JohnAmardeil.com

Gmail lost people’s entire accounts last week (they were all recovered). Back in December, Tumblr went down (chaos ensued).

Increasingly, our lives have moved almost entirely online.  Just think about it – you’ve probably got your calendar online, banking, work for the office and then all of your own personal files and emails.

And yet, most people still don’t backup their stuff. Either consistently or at all.

There’s nothing worse than that helpless feeling that everything you’ve worked on and for is gone. So we’re protecting ourselves and our clients. Because cyberspace is just that – space. And anything can go anywhere at any time.

You may not realize the message that the clothes you’re wearing give or the feeling the paint on your walls stirs up, but every colour has immense power.

Think about your wardrobe. I bet there are colours that you’re drawn to and ones that you won’t go near. And your home? Do you surround yourself with warm, enveloping colours or bright, stimulating pigments?

Studies show that certain colours evoke certain emotions:

– Blue food or food on a blue plate registers as unappetizing.

– Although yellow is a primary colour, it’s the hardest one for your eyes to focus on. According to BasicTips.com, “It triggers the following emotions: intelligence, joy, and organization. Its opposite effects when used in the wrong manner or with the wrong combination of other colors can create feelings of criticism, laziness, or cynicism. Splashes of pale yellow is the best choice since many tones/shades of yellow are difficult for the human eye to focus on for very long. However, if used with short burst of text as a background, it grabs your attention and helps hold what you read in your memory banks.”

This is very important to us and our clients. We have to assess which colours should be used for each campaign. If we want to evoke young and sexy, should we be going with the tried and true black and red combination, or does the younger generation prefer colours like pink and grey? What colours make people think of luxury? What colours evoke a feeling of a good deal for your money?



With every client, we think about the product and the audience and choose colours accordingly.

So next time you’re drawn to a pizza poster, think about it – is it the picture of the pizza or the colours used in the ad that are pulling you in?

With the glut of information we’re bombarded with every day, it can be difficult to sift through it all and get to the stuff that matters to you most. You’ve not only got that pile of work on your desk, you’ve got phone calls to return and about 50 emails that need your immediate attention.

That’s why I’m so excited to announce that this week, it was announced that BAM received the VR500 Award from Vertical Response (our eblast deployment company) for email excellence.  

BAM sends out a lot of eblasts, or mass emails, on behalf of our clients, who need to communicate regularly with their registrants and homeowners. This is challenging because we want to convey important information, make it engaging and stand out from the rest of the email in your inbox.

Designing effective eblasts (like the one above) is something that we put a lot of time and thought into. We don’t want to inundate people with boring emails to add to their growing inbox of unread mail. We think about appealing subject lines that convey our client’s message strongly and clearly. What will excite people and give them a reason to open the email? Then there is the design and layout to consider – how can we catch our target market’s attention, and give them the info we want to convey in the most clear, concise and appealing way possible? 

We won the award because we have high email open rates and click rates. When composing an eblast, we strive to make it clear what the call to action is and where people should click. We want to give the recipient only the information that is useful to them and not to be confused with junk mail or spam. We want to direct the reader to what they need to do and where to do it. And it looks like we’re succeeding!

 This doesn’t mean we’re resting on our laurels, just reveling in our success for just a moment.

 There, that’s it. Now back to work.