Tony Attwood's Blog

In this market, if there is one thing I think virtually every company should do in terms of marketing at this moment, it is to build email lists of clients and prospective clients.

Now when I say this to people, they mostly come back to me and say, “oh we’ve done that”. But when I get a bit closer (if they let me get a bit closer that is), it then turns out everything is not quite as I think it should be.

Here’s what I feel is the perfect scenario…

First, all enquirers’ and purchasers’ email addresses are added to a database showing their postal and email address. These people are then emailed each week or two with an informative item – not just pure sales but also giving some interesting background. Something that they will want to read, because of their area of interest.

If you are interested in seeing examples of such emails, give me a call and I will forward you a few samples.

Second, email lists of potential customers have to be built up. Of course you might be lucky and find you can buy these readymade, but most of us don’t have this luck.

To give an example, let’s assume you sell software to businesses. You can go out and buy a list of most businesses selected by what they sell – but those lists are likely to be just addresses to the MD or an administrator. They can work, and I would not knock them, but it can also be incredibly beneficial to build a list of the email addresses of the actual people who will decide to buy your product.

Doing this it not nearly as complex or expensive as people think. True, an email address researched in this way might cost you £2 – but the fact is that once you have that address, it is yours, and you can use it quite a few times. (Also if you need to get two or three people’s addresses per company the price remains much the same, but the volume of addresses increases).

Next you load these addresses into a database attach to a specialist email marketing program, write your interesting copy, and send it out. Of course you have to have an unsubscribe button on the email – but how many unsubs you get depends on how good your copy is. If it is really exciting and lively you will get more people asking to sign up, than you get people leaving.

Obviously this is a quick summary – but having this list of potential customers which you mail every few weeks with interesting copy, and having your list of people who have shown their interest or actually bought, is a major step towards having a business that really makes use of digital technology.

And it really does work.

As always, if you want to know more email Tony@hamilton-house.com or call 01536 399 013

The phrase “viral marketing” – a bit like the phrase “word of mouth” is one of those that is floated around here and there.

The concept that these phrases encapsulate can seem rather like geese and golden eggs – the route to free marketing. But equally they are rather vague.

Unfortunately neither “viral marketing” nor “word of mouth” are ways of advertising for free, but they can be a very powerful approach to marketing which can be very cost effective. Below is a brief outline of the how these approaches can work. As always if you would like to know more, please do get in touch.

These approaches basically relate to having a promotion which customers and potential customers pass on to each other. At its simplest you send out an email, and the person to whom you send it is so impressed that he or she sends it on to others, who send it on to others who….

The variation used by many firms is to put an advert on the internet, and people then tell each other about the site, and so go and look.

Obviously the key here is to have something that people want to look at or see. A very funny You Tube piece can draw in a lot of viewers, not just because they have been told about it by friends or colleagues, but also because others find it through searching for key words on Google.

But most of us don’t have the ability or finance to make a You Tube movie, so we come back to text – and here again it is possible to write pieces that others will refer on. But you do have to get the text right.

Here’s one example. We send out an advert for the Royal Academy to 2068 people, and 422 clicked on the link we gave, which went to their web site.

Now a 20% click through rate is incredibly high – (the average for the sort of list that we were using is about 6.5%) and when we checked what had happed it was clear that many of those clicking through were not the people we had mailed. They had in fact sent the advert on to colleagues.

Articles that appear on blogs and web sites can be forwarded too. The experimental blog set up by Hamilton House two years ago now regularly has its articles cited by other blogs – sometimes with phraseology such as “there’s an excellent piece on this at….” sometimes with phrases such as “this guy might be a bit of a pain when he bangs on and on about finance in football, but he really does know his onions….” Either way the article gets read, and the word gets out. Through our tracking program we pick up about three or four such referrals which give the full web address of the original article, each day.

Another approach is to use other people’s blogs and news services. Here one reads what others are saying (for example where they are discussing a subject close to your product or service) and then one jumps in with one’s own comment, which relates back to your product. Obviously you need to be sophisticated in the way you do this, but as a method of advertising it is ten times more cost effective than Google Ads.

As I mentioned, I am happy to talk about this further – but if you would like to read a bit more background on this final point, there’s an article on http://www.mailing.org.uk/Adwords.html

If you would like to read a sample blog which is not at all about direct marketing or other subjects Hamilton House is associated with, try www.blog.emiratesstadium.info. It is about football, but don’t be put off even if you are not interested in football. Just flip through some of the articles, and note that this gets approaching 200,000 individual readers a month (a figure achieved with an advertising budget of £200). Such success can be found with all sorts of topics.

If you would like to know more please call me on 01536 399 013

Tony Attwood

The Advertising Association (AA) has suggested that more non-broadcast adverts should meet the Advertising Standards Authority requirements.

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

There is a book by Geoffrey Miller Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism. which seems to argue that people in develop an intuitive understanding of behaviour through their experience of selling stuff.

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

The rapid development of new powers for the Information Commissioner seem to have slipped in under the radar – but they are quite alarming.

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

My thinking is that blogs are worthwhile because they get your company message to wider and wider audiences, and allow you to become known to people who can find your background thoughts and information worth reading.

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

You aren’t reading because of “email fatigue”.

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

Way back in the dim and distant past (well last year) I wrote an article about email open rates and how unreliable they are.

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

If you think emails and web sites are coming under attack from the dark side of online activity, then you don’t want to get too close to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For this is where the cybercrooks are really turning up the heat.

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. It is important however to consider and download free antivirus software online to help protect your computer against the prevalent threats that exist online. Considering all the risks highlighted in the sophos report, it is important to have antivirus software ready.

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

If you think emails and web sites are coming under attack from the dark side of online activity, then you don’t want to get too close to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For this is where the cybercrooks are really turning up the heat.

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 talk about the information here please call me on 01536 399 013 or email Tony@hamilton-house.com