Mail Order and Instalment Trading
A Pitman handbook of about 350 pages, in three sections, for beginners and growing traders who sell by post.
What it is
A Pitman handbook of about 350 pages, in three sections, for beginners and growing traders who sell by post. Section I covers the scope: Bull opens with "always think of the demand before you consider the supply", sorts mail order into five kinds of business, and explains the "advertising line", a cheap newspaper bargain such as a one-shilling pocket knife that brings in names for later leaflets and letters. It prints model follow-up series, such as four letters from an invented Witney blanket maker to buyers of a year before, plus chapters on specialities, books, correspondence courses and cash on delivery. Section II covers financing, staff, book-keeping, warehouse and dispatch, and the legal gap between hire purchase and instalment sale. Section III covers media, copy, layout, keying by "Desk" numbers, the life of an advertisement, and spotting when a line is worked out.
Why read it now
Bull's working rule, that the newspaper is best for finding customers and the post box cheapest for turning them into profit, is the split between acquisition and retention that CRM economics still rests on, and the blanket maker's letters to year-old buyers show it in use. The advertising line, a near-cost bargain that buys a name, is the logic of today's low-price front-end offer. His account of an advertisement's life, climbing for about a third of its run and then decaying, matches what media buyers now call creative fatigue, and the firm he quotes, which retires copy three insertions after the first drop, gives a usable stop rule. The warning that nobody profits from reselling another owner's advertised brand still bites marketplace resellers. The hire purchase law and book-keeping chapters are British and of their time, and his view that "the sub-conscious mind of man" is the best tool for reading results is weak beside controlled tests. Use it this way: log each ad's replies weekly, and once response starts to fall, run it three more times and then replace the copy.
Passages worth keeping
Always think of the demand before you consider the supply.
ابدأ من حاجة الناس، حتى الحاجة التي لم يعبّروا عنها بعد، ثم ابحث عن السلعة التي تلبيها.
the newspaper is the best means of forming a mail order connection, but the post box is the cheapest means in many cases of building it into profit.
الإعلان في الصحيفة يجلب العملاء الجدد، أما الرسائل البريدية إلى من اشتروا من قبل فهي في الغالب الطريق الأرخص لتحقيق الربح منهم.
Bald statements rarely carry weight, reasons and causes do.
الادعاء المجرد لا يقنع أحدًا، أما ذكر السبب الذي يجعل السلعة جيدة، مثل جودة المكونات أو دقة التصنيع، فيقنع القارئ.
It takes a certain length of time or number of insertions to get to its highest pulling point, and that is practically one-third of the period in which it draws at all. It usually does not pay to give it too long an old age.
لكل إعلان عمر: يبلغ ذروة أدائه في نحو ثلث مدة تأثيره ثم يضعف، ولا فائدة من إبقائه طويلًا بعد أن يشيخ.
No mail order dealer can hope to do a profitable business by selling goods bearing an advertised brand of which he is not the proprietor.
من يبيع بالبريد علامة تجارية يعلن عنها غيره لن يربح منها، فالهامش يذهب إلى صاحبها، وعليه أن يبني علامته الخاصة.
What it teaches best
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