Making the Letter Pay
A 1913 handbook from The Business Man's Publishing Co. of Detroit, signed A. Peter Stowe, with the copyright held by Albert Stoll, Jr. The foreword calls it a symposium of useful ideas gathered by the editor.
What it is
A 1913 handbook from The Business Man's Publishing Co. of Detroit, signed A. Peter Stowe, with the copyright held by Albert Stoll, Jr. The foreword calls it a symposium of useful ideas gathered by the editor. The first half is on writing: the envelope and return card, salutations and signatures, and how to write a business letter, where it asks for short Anglo-Saxon words, more "you" than "we", and letters worked over rather than dashed off. Chapter V covers form letters: their cost against dictated letters (over 25 cents each), a railway reply on cheap pulp paper that lost an inquiry for travel worth over $300, the need for an "excuse" for writing, and a test that sends half the inquirers the catalog alone and half the catalog with a letter. The second half is office system: mail distribution, subject and numerical filing, the "H-F-A" follow-up and catalog filing.
Why read it now
The writing advice holds and is stated plainly: short words, the reader's viewpoint, one clear point, and a form letter judged by the same standard as a personal one. The catalog-plus-letter test is a clean split test, and its idea, that a personal note lifts response to printed material, still guides direct mail and email practice, though the book's figure of over a hundred per cent is asserted, not shown. The railway example, where a careless reply lost a $300 booking, still describes how buyers judge a company by its first response. Two things have dated badly. The book says a form letter's only advantage lies in its deceptive character and recommends measured flattery; today a message that pretends to be personal and is found out loses more trust than it gains. And half the book is paper filing, of historical interest only, though its logic of one shared file and a dated follow-up for every open letter fits any CRM. Use: give every outbound template a real reason for writing to this person, then test it against a version without that reason.
Passages worth keeping
Fine feathers may not make fine birds, but we are pretty apt to judge our bird by its feathers after all.
المظهر لا يصنع القيمة، لكن القارئ يحكم على الشركة من ظرف رسالتها وورقها قبل أن يقرأ سطرًا.
The good old Anglo-Saxon words, the short, powerful, little fellows, often with barbed wire on them, are the best.
الكلمات القصيرة المألوفة أقوى في رسالة البيع من العبارات الطويلة المنمقة.
Less of “we” and much more of “you” is the great need.
قلّل من الحديث عن شركتك، وأكثر من الحديث عن القارئ ومصلحته.
A form letter is a circular letter masquerading as a personally dictated affair.
يعترف الكاتب بأن الرسالة النموذجية منشور يتنكر في هيئة رسالة شخصية، وهي فكرة قائمة على الإيهام لا تصلح اليوم.
Let him take a number of inquiries from the same source and to one half of them let him send out the catalog alone, sending to the other half both the catalog and the well designed letter.
لا تصدق الادعاء، بل اختبره: قسّم المستفسرين نصفين، وأرسل إلى نصف الكتالوج وحده وإلى الآخر الكتالوج مع رسالة، ثم قارن النتائج.
What it teaches best
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