The five direct mail headlines most likely to double your response rate when selling to schools

When you send out a mailshot to schools around 80% of the people who get it will spend no more than five seconds looking at it. In most cases all they'll see will be the headline. At that point the overwhelming majority will then throw your mailshot in the bin. Only a small percentage will stay with you and read on.

This simple fact of direct mail life shows why a really exciting, winning headline is the key to increasing the response rate in your mailshot. If you don't hit the right note in the headline then the reader just gives up, no matter how good the rest of your promotion.

For the past four years, Hamilton House has been analysing the success or otherwise of hundreds of direct mail headlines used in marketing to schools. To everyone's surprise only five headlines have been found to really work time after time.

The interesting thing is that what has emerged are not five absolute headlines, but rather five generic headlines: headline types which can be used in a number of settings. What's more, the headlines that work best are not the headlines that most of us imagined would do so.

In the piece Tony Attwood not only describes the five headline types and explains why they work so well, but also considers a few other headlines which look as if they ought to work, but which actually fail to produce the results. And they?re not the ones we expected either.

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