The Art of Resultful Letter Writing
A 68-page brochure from the Mailbag Publishing Company of Cleveland, collecting seven articles Robert Ruxton wrote for The Mailbag, a direct-mail trade magazine; the editor calls him chief of copy staff at a large direct-mail firm.
What it is
A 68-page brochure from the Mailbag Publishing Company of Cleveland, collecting seven articles Robert Ruxton wrote for The Mailbag, a direct-mail trade magazine; the editor calls him chief of copy staff at a large direct-mail firm. Chapter One opens on the letterhead and envelope: by mail they are the only picture the prospect has of you. Chapter Three sorts letters into inquiry-bringers, sales letters and follow-ups, and argues for asking first and sending the costly booklet only to those who reply. Chapters Four and Five print an investment letter, margin-labelled Attention, Interest and Action, that drew about 40 per cent inquiries against a usual 2 to 6, and name its hidden engine: curiosity, since it never says which industry it means. Chapters Six and Seven teach imagination: write to one real person you know, such as a hardware dealer, a doctor or a thrifty housewife in Maine.
Why read it now
Three ideas hold. The inquiry-first method is two-step lead generation: a cheap message filters the list, and the expensive material goes only to people who raised a hand, which is how lead-magnet funnels and click-to-WhatsApp ads work now. Writing to one real person you know is the persona method without the slide deck, and it still produces warmer copy than writing to a segment. His warning that curiosity letters suit picked lists but flood a press advertiser with poor inquiries matches what media buyers see when a vague hook lowers lead quality. What has dated: his claim that the rules are as final as mathematics, the poetry, and the advice that a sales letter for an expensive item should run twenty pages. The letterhead chapter now reads as a point about sender name, domain and the first screen of an email. The results are anecdotes with no controls, and the curiosity letter's rate is 40 per cent in one chapter and 45 in the next. Use: for a high-ticket B2B offer, send a short curiosity-led first message to a filtered list, and keep the full proposal for those who reply.
Passages worth keeping
Persuasion is a big business-winning factor but Appearance equals it.
المظهر يعادل الإقناع في قوته، فالرسالة الجيدة على ورق رديء تخسر كثيرًا من أثرها.
People in this world are apt to dodge what you throw at them and catch what they ask you to throw.
الناس يتهربون مما يُفرض عليهم ويقبلون على ما طلبوه بأنفسهم، ولهذا يبدأ البيع بطلب الاستفسار.
Working on picked lists of names the principle of CURIOSITY can be legitimately and effectively employed as the first step in mail salesmanship.
إثارة الفضول تصلح خطوة أولى في البيع بالبريد إذا وُجهت إلى قائمة منتقاة، لا إلى الجميع.
Take our service man away and place him opposite a typewriter, a blank sheet of writing paper, carbon paper, and an envelope, and watch what happens; his eyes see material where before they saw spiritual things
البائع الذي يقنع وجهًا لوجه يفقد حرارته أمام الآلة الكاتبة والورق، لأنه لم يعد يرى إنسانًا أمامه.
Having got my composite person fairly well fixed in my mind I next run back over the list of actual persons I know or have known and select the one that approximates closely in characteristics to the composite person drawn.
يرسم الكاتب صورة مركبة للعميل، ثم يختار من معارفه شخصًا حقيقيًا يشبهها ويكتب إليه هو.
What it teaches best
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