Sales Promotion by Mail: How to Sell and How to Advertise
A 1916 handbook from G. P. Putnam's Sons in ten chapters, each edited by a different practitioner, covering every part of selling by mail.
What it is
A 1916 handbook from G. P. Putnam's Sons in ten chapters, each edited by a different practitioner, covering every part of selling by mail. H. C. Burdick opens with the mailing list, treated as the circulation of your advertising: define the prospect before writing a single name, then use a trade-by-trade catalogue of name sources, and expect a retail list to change 15 per cent a year. James Wallen covers form letters and testing them on part of the list. Louis Victor Eytinge argues that most advertising fails at the follow-up, citing a silk maker whose eighth and seventeenth letters pulled best. Later chapters cover enclosures, collection letters written as sales letters, answering inquiries fast, Wm. H. Ingersoll's system for an advertising department with its test-tube idea, promoting departments, house organs for dealers, and export by mail. An index lists name sources by trade.
Why read it now
The list-first argument has held for a century. Direct marketers still quote the 40/40/20 rule, which gives the list and the offer 80 per cent of the weight, and the 15 per cent yearly decay given for a retail list is the same order as the 20 to 25 per cent email vendors report now. Eytinge's inquiries left to rot in shoe boxes are today's slow lead response. In Mears's chapter the author asks a maker for a catalogue, hears nothing for a week, buys another brand locally, and then gets seven dealer letters offering a demonstration; every sales team should read it. Ingersoll's never-answered questions and test-tube idea describe small trials and control groups before full spend. What has dated: name sources such as payroll sheets and voter rolls would now breach privacy law, including Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law; the claim that 75 per cent of advertising failures trace to follow-up is a guess; the house-organ and export chapters describe print-era logistics. Use: list the three questions your team argues about every quarter and design one small test for each before the next campaign.
Passages worth keeping
even a poor letter or feature will give some returns spread over a good list, but however excellent the caliber of the appeal, it hasn't a chance in the world to succeed if the list is poor
القائمة الجيدة تنقذ الرسالة الضعيفة، أما القائمة الرديئة فتُفشل حتى أقوى رسالة.
More good business is lost through premature abandonment of the trail than through any other single cause.
أكثر الصفقات تضيع لأن البائع يتوقف عن المتابعة مبكرًا، لا لأن العميل رفض.
They attract attention, it is true, but in the same undesirable sense that a man standing on his head at the corner of a busy street would attract attention
الحيل الغريبة في الرسائل تجذب الانتباه، لكنه انتباه يضر صاحبه كما يضر من يقف على رأسه في شارع مزدحم.
Until cause and effect are definitely connected, there can be no such thing as assured progress.
لا تقدّم مضمونًا ما لم تربط كل نتيجة بسببها، أي ما لم تقِس أثر كل قرار إعلاني.
Fourth, answer your inquiries promptly, in the language in which they are written.
رد على الاستفسار بسرعة وبلغة السائل نفسه، فهذا من أول شروط كسب العميل في سوق أجنبية.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
If this library is useful, leave an email
We send new patterns, ads, and notes when we add them. Name and phone are optional.
You are on the list
We will write when we add more library material.