It’s such an easy mistake to make.

You spend all day every day living and breathing your company’s products. You’re so familiar with them that it’s easy to take it for granted that teachers will be too.

It is a common failure with a lot of marketing to schools and a very easy thing to overlook. After all, so often the people we get to proof read our marketing emails are those people we work with and are therefore just as familiar with our products as we are!

Sometimes it’s only when somebody completely unrelated with your company reads your marketing that the problem comes to light.

This was the case only yesterday when I was asked to provide a client with some feedback on an email they wanted to send to teachers. I read through the email twice and simply could not wrap my brain around what they were offering!

In the end I had to do some quick research on the client’s website before it became clear exactly what the email was referring to. It’s unlikely that any teachers would have gone to the same trouble.

The client had spent so much energy trying to persuade teachers why they should buy his product that he had completely forgotten to clarify exactly what that product was and how it could be utilised by schools.

In the end, we stripped all the marketing spiel from the email and simply focused on expressing the client’s value proposition as clearly and succinctly as possible.

And do you know what; the email was far more compelling when it focused more on telling and less on selling. It reminded me of a phrase coined by Dr Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments, ‘clarity trumps persuasion’.

There is a lot of truth in that; you’re far more likely to sell more to schools by simply providing teachers the information they need in order to make an informed purchasing decision, rather than trying to be too persuasive with your copy.

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john@sprint-education.co.uk

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Marketing to Schools Emailing Teachers Email Teachers Schools Marketing Selling to Teachers How to Sell to Schools Sprint Education

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