Building Retail Business by Letter, Including Four Hundred Retail Letters That Made Good
John B. Ruffalo ran The John Service, Inc., a New York firm that wrote sales letter campaigns, and he argues that the personal letter is the retailer's stand-in for a salesman who cannot call at the customer's home.
What it is
John B. Ruffalo ran The John Service, Inc., a New York firm that wrote sales letter campaigns, and he argues that the personal letter is the retailer's stand-in for a salesman who cannot call at the customer's home. Part I has eight chapters. It opens with a 'Special Report' to one store: 12,000 of its 20,000 local families never shop there, so its newspaper ads mostly reach people who already buy, and a survey of 100 lost customers puts 68 down to store indifference. Later chapters cover the opening, the single-idea body and the suggestive close; make-up, where a typed look beats an obvious circular; the follow-up series; and list sources from charge ledgers to tax rolls. Part II holds about 400 letters sorted by trade, from men's clothing, shoes and furs to inactive accounts, charge accounts and collections, ending with a registered final warning.
Why read it now
What holds: the report's arithmetic, turning a cost per home into a cost per non-customer reached, is an early check of effective reach against paid circulation. The advice on openings, lead with a fact the reader never considered and drop 'We beg to advise', still describes a good email or WhatsApp message. The single-idea rule and the weight put on the list over the copy match a century of direct-mail testing. What has dated: the 68 percent indifference figure comes with no source, and the same breakdown still circulates in sales training with no traceable study. Ehrenberg-Bass research finds that loss rates track brand size and that much defection has causes outside a store's control. The 'five impressions' rule is folklore, not a finding. Dressing a mass mailing as a dictated letter is a disguise readers now resent, and names taken from tax rolls or voter lists would breach the consent rules of Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law. Use: rebuild the inactive-account series, a warm reminder, a letter asking whether the store failed them, then an offer, as three messages to lapsed customers who agreed to contact.
Passages worth keeping
68 drift away because of store indifference
من كل 100 زبون توقفوا عن الشراء، ينسب التقرير 68 منهم إلى إهمال المتجر لهم لا إلى السعر، وهو رقم بلا مصدر ما زال يتكرر في كتب البيع حتى اليوم.
The worst sin in the beginning of a letter is dullness
أسوأ ما يصيب افتتاحية الرسالة هو الملل، لأن القارئ يقرر من السطر الأول هل يكمل القراءة أم يرمي الرسالة.
To be successful, a letter must have a single, definite idea.
الرسالة الناجحة تدور حول فكرة واحدة واضحة، وكل فقرة فيها تخدم هذه الفكرة ولا تبتعد عنها.
It has been said that more good business is lost through the premature abandonment of the follow-up than perhaps through any other single cause.
التوقف عن المتابعة مبكرًا يضيّع صفقات كثيرة، فمن لم يستجب للرسالة الأولى قد يستجيب لرسالة لاحقة تصله في وقت أنسب.
Upon the mailing list depends necessarily the success of every personal letter campaign.
نجاح حملة الرسائل يبدأ من القائمة، فأجود نص لا يفيد إذا وصل إلى من لا حاجة له بالبضاعة.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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