The Mailbag: A Journal of Direct-Mail Advertising, Volume 2 (April 1918 to March 1919)
The bound second volume of The Mailbag, a Cleveland monthly on direct-mail advertising edited by Tim Thrift, covering 12 issues from April 1918 to March 1919.
What it is
The bound second volume of The Mailbag, a Cleveland monthly on direct-mail advertising edited by Tim Thrift, covering 12 issues from April 1918 to March 1919. Each issue leads with a case or practice article, followed by editorials, running series and trade advertisements for Multigraph machines, envelopes, paper and mailing lists. Jack W. Speare explains where direct mail fits among other media; Charles A. Bonniwell describes a broadside and letter campaign that signed 6,815 new dealers in 90 days; Michael Gross's "Fixer's Notebook" diagnoses failed mail-order campaigns, such as a $5 folding stove first mailed to owners of expensive cars instead of Ford owners; S. Roland Hall shows how Alpha Portland Cement forwards each inquirer's own letter to the local dealer; Harry M. Basford writes "Lessons in Letters". Wartime themes run through it: conservation, labor shortages and postwar readjustment.
Why read it now
The volume records direct mail being turned into a discipline, and several of its working rules still stand. Bonniwell's point that keeping an account matters as much as winning one is now standard retention economics. The Fixer's cases show that most failures came from the wrong list or the wrong angle rather than weak copy, which matches the later 40/40/20 rule of thumb in direct marketing: list and offer count for more than creative. Hall's advice to act on inquiries and hand them to the dealer with the original letter is lead handling in plain form; a 2011 Harvard Business Review study of web leads by Oldroyd and colleagues found that firms answering within an hour were far more likely to qualify the lead. What has dated: most claims rest on single campaigns with no control group, results are reported by the people who ran them, and much of the patriotism is period sentiment. Use: read the Fixer's cases as a checklist, and audit a failing campaign's list and angle before rewriting its copy.
Passages worth keeping
There is no one form of advertising to meet all needs
لا توجد وسيلة إعلانية واحدة تصلح لكل حاجة؛ البريد المباشر له مزاياه لكنه لا يغني عن غيره.
getting a new account is one thing and retaining it is quite another.
كسب عميل جديد شيء، والاحتفاظ به شيء آخر يحتاج جهدًا مستقلًا.
The dealer in turn put the burden up to the manufacturer, claiming it was not his province to create the demand.
التاجر يلقي مسؤولية خلق الطلب على المصنع، فعلى المصنع أن يبيع للمستهلك قبل أن يطلب من التاجر أن يبيع عنه.
The original letter looks very real.
إرسال رسالة المستفسر الأصلية إلى التاجر أقنع له من ملخص مكتوب، لأنها دليل حي على وجود مشترٍ حقيقي.
And we therefore face a morning-after such as no world ever faced before.
بعد حماسة الحرب ينتظر العالم ارتدادًا كبيرًا، والكاتب يدعو محرري نشرات الشركات إلى الاستعداد لما بعد الحماسة.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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