorter edge to make the card neater, in the same way they are reluctant to cut into a square sheet.

Direct marketing works on the basis of gaining permission to continue a relationship, and so your response device can be a useful way of gathering information/checking the details you already hold, within the context of prevailing legislation. How much detail should you seek? Asking for too much information may offend recipients or dissuade them from completing the form. Again, fill it out yourself and consider how you feel. Do you feel you are being asked to populate their customer database with information you would rather not share? As an example, I recently tried to give feedback on good customer service in a store and the resulting online form posed so many additional questions I was tempted to give up.

• An order form should be a mini version of the advertisement, restating all the main selling points. Start with the chief one: ‘Yes, I would like my family to have access to the new Children’s Encyclopaedia.’

• The less small print, the better. ‘Offer subject to our standard terms and conditions, available on request’ covers most eventualities.

• Free draws for swift responders attract replies. If you try this on a regular mailing to the same list, be sure to announce who won: it boosts credibility and creates a club atmosphere.

• Try a pre-publication offer or, for projects that are even further from completion, a ‘pioneer supporter’ price: this can work particularly well for expensive multi-volume sets that take years to come to fruition, and helps to subsidise your development costs.

• Involve the reader on the response device. Some physical mailing pieces ask the recipient to stick peel-off labels or yes/no stickers on the form. Increasing customer participation boosts response levels.

Attractive and appropriate design makes your message appealing to the market. This means thinking about the look and feel of what you are planning. Your market will make instant decisions about what to do with your marketing piece, without rationalising why, other than being aware that they have a choice over whether or not to invest time in reading it.

Research has shown that when looking at marketing material, reading habits are seldom linear; people do not move logically through the content. Rather they dart around, allowing their eye to be grabbed as it will. Your design layout should anticipate this and provide lots of interesting locations in which they can graze for information.

Provide a complete brief on what you are trying to achieve and the ideas you have had so far before the designer starts work. For further advice on dealing with designers, see Chapter 14.

This determines how your material gets to the market. It needs planning rigorously, and with accurate time allocated to each stage of the process, working back from the date you want your material to reach the customer. Whether you are using an external supplier, colleagues in another department or your firm’s warehouse, do give them plenty of notice of your schedule.

You need a system that will monitor how effective your marketing has been and help you to take appropriate action. This needs to be based on the kind of information you want to capture and the uses to be made of it in your future marketing and publishing decisions.

Direct marketing is a very testable medium – and an opportunity to learn from past projects and improve each campaign before you commit significant resources. All large-scale mailers test the market before they commit themselves to extensive campaigns, by mailing a selection of addresses from all the lists they are considering.

Don’t confuse yourself by testing too many variables at the same time, rather test the issues that are likely to have the greatest effect on your response rates, and hence:

Before any promotional information goes out, fulfilment services need to be in place to support the marketing offers you have made so that customers who order can receive a prompt service. So the warehouse that will send out your products needs to have systems for locating, selecting and packaging items, and the customer information lines you offer (email, telephone or both) need to be ready before you make them available.

The fulfilment service needs to know all the things you know, but will not know them unless you tell them. For example:

• What is your policy on orders that arrive after the deadline – will you still honour the offer?

• What guarantees are provided and what is the policy on accepting returns from dissatisfied customers?

Telemarketing remains a popular medium, both for creating sales and following up other direct marketing initiatives. Selling over the phone is the natural extension of the personal contact for which direct marketing strives, but by talking directly to the market much more comprehensive feedback can be obtained. It can be useful both inbound (for the placing of orders and customer enquiries) and outbound (for teleselling, renewals chasing and promoting good customer relations).

Telemarketing is an effective way to test customer reaction to new products and ideas; to identify new market sectors and measure market attitudes; to find out who within an organisation should be targeted with sales information and how large their budget is; to test a price, offer or incentive.

Telemarketing is an excellent way to update information held, to ‘qualify’ (establish real interest from) sales leads generated, to follow up a mailing piece and thus increase the response rate, and to carry out post-campaign research and analysis.

• If you are writing about something you do not understand, has the copy been checked by an expert such as the editor or the author?

• Have you called the product by the same title, with the same capitalisation, each time?

• Is it clear what the basic price is and how much should be added for postage and packing, etc.? If carriage is included in the price quoted, have you made it clear this is a benefit?

• Are the publisher’s name, address, telephone, email and website details on all the elements of what is sent? If the order needs to be sent somewhere else, is it clear which address is which, and would it be better to offer just one address to avoid confusion?

• What does the customer do if he or she is unclear about some aspect of your product? Are you offering a telephone number for enquiries? Is it working? Try it now.

• Triple-check the final proofs for press for consistency, grammatical errors, etc. Publishers are expected to get these things right! Last-minute changes are very expensive.

• How is your marketing piece to be followed up: by your reps, by re mailing, with telemarketing, etc.?

• If you offer a slot for those who do not want to order now saying ‘Please send me further information on … ’ have you sorted out what you are going to send?

• Have you told everyone who needs to know, from customer services to those who may answer your phone or out-of-office email response?

• Is your address on the outer envelope so that undelivered shots can be returned?

Concluding case study: Reading Force, www.readingforce.org.uk

Building a database to communicate more effectively with a market, information on a sample direct mailing campaign and consideration of how this could be extended through telemarketing

Reading Force is an initiative that encourages Forces families to communicate more effectively, particularly at times of stress, through shared reading. Military families face a range of pressures not experienced by the wider population, such as frequent moving of house (and associated changing of schools, disrupted friendships), long absences of partners due to training, deployment and active service – and associated worry throughout. Developed by an Army wife, the scheme is based on the principle that when families are under stress it can be hard to talk about what is really going on – and due to all the moving, wider family and friends are often physically distant. Families are therefore encouraged to set up a reading group, choose a book together, read it – and then pool their feedback in a special scrapbook they receive, which can be kept as a memento. These can be returned to Reading Force for comment, a certificate of participation, a book prize and entry into a competition, or just kept by the family. They are always returned to the entrants by ‘recorded delivery’ post to ensure safe arrival.

Encouraging families to share books, and talk about what they have read, is an effective way of living through a difficult time, often offering the opportunity to ‘project’ worries on to characters or situations in a story, and in the process pulling everyone together. The idea is based on principles developed within other community reading and reader development schemes and has been shown to be very effective in the 4 years that it has been running. The scheme is for families of all ages and compositions and participation is free.

Hattie Gordon, Director of Communication and Projects for Reading Force comments:

Our starting point was Aldershot, home of the British Army, where with support and small grants from both the local council (Rushmoor Borough Council) and the area authority (Hampshire County Council) we piloted an initial scheme. We contacted all the local schools, set up a steering group (which consisted of everyone who responded), and worked with them to develop a scrapbook that they then distributed to local Services families through the schools and libraries. In addition to this support from school head teachers and librarians, we made many visits to local playgroups and youth groups to talk about the scheme, and also worked with welfare officers supporting the families and the local HIVES (information centres on all military bases). After the scrapbooks were submitted to the competition, prizes were presented to families at a storytelling day at the local community centre. But while it was all a success, and we received a grant from the MOD to extend the scheme over a wider region, we were very aware that so far success had relied heavily on personal communication, and if it was to spread wider it would need much more formal marketing, and this time through non-personal means.

Ideally we wanted to communicate with Services families directly, but the problem was locating them. We discovered that no reliable and complete data is kept on Service families – their constant mobility makes keeping track of them difficult and no organisation knows exactly how many there are.

In our second year we planned to make the initiative available through four counties, following the same distribution model as the pilot, reaching families through schools, and running for 6 months over the summer. We worked with an educational marketing company but despite their highly sophisticated, multilayered information database, which offered a wealth of additional information to their users (e.g., which Maths or English scheme a school was using), the key data we needed on whether or not they had Services children within the school was not something that had been hitherto requested – and hence was neither recorded nor available to us.

We emailed head teachers in schools in areas we thought likely to have Services children through the educational marketing company, but after a poor response became very aware of how much email schools are receiving – and therefore that not all of it is being read. We felt we needed to make a personal link with an individual member of staff who would take responsibility for the wider sharing of our message.

During this period we were joined by Elaine Boorman as director of marketing and development and together we did some analysis of our second-year response. This highlighted that, while the mass mailing to all schools across the four counties had been achieved at relatively low cost, it had proved ineffective. Clearly we needed to adopt a more targeted approach and this led to a complete review of our marketing plan. We divided our markets into:

• service families;

• routes to reaching them (e.g., schools and welfare units);

• potential supporters who could refer our project to those interested;

• the media

and then sought to build up contacts and more rigorous information in each case.

Elaine comments:

Relevant data was, and still is, hard to find. Lists of Service personnel (or the location of their housing) are not available to outside agencies, and we found we needed to communicate through a range of different methods to build awareness and reach families. Our challenge was how could we start targeting our messages effectively with a lack of appropriate data? The Directorate Children and Young People (DCYP, part of the Ministry of Defence) was set up in 2010 to manage professional and practical support and safeguarding for Services families and had the compilation of data high on its agenda, but by the launch of Reading Force their own list was still in its infancy. A database of schools, compiled by Service Children in State Schools (SCISS, which is part of the MOD’s Children’s Education Advisory Service) is the nearest thing to a ready-made means of contacting Services families via schools but is not available to external agencies. It is also incomplete as schools are ‘entirely self-nominating’6 and it does not in any case include private schools, which large number of Services children attend through assisted places at boarding school.

With this lack of relevant data we had no choice but to build our own database from the ground up, which has been challenging and time-consuming but well worth the investment; the data we’ve compiled is invaluable in allowing us to target our efforts, resources and messages to much greater effect.

We started by sourcing the information handbooks that garrisons distribute to families and we were able to identify the schools they listed.

We then tried to establish a ‘Reading Force Ambassador’ in each school to whom we could send information and materials to distribute. While most schools with Service pupils allocate a specific responsibility for their care to an individual member of staff, finding out who it was proved to be quite a challenge. We now have on our list of useful contacts the following: ‘Nurture Teaching Assistant’, ‘Parent Support Adviser’, ‘Literacy Leader’, ‘Services Support Manager’, ‘Home Link Support Worker’, ‘Pastoral Support Manager’ and ‘Service Pupils’ Champion’.

Wherever we work with partners to promote the personal delivery of materials (e.g., working through BookStart coordinators or service welfare departments) we see stronger engagement with the scheme. Service welfare units within garrisons are a direct route for us to families but establishing a list of personal contacts has proved difficult as we have found that this is a specific responsibility that changes all the time (Services personnel tend to get ‘posted’ at least once every two years, often more regularly). A generic ‘Families Officer’ will work for postal mail, but email addresses are much harder to locate, partly because individuals change but also because of the immense complexity of the construction of email addresses within the Forces.

Working through Services units also risks making us reliant on Service personnel passing the information on and from the outset we have been keen to avoid implying that Reading Force is an extension of the Service person’s employment and in any sense an official or monitored process. Post rooms in Services units often have a waste basket, and items for communication with families are often found deposited here. We found that Service families were quite resistant to what was often perceived as ‘organisational bureaucracy’, as well as being labelled as ‘Forces families’ and thus seen as part of an indistinguishable mass rather than as individuals. There is also the issue of how to reach families with a Services link who are not either formally part or geographically close to the unit they are involved with, for example, families of Reserve Forces, or children of parents who are divorced or separated and do not live with the Services person. All this makes it even more important for us to communicate directly with families.

We have achieved this by encouraging Service families to register with us directly by offering an incentive of a free book. As they generally keep the same email address when they move house, this has provided a much more sustainable method of keeping contact. We now have a number of families who have taken part each year, bringing in new friends and wider family members to share and encouraging others to join in the scheme.

We also found it effective to build links with the Services charities, of which there are many, with other organisations active in this area such as the Service Children’s Support Network 7 and with the media, both Services-related and general. As the profile of the military varies in the media, according to what is topical, so projects to support their unusual lifestyle become more significant to other people – and news spreads. It was a great boon getting funding from the Armed Forces Covenant Libor Fund, which redirected fines from financial services firms towards Services charities, and this has given us the money to extend to a scheme that is now nationally available.

Our database is continually being updated and is fully categorised according to our target markets, enabling us to make our communications more relevant. We send out regular e-newsletters, varying them according to the target group. With families we share information on how other people have used their scrapbooks or experienced the scheme as well as news of who has won prizes – all with the aim of boosting longer-term involvement. We keep teachers up to date with the social and educational benefits of our scheme; funders and our trustees get additional specific information relating to their contribution. What keeps us going is the positive feedback we consistently get from those involved – and we now have a wealth of lovely quotations from Service families who have taken part and found the scheme very beneficial:

‘Next time Daddy deploys we are going to choose a book and repeat this process, we are sure it will help give us something to talk and focus on, as well as counting down the days.’

‘I enjoyed being able to share a book with my family even though I wasn’t at home. It really made me feel included and I enjoyed hearing [on the phone] Annabelle reading a very tricky book.’

‘When we received our Reading Force scrapbook we thought it was a great opportunity to get together as a family and share a book. Annabelle was very excited about it and we spread it out over a few weekends when Daddy was working away and he joined in using face-time which made it really special.’

‘Today I listened to Isla Jane read me her book on the phone as I am in Diego Garcia in the Far East working away with the Royal Marines and I have never heard anything so sweet in my life.’

‘We read together every night and we like to talk about what we read. It was nice to be able to involve Nan and Auntie Mary too – they don’t normally read the same books as us. It gave us extra things to talk about with them on the phone.’

Looking ahead, we want to invest in a more sophisticated marketing database to capture and leverage even more data for integrated marketing activities. For example we want to be able to cross-reference the book titles families choose to share (useful information for maintaining our relationships with publishers), capture more complex data on the age-groups involved (do we need a different communication style/varied materials for different age groups?) and analyse the high quantity of data on levels of involvement that we are gathering (in order to further refine the scheme).

There are also certain synergies that are emerging from the project that may make it more valuable within society as a whole, and that we need to formally track. For example, it has been reported back that the scheme has a real role to play in helping Service families through difficulties that are more widely experienced within society, such as divorce, single-parenthood or long-term illness. Rushmoor Borough Council spotted early that the scheme could be highly relevant for children in care, or those with a parent in prison, as it provides a long-term means of keeping in touch. Those working with young offenders have spotted benefits in the scheme in that, because it encourages ‘projection’ (discussion of difficulties through attributing them to third parties), it may be a pathway to therapies that require self-analysis and consideration of both personal responsibilities and the consequences of actions.

In conclusion, as the scheme has spread we have become convinced that the key to effective delivery, and to Service families understanding and appreciating the benefits on offer, is to communicate with a variety of different agencies – and to keep careful records of their involvement with us to date. We also want to be able to communicate more effectively, and more regularly, with the Service families taking part, and a more sophisticated database, with more options for automated communication, would enable the despatch of messages to our audience, at specific stages on their journey with Reading Force. This would help us keep the excitement going (‘Did you receive your free book?’ ‘How are you getting on with your scrapbook?’ ‘How are you enjoying the book?’) and further encourage those taking part to both share the scheme with their family and let us know how they are getting on (by contributing their feedback to our website). The more touch-points we have with those who take part, and the more our communication becomes two-way, the more motivated they are to continue with the project and refer it to others – and reap the associated benefits. How this is to be resourced is our ongoing main priority.

Mailing a sample resource pack to schools and other organisations to encourage registration to Reading Force; to spread awareness of the scheme and promote participation in the first competition of 2014

SMART objectives:

1 To achieve a minimum 10 per cent registration response of the total mailed. Registration to be by printed form returned via Freepost envelope, or online via the website.

2 20,000 scrapbooks to be ordered/despatched via registered schools/organisations.

Plan: To mail an introductory letter and guide booklet, a registration form and Freepost envelope plus a sample scrapbook, leaflet and stickers (a resource pack) to schools and other organisations both new to Reading Force and previously involved.

Lists:

1 Reading Force’s own database of schools and organisations.

2 Primary schools in HIVE postcode areas (commercial list).

Offer:

1 A free resource pack for organisations (scrapbooks, leaflets, stickers, for distributing to Service children, posters and a guide booklet).

2 The materials for distributing to Service families encouraged families to sign up and receive a free book – and to enter the associated competition.

Decision on the most appropriate medium: direct mail to ensure they see the high quality of the materials.

Decision on timing: November, when new initiatives are prioritised for the new term – offering a choice of delivery of materials in December or January.

Copy platform: encouraging, affirmative – non-corporate. Stress how easy it is for schools/organisations to get involved; fun for families. Ensure it is understood that there is no cost to those taking part.

Design services: locally secured, brief was to reflect: free, fun and easy for schools/organisations to sign up; child friendly scrapbooks; parent friendly leaflets.

Fulfilment/system of despatch: mailing materials organised by Reading Force. Fulfilment through an educational mailing service.

Method of monitoring effectiveness: evaluating responses direct to Reading Force (post and online form on website) from schools/organisations; despatch of materials requested. Evaluating families requesting free books (having received materials distributed by schools/organisations). Returns used to update the mailing list.

See Figure 8.1 for the results.

Figure 8.1 Mailing results for a recent Reading Forcemarketing campaign. Courtesy of Reading Force. CEAS = Children’s Education Advisory Service, a tri-service organisation funded by the MoD. SCISS = Services Children In State Schools.

Associated telemarketing

Associated telemarketing backs up the campaign and helps us reach schools that have been identified within an area containing Services housing, and sent information packages, but that have not yet participated in the scheme. No cold calling is done. Calls are only made to schools/other organisations who have been previously mailed but have not yet taken part. So the call would be developed through sharing some of the information, depending on the response of the person being called.

It is important to establish early on in the conversation whether or not the person receiving the call is interested; one outline conversation does not fit all situations and not all the relevant information should be offered. Hattie Gordon comments:

Just last week I spoke with a Service family supporter in a school (new to the job) who said she was finding it hard to find initiatives for Service children and she was so pleased to have come across RF online. And so we progressed to taking their details and sending a pack of materials very quickly.

Examples of conversations around Reading Force

RF: (after saying name) I am ringing from Reading Force, a shared reading scheme for Forces families, in order to:

• ask if you have anyone within the school with a specific responsibility for looking after Forces families within your school;

• check to see whether you have received the Reading Force letter and samples we sent you;

• check you are aware/understand the benefits of Reading Force.

Possible response: We don’t have any Services children in our school.

RF: That may be the case right now, but it may be that a Forces child will join the school in future and it would be good to have the material on hand.

You are close to the xxx units/Forces based in your neighbourhood.

We have discovered through running the scheme that schools often have the children of Reservists in their school, or those who are closely linked to a Forces member but perhaps do not live with them. For example, there may be children from Forces families whose parents are separated or divorced and while they are no longer living on a daily basis with the Services person, they feel a difficult combination of strong concern but isolation. Having their identity as a Services child confirmed, by taking part in RF, can be really important to them.

Plus as all children who take part receive a free book, it would be good to ensure any children you have who are entitled to one do get it.

We would like each Services family to know that this is an opportunity and resource available to them, whether or not they choose to take part.

Action: If details given of person with responsibility for Forces children within the school, note name and spelling. If they do not have anyone with a specific responsibility for Forces families, is there someone whose general responsibility it would fall under? It’s helpful to suggest who that might be, e.g., pastoral or welfare officer.

When talking to those who sound unfamiliar, or who have not previously heard of the scheme, describe again:

RF: Reading Force is a shared reading scheme for Forces families. Use over 4 years has shown that it encourages families to remain in touch when facing difficulties and has been much enjoyed by those who have taken part.

Possible response: We have enough schemes to administer without adding to the workload of our hard-pressed staff.

RF: Of course we understand that schools are under pressure, but this is an unusual scheme that targets a group of children who often slip under the radar. Services families have particular needs and this scheme has been designed especially for them.

We would like each Services family to know that this is an opportunity and resource available to them, whether or not they choose to take part.

The scheme promotes family literacy, we hope that it supports the aims and work of the school rather than being a distraction. All children who take part receive a free book, and we have found that this can be a real motivator in encouraging them to read for pleasure.

Possible response: This would not appeal to our Services children.

RF: Of course you know your children very well, but we have now been working on this scheme for 4 years and have a lot of evidence that children really enjoy reading with their families – particularly when times are stressful. We would love you to see a sample of the materials to see how motivating they are.

We have a leaflet showing how schools have got involved and why they have found it helpful – and this includes feedback from families who have taken part. And there is also extensive feedback on our website. Can we send a copy to you for you to share with your colleagues?

Possible response: In our experience Services families tend to be private and prefer to deal with these things on their own.

RF: Coping with the absence of a key family member is a difficult situation, and we know that Services families find different ways of managing this. But the scheme was developed by a Services wife with long experience of managing separations, and one of the benefits experienced by schools using the scheme is that through Reading Force Services children often find other Service children in their school – and form bonds.

We would like each Services family to know that this is an opportunity and resource available to them, whether or not they choose to take part.

3 This will vary according to the market and the approval staircase involved. In general, teachers being contacted through their school would need more time than individuals being reached at home.

5 I once ran a competition in a magazine going to direct marketing professionals asking people to name their worst direct marketing disaster. Someone had, by mistake, printed the telephone number of the local police station on their order form. A bad case of wasting police time.

Response device in the mail	1 week
Time prospect needs to consider the offer and respond	5 weeks³
Best time to arrive	1 September
Time in the post, by most cost-effective means	1 week
Stuffing the mailshot	1 week
Printing	2 weeks
Circulation of final proofs, passing for press, ordering lists	1 week
Design and layout, corrections	2 weeks
Copy approved and passed to designer, visual prepared and circulated	2 weeks
Finalising copy	1 week
Copy presented, discussed and circulated	1 week
Time for writing copy	2 weeks
Drawing up schedule, briefing suppliers, requesting estimates, sourcing lists, setting up monitoring procedures for mailing response	2 weeks