01/09/2008 by Tony Attwood.

I know that sometimes you might receive emails and letters from Hamilton House Mailings which don’t always get straight to be the point. Indeed occasionally I get calls from people saying they aren’t quite sure what the point is…

So today, just for a change, I thought I would jump straight to the nub of the matter and say that….

Hamilton House has storage space available in its warehouses, at a rate of £2.75 per pallet per week.

There are no charges for receiving the pallets nor for loading them to return them to you. The only extra charges are transport (although of course you are free to organise your own), and retrieval of items from the stored pallets to meet a specific request.

There’s not even a minimum time period – although there is a minimum overall charge of just £50.00 plus VAT.

As an additional service we do also complete orders for some of our customers who use this facility, receiving orders, picking the goods and sending them out. Obviously the price here depends very much on the goods in question, but we are happy to talk this through.

For more information on this, please do call me on 01536 399 000.

There’s information on a wide range of Hamilton House direct marketing services on www.hamilton-house.com

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29/08/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Many people talk about “open rates” in email marketing – implying that they are able to judge the number of people who have actually seen an email, and that there is a clearly understood definition of what the word “open” actually means.

Our research has revealed several things – including some information on what the crooks are doing with emails. That might seem a bit off topic, and I’ll leave that bit until last but it does give a clue as to where the market might go.

In the meanwhile, here’s what we found out about “open” rates.

Depending on the software you use, open rates can mean any of these things:

· The number of emails actually received by people you emailed (even if the email went straight to a delete box through the use of some “message rules”). This will be the number sent minus those that never arrived because the mail box was full, or the system down, or the address discontinued.

· The number of emails clicked on by readers – but this clicking could mean clicking to delete the item as much as clicking to read it further.

· The number of emails where the recipient has clicked to reveal blocked images that are on a website that links to the email. The problem here is that our trials and research shows that when we put in such a link many people read the email without clicking, and others just delete it at once – thus the stats can be quite misleading. We feel the latter option (delete at once when the “reveal pics” message is shown) is growing, because of the increased awareness of the sophistication of cyber crooks (see below).

So the situation is unclear, and it is made worse by the fact that some software actually seems to record open rates twice for some emails. For example an email received might be clicked on once to open it up, but then if one clicked again to reveal the images or to go onto a site linked from the email, that produced a second “open” statistic. So the number of “opens” would include some emails where one recipient counted twice.

It’s all a horrible mess – made worse by the example of Outlook Express. Most people using OE can look at the content of their incoming email without clicking or doing anything else. Typically one window shows the sender and subject line and another shows the email itself. The recipient can read, and then delete. Is this “open” or not? No one can agree, no one knows.

Now I should add that I know that the response of some email statistics software companies is to say, “yes, there is a lot of rubbish out there, but ours works”. And I am perfectly ready to believe this – but all I can say is that we have not been able to lay our hands on any software which we can trial, which gives us sensible results.

The situation is exacerbated by the growth in agencies that handle email distribution for companies, rather than sell software that allows you to do it yourself. They email for you, and give you a set of statistics which cannot be verified. Worse, they often fail to define “open” – particularly in reference to Outlook Express where one can see the email without actually clicking on it.

The one statistic that does have a consistent meaning is “click through” – obviously defined as the action of clicking on a link within the email to a web site. The software can measure this clearly and straightforwardly and always gives us consistent results.

Indeed the fact that this statistic always works throws further doubts on all the other stats. If we can always measure “click through” and can verify the measurement through a set of tests, why do the “open” figures vary so much?

This raises another issue: what is the point of “open rates” at all? If I “open” your email, read a line, think it is rubbish (no offence) and press delete, and you count me as “opening” – so what? I haven’t read much, I haven’t clicked on the link…I don’t like what I read. What have you learned from this statistic?

I can see the point at one level – if 80% of people you sent the email to “opened” it but only 1% clicked on the link, we could say that your subject line was obviously good, but you lost it all in the message. But to do this I would need to be sure that “opening” was a real choice, and wasn’t incorporating within the count messages that were simply delivered.

In reality, because emailing is cheap, it is possible to sort this out in a much more positive and clear way by undertaking a set of experiments based around either
· the number of enquiries or sales you get or
· the number of people who click on your link.

To turn to the other issue that I raised, SC Magazine has published an interesting piece (full details below) about emails from cybercriminals. They point out this scenario…

· The user clicks on the link and is directed to a site where a Trojan file automatically downloads onto the user’s computer.

· The trojan then downloads an additional spyware file that captures sensitive information, such as bank account numbers (known as spy-phishing).

http://www.scmagazineuk.com/Cybercriminals-move-with-the-times/article/112273/

Now what strikes me is that by and large people are getting more and more cautious about email. They will look at emails (and using the Outlook Express example above they will do this without actually clicking on anything), and then decide if they want to read on.

At the moment I believe most professionals feel that they can recognise a criminal email when it pops up and hits them between the eyes because it is so obvious – the Nigerian scam, the sex pills, the tax refund, Britney Spears pictures, the bank website update (please re-enter you account details and password)…

What we all know is that the writers are sophisticated in their IT skills, but we rely on their lack of other skills – such as knowledge of grammar, an ability to spell…

But supposing the criminals start to get more sophisticated in terms of their ability to copy legitimate sites and in their use of the English language?

At that point fewer people would be willing to click on a link even if it looked perfectly reasonable and related to their profession. In which case the only way to sell by email will be to give information and offer not only the link to the online shop but also a phone number, a fax number and an address.

In fact, most serious players in the market do this, but a fair number of smaller firms don’t supply such background detail at all, and this could ultimately be their undoing.

In a sense I am predicting a movement in email marketing which moves away from all the high tech “click here” approach of the last few years, and back to treating the email as if it were a bit of direct mail, which is forced to rely on words to excite the readers. The links can still be there for readers willing to take the risk, but over time I suspect fewer will be willing to give a website a try, no matter how well the email is presented.

To conclude, if you supply a piece of software that measures open rates in emails, and you are willing to allow Hamilton House to test it for a week in a way that allows us to verify the answers, we’d be delighted. If the results fail to be consistent, then we won’t tell anyone, but if the results actually match our figures we’ll happily report the news through our news groups and on this web site.

If you’d like to explore ways of marketing your company through email marketing, do give me a call – no obligation and I’ll be happy to discuss with you the in’s and out’s of selling any particular product.

Tony Attwood: 01536 399 000

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11/07/2008 by Tony Attwood.

We are all used to getting junk emails. We can all recognise them a mile off. Bad grammar, every sentence ends with an exclamation mark, pictures that don’t load properly, crazy linguistic style, multiple colours and huge headlines that are almost bigger than the screen, use of certain set phrases that no one would ever say in a billion years, fake personalisation, broken links…

It’s a bit like describing a desk. Desks come in a million different shapes and sizes, but I know a desk when I trip over one. Same with junk emails - I know one when I see one.

Thus we look, and think - “junk”. Which is fine when it is junk - but not when it is a serious advert written by someone who does not know how to write adverts. Then the sender really goes down in our estimation.

About 50% of the email adverts that I am now sent to review, end up with my saying (in the nicest possible way) I am sorry, but I think you would be better off sending nothing - this could do you real damage.

Of course such ads can bring in one or two enquiries, but they will probably alienate many more people. Especially those who know a spot about the law - for example, that you are supposed to give the name and address of the company that is advertising, that you mustn’t send an advert for a private product to a person at work without their permission, and so on.

At the very least I would always say you should follow these four basic rules:

1. Collect half a dozen really good email adverts together and print them out, and ask, “why do I like these?”
2. Get a professional writer of email adverts to look at your piece before it goes out.
3. Test the email on a number of people who you can trust to give an honest opinion, and ask them questions including, did this look like junk?
4. If writing it yourself, only send out a small number at first.
5. Unless you are sure of your own skill get a pro to write it for you. It might seem a lot of money to pay, but it really can do a lot for your business.

Notice my slip - yup there were five points not four. Can’t win them all. (Now ask, have you ever seen a bit of total junk with a throw-away comment like this at the end? Just one of many ways of making your writing stand out from the rubbish).

Tony Attwood

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02/07/2008 by Tony Attwood.

There is a report doing the rounds at the moment, which has been commented on in several places, in which the following question is asked:

“What is your best performing mailer (postcard, voucher, 6×9 etc) and is the recent postage hike and weakened economy forcing you to re-adjust your direct mail strategy? If so, how and why?”

Apparently lots of people answered by saying that the postcard was best for retail, marketing, healthcare and software.

Which on the face of it, looks amazing. Except for one problem.

As a study of the psychology of perception shows, how a person reacts to a mailer depends very much on how well they know the sender. In one way this is obvious - I read postcards from my daughters word by word, I keep them, I read them again. I’m soppy that way.

A postcard from a firm I’ve never heard of selling something that I am not responsible for buying doesn’t get me going at all.

As I say, that’s obvious. But what is not so obvious is the fact that we make our decisions as to how to treat these item according to how we perceive the sender. That affects the amount of brain power we give to the piece. Then, whether we read the piece or not is further affected by how much brain power it demands (lots and lots for colour pictures, far less for text).

So without knowing whether the postcards were sent to customers in love with their suppliers or just to a cold list, and without knowing whether the postcard contained pictures and other high demanding things or not - we are not getting very far.

Likewise we don’t know if the people who said “postcards is best” actually tried testing against anything else - like A4 letters. And if they did, did they keep the content the same.

And then we don’t know if (perhaps by chance) they obeyed the rules of the psychology of perception on the postcards but not on the letter.

In short, we know nothing. It was, at least as reported, a wholly useless piece of research. There are snippets in there which are worthwhile but not enough to start giving us proper stats on which to make a judgement.

All this is bad enough - but the worst thing is that this piece of research is just how much people everywhere are repeating it without questioning it. No wonder quite a few firms in the US felt the rise in postage prices was affecting them if they really are following this type of generalised advice.

Tony Attwood

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