Short Cuts and Money-Making Methods: How to Handle Lists of Names
A 1910 book published and copyrighted by The Addressograph Company of Chicago, maker of the addressing machine it promotes.
What it is
A 1910 book published and copyrighted by The Addressograph Company of Chicago, maker of the addressing machine it promotes. It promises the methods of 512 managers in 239 lines of business for handling lists of names in advertising, accounts, payroll and shipping. Part I builds prospect lists from rating books, directories, salesmen's daily reports and special schemes: railway station agents rewarded for naming grain dealers, boys given prizes for naming houses that need paint, a Kansas City bank writing to new parents found in the birth notices. Part II files lists on cards, corrects them from returned mail (retail lists change 15 per cent a year) and puts them to work: a burned-out Illinois store that circularized the whole county and grew 50 per cent, a Topeka wholesaler who mailed 1,200 price cards the afternoon a price dropped. Parts III to V cover statements, payrolls and the machine itself.
Why read it now
Behind the sales pitch for a machine sit list rules direct marketers still use. A small list worked hard beats a large one worked loosely. People who answer an ad are the best prospects because they chose to. Lists decay, 15 per cent a year for retailers and 30 for barbers, and must be cleaned from returned mail; email marketers today face the same decay, and sending to dead addresses hurts delivery. The retailer whose telephone clerk calls charge customers who bought nothing that month is running an early win-back programme. Dated or now unacceptable: buying names of engaged couples from clergymen at 25 cents each, copying tax and voter rolls, and letters made to look personally typed so they escape the waste basket. Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law, like Europe's GDPR, now requires a lawful basis for collecting and using names this way. Most of the text doubles as copy for the Addressograph, so read its results as unaudited case stories. Use: tag every contact with its source and date, and each quarter remove the numbers and emails that bounce or never respond.
Passages worth keeping
A small, correct and constantly hammered list is much more productive than a large one filled with errors and indifferently worked.
قائمة صغيرة صحيحة تُراسل بانتظام تجلب أكثر مما تجلبه قائمة كبيرة مليئة بالأخطاء ولا يعتني بها أحد.
the person voluntarily answers the advertisement is proof of his interest.
من يرد على الإعلان باختياره أثبت اهتمامه، فهو أولى بالمتابعة من اسم مأخوذ من دليل.
The average list of retailers will undergo a fifteen per cent change in a year.
القوائم تتقادم كل عام بسبب الانتقال والإغلاق والوفاة، فلا بد من مراجعتها بانتظام.
The correcting of a mailing list is difficult only when it is not done.
تصحيح القائمة سهل إذا صار عادة منتظمة، ويصعب فقط حين يُترك حتى تتراكم الأخطاء.
If your customers are worth getting, they are worth keeping.
العميل الذي تعبت في كسبه يستحق أن تستمر في مراسلته وخدمته حتى يبقى.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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