A hot spot is where your eye goes first when you look at a postcard, outer envelope, catalog spread, direct mail letter, space ad, landing page or even an email.
Most of us had our first experience with hot spots in elementary school when we looked for easy ways to study for tests. We wanted to pick out key points to review without rereading entire chapters. What did we do?
We looked at chapter titles, subheads, terms in boldface type, maps, charts, graphs, photos and the captions under them. In other words, we looked at hot spots. From this experience, we've trained ourselves to look for eye-grabbing design and copy elements. We use these road signs for scanning copy and deciding whether or not we'll read the rest.