Selling by Mail: Principles and Practice
A 452-page McGraw-Hill textbook by Verneur Edmund Pratt, a former departmental advertising manager at Sears, Roebuck who ran his own counsel firm, Pratt & Lindsey.
What it is
A 452-page McGraw-Hill textbook by Verneur Edmund Pratt, a former departmental advertising manager at Sears, Roebuck who ran his own counsel firm, Pratt & Lindsey. Its 32 chapters follow the order of the work: market analysis, the appeal, the mailing list, copy, illustration and colour, testing, catalogs, the sales letter, follow-up, order blanks, collections, postal rules, press advertising to build lists, and uses by retailers and agents. Built lists beat bought ones. A test should be charged at full-run unit cost: 5,000 catalogs at 50 cents each fall to 8 cents at 50,000. A dollar of catalog must bring ten of sales. Big houses cut prices on goods whose value everyone knows and raise them on blind goods. The appeal chapter recounts curiosity frauds, such as a 50-cent steel engraving of Washington that arrived as a two-cent stamp. Examples come mostly from his own scrapbook, without client figures.
Why read it now
Much of this still holds. Charging a test at full-run unit cost is the right way to judge a pilot, and teams still kill good tests by reading small-batch costs. Cutting prices on items whose value everyone knows while holding margin on blind goods is the known-value-item practice retailers run today; it builds a low-price image without cutting the whole range. The order blank written in the buyer's own voice, as in the pecan seller's Dear Walter form, anticipates checkout copy that reassures at the moment of commitment. Preferring built lists to bought ones is the case for first-party data. What has dated: postal rules, plate and paper costs, and rules of thumb such as tripling cost to set a specialty's price, which fit 1920s goods and not every margin now. Several claims, such as readers trusting typewriting over print, are asserted without data, and the author withholds the returns that would prove them. Use: before a Ramadan catalog or flyer, pick one item every shopper can price, discount it visibly, and keep margin on the rest.
Passages worth keeping
Pricing one item at a figure every reader knows to be a bargain will usually result in placing that item on the order blank.
سلعة واحدة بسعر يعرف الجميع أنه صفقة كفيلة بأن تبدأ الطلب، ثم تتبعها سلع أخرى.
Short, choppy, breathless sentences are best for securing action.
الجمل القصيرة المتلاحقة توحي بالعجلة، فتدفع القارئ إلى الطلب دون أن تأمره بالإسراع صراحة.
The list which is built is by far the most valuable of all, because it comes nearer to fulfilling the requirements of an efficient list as already enumerated.
القائمة التي تجمعها بنفسك من المهتمين أثمن من أي قائمة تشتريها أو تنسخها من السجلات.
Many times a test has been unwarrantedly regarded as a failure because the necessary reductions in cost, due to the quantity of mailing and the cumulative effect of repeated mailings, were not considered.
لا تحكم على الاختبار بتكلفة الدفعة الصغيرة، فالتكلفة تنخفض كثيرًا عند الإرسال الواسع والمتكرر.
It should be so worded that the signer is unconsciously praising the merchandise and reassuring himself that he is doing the right thing in signing.
يُكتب نموذج الطلب بحيث يمدح المشتري السلعة بنفسه وهو يوقّع، فيطمئن إلى أن قراره صحيح.
What it teaches best
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