Printers' Ink, May 29, 1913 (Vol. 83, No. 9)
A 108-page weekly issue.
What it is
A 108-page weekly issue. The piece filed here is S. Roland Hall's "Making the Most of the Inquiry", written while he was at the International Correspondence Schools. Hall says getting a reader to write in costs 50 cents to $5, so a badly handled reply wastes real money, and drawing the inquiry is often less than half the sale. He finds magazine inquiries twice as good as those from letters with an easy return card, and shows how small slips lose orders: a sporting-goods clerk who dropped the word "gauge" lost his. He then grades the follow-up of real firms: Postal Life, Burrowes billiard tables, Monroe refrigerators, the Larkin Club-of-Ten, Conklin pens, and a salt maker whose sample became an order within a day. The issue opens with Three-in-One Oil packing samples inside revolver boxes, and H. L. Allen on competitive copy that never names the rival.
Why read it now
Hall's core point is now standard in sales operations: an inquiry has a cost, and its value is decided by what happens after it arrives. Speed-to-lead research agrees; contact rates fall sharply when a reply takes hours instead of minutes, and his heater dealer who waited weeks is the textbook case. His finding that easy-response inquiries are weaker, because signing a card costs the reader nothing, matches what performance marketers see with one-tap lead forms: more leads, lower intent. His method of grading real follow-up letters still works: inquire as a customer and judge what comes back. What has dated: typewriter tricks, postal logistics, and the idea that one letter can carry the whole canvass; today follow-up is a sequence across WhatsApp, email and calls. Allen's piece on disguised comparison, such as the "Waterlevel Route" line against a hilly rival railway, still holds. Use: this week, send an inquiry to your own business and to three competitors, then time and grade every reply.
Passages worth keeping
What is it worth to you to make a sale?
السؤال الصحيح ليس كم يكلف الاستفسار، بل كم تساوي الصفقة، ومن الجواب تعرف كم تستحق العناية بكل رد.
it is not more than half the battle, and sometimes hardly that, to interest someone to the point of writing you.
أن يكتب إليك المهتم ليس إلا نصف الطريق أو أقل، والنصف الآخر هو طريقة ردك عليه ومتابعته.
inquiries secured from magazine advertisements turned out to be twice as good as inquiries received from “straight-canvass letters.”
الاستفسار الذي يبذل صاحبه جهدًا لإرساله أجود من الاستفسار الذي يأتي بلا جهد، لأن الجهد دليل على جدية الاهتمام.
an exceedingly small thing will turn the balance when the man at the other end of the correspondence is in doubt.
حين يتردد العميل تكفي تفصيلة صغيرة في الرد، خطأ أو لمسة لطف، لتحسم قراره بالشراء أو الانصراف.
We figure that a man who will take the time to get up a list of fifty or a hundred names must be in earnest.
التاجر الذي يتعب في جمع أسماء كثيرة لتوزيع العينات جاد في البيع، لذلك تلبي الشركة كل طلباته.
What it teaches best
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