According to reports “The recommendations, if accepted, will bring companies’ marketing communications on their own websites, and other non-paid for space online, such as brand activity on social networking sites, within scope of the CAP Code.”

All other marketing communications activity in paid-for space online, such as search marketing and display advertising, is already within the ASA’s remit and subject to the CAP Code.

The idea is to bring this into play before the end of the year, and then effectively stop government control of advertising to children by claiming it is all “self-regulated”.
Rae Burdon, chief operating officer at the AA, says: “Contrary to general understanding, much advertising online is already in remit and there’s a very high level of compliance with the existing rules. There are some complex issues in the remaining space which require careful analysis.”

“The industry has delivered to CAP a clear mandate that first and foremost will protect consumers and children, that will also – crucially – protect editorial content, and that will, if accepted, maintain CAP/ASA’s reputation as a world-class operation. The whole industry has pulled together to make this happen. What’s important now is effective implementation and raising consumer and stakeholder awareness.”

Tony Attwood
01536 399 000
Sales@hamilton-house.com

This happens in two ways - which are themselves complex - which I suppose is one reason why the use of pictures in emails continues. Intuitively it seems a good idea, and the reasons why it is not are complicated.

We work on hundreds of email campaigns a month and I can say definitively that the response rate of each has nothing to do with the pictures or lack of them - except that as a generality emails with pictures tend to do worse.

Indeed pictures can in fact harm your response rates - for two reasons.

First, the way pictures are presented in emails causes problems. If you want a picture in an email you have two ways of putting it in. Either you can embed the picture or you can web link the picture.

Embedding the picture means you drop the image into the email, so it is permanently there. The problem with this is it will slow down the loading of the email, and some email systems will be set up to reject emails of above a certain size.

Web link pictures are not in the email at all - but are on a web site. The reader normally can’t see the pictures until he/she clicks on a button at the top of the email to reveal them. This also allows the sender to track an open rate.

The problem is that when the recipient first sees the email it can look blank - because the pics can’t be seen (apart sometimes from a little red x at the top of the box). This hardly encourages people to read on - given that they only look at each email for one second before deleting.

The second reason that pictures cause problems in emails is that pictures are “read” by the right hemisphere of the brain. Text is read by the left hemisphere. Although the brain is a fairly nifty bit of kit, the one thing it doesn’t like doing is switching from left to right hemispheres - this requires a lot of extra brain power being used. And the one thing people don’t hand out willingly is the use of their brain when they are trying to get rid of their emails at high speed.

If you buy a magazine that you are committed to reading you will of course put a lot of brain power into reading the magazine - and the pictures will enliven the text. But this is not the case with an email you send out.

So that’s the problem: people don’t “read” emails in a way that makes pictures plus text work readily together, and when you do put pictures into emails they can cause problems themselves - either by being rejected straight off or because they give white space until the reader clicks.

Why then do people really continue to use pictures?

There is a belief that pictures work, just because people believe pictures work. But also, the fact is pictures are an easy way out - because it is easier to plonk in a picture rather than find a good piece of text which excites the reader.

Pictures can be of use, of course, but they should be put on the landing page of the web site. This overcomes all the problems - a person who clicks through is by then willing to give more brain power to the issue (they have CHOSEN to look at the web site) and there should be no loading problems - no blank areas etc.

If you would like to talk about this, please do give me a call on 01536 399 013, or email me at Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Well I suppose some do - but when they do, they don’t make much of a fist of it, because it is also vital to know about the psychology of perception - at least when sending out emails and direct mail.

People do not read messages as we expect them to - and unless one has mastered the psychology of perception then one can’t expect to get the maximum out of a message. If you don’t know how colour affects the way people see a message then you could be using completely the wrong colours.

The whole theory of the psychology of perception is on www.theory.bz - but there is also a complete index to the leading articles on http://www.theory.bz/factors.html

If there is any issue you would like to talk about from that site, do give me a call
Tony
01536 399 013
Tony@hamilton-house.com

This was shown in a Southwest Airlines case when a celeb was asked to leave a flight because of his size. Each side told their tale on Twitter.

But then they moved on to blogs, where much more of the story could be told.

Yet despite the obvious advantage of unlimited space that blogs give, most commentators agree that blogs are underused, or wrongly used.

Blogging about your products and services is one of the most powerful marketing tools that is utterly under your control, and which can reach a huge audience. (As you may have heard me tell before, the blog I set up 2 years ago to find out how to do it, now has an audience of 170,000 readers a month.)

What’s more if you build the blog around targeted keyword phrases, that page becomes an authoritative page in Google that can very easily be found in the top search results by those searching.

Of course not just any content will do. Something quirky and slightly amusing, and above all interesting and easy to read works best.

If you would like to see some samples, drop me a line or give me a call

Tony Attwood, 01536 399 013

There is the ability to a £500,000 fine (from April 6), and the new guidelines of March 2008 new guidelines on data breach handling and disclosure are now in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act.

If you suffer a security breach in your organisation and you are fined anything up to £500,000 you will also get the stigma of failing, which will hardly be good for your business.

If there is any evidence that there were continuing reports of data breaches or failures, and action was not taken then you could be in real trouble.

Call me on 01536 399 000 if you want more information on this, or any aspect of selling via direct mail, email or the internet.

There’s more about Hamilton House on www.hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

That is stage one - and is highlighted by the fact that blogs that are content rich get readers, not only for today’s blog, but for all the past ones you have written. A person does a google search for a phrase that turned up in your blog three months ago, and they find you - and there is a chance they will read more, and go onto your main web site.

Stage two involves placing a few advertisements on your blog. In the early days these don’t generate that much money but as the readership builds so can the response rates to the adverts build. Obviously you don’t take on anything that is competitive but you can still make something extra.

Stage three then involves exchanging links with people - getting them to mention you, and you to mention them. Not just the “blogroll” links (a list of links down the side of the blog) but actually in the article. As in “I was reading an interesting piece on…”. This doesn’t generate income but it helps take you up the rankings and gets your more readers.

Now suddenly your blog starts to become valuable in itself, not just because it sells product and keeps people in touch with you, but also because as you grow, other bloggers with non-competitive products, want to know you.

The first blog I set up, as an experiment to see how the whole blog thing works, now gets 170,000 individual readers a month. And this has led to interesting developments.

Each week now I get people writing to me asking me to link with them, or to mention them on my blog. When this started I was being offered sums so small that I took no notice - $20 a link was common. But as the reputation of my site has grown, so the amounts have grown. There are even companies out there who do nothing but organise links for clients - and the money comes in each month.

This is all because links have a double value - they can get people to go onto the other firm’s web site, and they can help take a web site up the rankings, if it is being linked to by a site that is already higher up the rankings.

So that’s stage four - and to summarise:

1. You promote your own products
2. You get a modest sum from adverts for non-comeptive products
3. You start getting links which helps the site develop and go up the rankings
4. You get paid for links.

It’s a strange world - but it can have a huge effect on your business - and those firms that are not part of it, will, I feel, find themselves marginalised over time. At the moment business blogs that work are not that common - but they are growing in number by the day.

Tony Attwood
www.hamilton-house.com
01536 399 000

Even if your email gets through to you and is not blocked by filters and the like, “e-mail fatigue” then clicks in. The fact that you get 128 billion emails a minute means that you have had enough.

They have it worse in the US where only 10% of emails get looked at, while in Europe it is 13%.

The point is that once you are reading a message, there is a chance that you will click on a link. Getting clicks is not the issue, getting people to read the email in the first place is the big problem.

So what to do?

Firstly, stop sending emails to people who really don’t want to know. If you have 5000 emails going out but only half a dozen people opening and clicking through, then the service providers (who have systems that do this sort of thing automatically) will start treating your transmissions as spam, and either send them straight to spam boxes, or refuse to deliver them altogether.

Second, use stunningly brilliant headlines. Headlines that are so amazingly exciting and engaging that you force people to look, even if they are utterly disengaged. “You are probably not reading this” is not the greatest headline in the world - but it is a damn site better than most that hit my in box each day.

(It is certainly better than “Transfer of funding responsibilities is fast approaching!” which just landed in my in box. Anything with an ! in the headline usually counts as rubbish with me).

Third, stop writing in “email speak”. Use a natural conversational voice. With an interesting personal accent. And just one little moment that no one else could ever write.

Fourth, replicate the emails on a blog, so they stay in a permanent record. This makes them public, and other people will find them and then be interested and join in. This item started out as an email to a news group - and now is here.

We get about 4,000 individual readers a month for this blog - not nearly as many as the 170,000 a month we get on another blog, but 4,000 is 4,000 and some of them then become customers. Maybe it’s you.

If you want to talk about writing blogs and emails, or sending them out, or anything else come to that, call me on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamillton-house.com

Tony Attwood

But despite the fact that one or two others in the business did the same (I cite the very best analysis of open rates in my article) nothing much changed.

But now a research paper in the States has come out and said that open rates are just a mess. Each approach is different from the others, and each one under-estimates the number of opens that it gets.

There is talk of unifying open rates, but that is probably going to be a long way off. Until then, it is best to ensure that you only compare open rates using the same technology - not from one supplier to another.

My article on open rates is on http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/OpenRates.htm

The latest cry for uniformity is at http://www.marketingvox.com/industry-calls-for-standardized-email-metrics-046107/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=mv&utm_medium=textlink

Tony Attwood

2. Write well. Not everyone can write in a way that engages readers. Just doing it yourself if you are not a professional writer with a clear style, doesn’t help, because people will read a bit and then leave. The material you put up has to be to the point and well written. Don’t assume that people will read all your material - they will treat it like anything else. If it is not clear, lucid and to the point they go.

3. Don’t just copy all the latest internet ideas. Some audiences go for snappy headlines, click throughs, and pictures, but others want clear information. Decide if you are writing to a reader of the Sun or a reader of the Guardian.

4. Give the reader the chance to find you on every page by having your email, phone, fax and postal address everywhere.

5. Create more and more articles which include the words that people are likely to search for, and then give them the answers in a meaningful way.

If you want that summarised into one simple concept: write a lot about everything you sell in an informative and open way. That way people will find you with searches and you will go up the rankings.

If you would like to talk about this do give me a call on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamilton-house.com

Tony Attwood

Sophos’ Security Threat Report: 2010 is a huge, significant review of what we really don’t want to think about - the awful mess that resides underneath on line activity.

There were over 70% more spams on social networking sites last year than the year before, and 36% more malware attacks - and the numbers are rising daily. The biggest security risk is seen to be Facebook, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Despite the risks it seems that most companies allow staff to use Facebook etc on line at work. And although LinkedIn is not the highest rated risk, this is probably only because fewer people use it. Those in the know say that LinkedIn poses the biggest security risk and Sophos says that by publicly posting information there, companies make it easier for criminals to launch targeted attacks on a corporate directory.

In short, social network use poses a threat to companies, and very few companies have much awareness of how much danger they are in.

Meanwhile, there is widespread awareness that there is a huge threat to companies through the vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer - and yet despite this most firms keep using it - even though it is so simple to switch to Firefox or an alternative free browser.

The overall answer is simple: don’t allow social networking on your firm’s computers, don’t be tempted to join LinkedIn, and delete Internet Explorer from your computers (although do set up an alternative browser before you do!)

These opinions are of course just mine - but if you want some background here is the full report.

Full report: http://www.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/papers/sophos-security-threat-report-jan-2010-wpna.pdf

If you would like to know more about Hamilton House and our mailing services, please call 01536 399000

Tony Attwood