The Great Myths of Direct Mail

No 1: Names are always better than titles

No 2: A picture is worth 10,000 words

No 3: Mailmerge is a good thing

No 4: Anyone can write an advert

No 5: You can't use humour in direct mail

No 6: Catalogues stay on shelves all year

No 1: Names are always better than titles

It is a widely held belief that a mailing list in which the individuals are named will always out-perform a list which addresses people by title. Like many misconceptions in direct mail it is based on a partial truth - in some mailings a mailing list in which everyone is named can work better than a list in which people are addressed as “The Finance Director” or “The Marketing Manager”. But it is not always true.

Let us imagine you want a list of lighting manufacturers. Lots of list brokers and owners can offer you that list, and most of the lists will contain a majority of named MDs. But supposing you don't want the MD - you want the project manager (or the buyer, or the human resources officer or anyone else come to that.)

It is quite possible that a list broker or owner might offer you a list of Lighting Companies with named Project Managers. But the chances are that whereas the general list of Lighting Companies is around 1200 addresses long, the list of named Project Managers will be only 300 addresses long.

Now let us imagine that there are a number of people saying, “I want Project Managers and I want them named,” you can see what is going to happen. 300 project managers will get mailed over and over again - while 900 of their colleagues - the one’s for whom there is no name on the list - will hardly receive a sausage. Mail these unnamed people using their generic title “The Project Manager” and you will be hitting people who hardly get any direct mail - and the chances are your response rate will go up.

There are several reasons why the named list will be much smaller than the unnamed list. For a start some firms will not have a person called a “project manager”. However it is quite often the case in businesses that mail addressed by title is given to the person with the nearest title - so the mail does get through. Additionally there are many firms who do not co-operate with researchers in handing out information. They don't give it out on the phone, they don't fill in directory listings, and they don't put all their staff details on their web site. And if they don’t do any of that, it is hard to get them listed. (Of course if they subscribe to a journal you can pick them up, but the problem is that most journals are subscribed to by a minority of people in any one field, and so you are back to the problem of the same group of people getting mailed over and over again.)

This problem not only occurs at business addresses - it also occurs in education. In fact I was so surprised when I found I was getting higher sales from unnamed lists as opposed to named lists in schools that I sponsored some research to find out why. Turns out that school administrators find it much easier to handle mail addressed to “The Head of Maths” than to Mr Jones or Mrs Smith. When we asked them, around 85% of school administrators (the people who sort the mail) said they preferred the mail to be addressed by title only, or by name and title.
 

No 2: A picture is worth 10,000 words

While it is true that pictures can be very valuable additions to many forms of advertising, it is certainly not true that illustrations are an essential part of all advertising. Not only is a picture not always worth 10,000 words (as Printers Ink magazine told us in the 1920s), but sometimes in direct mail illustrations can actually reduce sales.

The fact is that some forms of advertising are by their nature driven by visuals - cinema advertising is a perfect example. Many of the most successful direct mail campaigns on the other hand are dominated by text - often by pages of it - with little or no illustration evident. Why is this?

What determines whether one should use a textual or a visual basis to the advertising is the issue of who controls the speed at which the advert is received.

In cinema advertising (and to a large extent TV advertising), the audience is captive - tied to the experience of the advertisement, and forced to observe the advert in the time span allocated by the advertiser.

But in other media it is the recipient who is in control. Consider the advertisements for evening newspapers displayed on stands outside railway stations. Typically these consist of a few words headlining a leading story in the paper that day. Consider also direct mail - even in direct mail which includes a catalogue full of illustrations one will find that the most successful practitioners of the art add a covering letter which is totally text based.

The reason for this difference between media has to do with the level of information that can be processed within a few words as opposed to a picture. The newsvendor’s headline “Cliff Richard Ticket Scandal” says it all in four words - it is hard to get a picture to do that.

For the cinema advertisement this is not an issue - the advertiser has time and knows the audience will not go away (after all they have only just settled down and haven’t seen the movie yet). But the recipient of direct mail can throw it out at any time. You need words to hold attention.

I’ve tried a number of experiments involving advertising books with and without pictures of the covers in the advertisements. The advertisements which are text based and don't have the illustrations have won every time. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have pictures in your catalogue - not least because by the time the reader gets to the catalogue he/she is giving you time, and so the visual option kicks in. But it does mean that none of us should be a slave to the old idea that pictures in direct mail are an absolute must. When producing just one or two pages of advertising (as opposed to a catalogue) it is often best to abandon illustrations totally and just stay with the text.
 

The idea of mailmerge is simple: write the customer’s name and address at the top of the letter and address the customer by name. As a nice extra you can even include some personal comment part way through the letter - as in “We have been carrying out an analysis of the rates charged for car insurance in Corby, and we have found that many people are paying far above the national average....”

The idea behind the scheme is that the reader will think that you are writing to him or her personally - that you really have selected this individual, personally typed in their name and address and are eagerly awaiting their reply.

Mailmerge did indeed bring in higher response rates until the early 1970s - but then the world changed. With new technology everyone was able to push out mailmerged letters at the drop of a hat. Instead of receiving one mailmerge letter a fortnight many of us started getting six a day. Simultaneously databases became bigger, and the rates that people were paid to type up the data declined. This in turn meant that errors began to slip into the databases, and although the worst of these were sorted out by address correction programs, many errors still remained.

As a result mailmerge stopped working. And then, bizarrely, in 2001 we found that mailmerge actually reduced response rates. This was a puzzle - I could see why mailmerge might not work any more (these days it is impossible to find anyone who actually believes that a mailmerged letter is addressed to them individually) but why would it actually lead to lower response rates than one could get with non-mailmerged letters?

To understand the situation I undertook an analysis over a 3 month period of every piece of direct mail received at one business address and at the home addresses of a pensioner, a businessman and a teacher. What I found was that around 85% of the mailmerged mail received contained one or more significant errors in the name or address. Obviously the address was good enough to have the item delivered, but the mistakes leaped off the page. Forenames and surnames were endlessly mis-spelt, the address had lines missing, the postcode was wrong... Most were tiny details (like spelling my name as Atwood instead of Attwood) but all of us involved in the project noticed the errors and were put off.

Was this the cause of the decline in response rates? I certainly think so. Although our eyes tend to skip over the personal details in a letter, we really do notice them if they are wrong. It is a bit like someone saying your name at a party - even if they are halfway across the room you can still hear it, because it is YOUR name.

Of course with business lists there are greater problems as people move around much more frequently - but even without this problem there really seems to be little chance of getting the error rate down in mailing lists. And since mailmerge costs more than non-mailmerge, the whole project looks like another of those ideas whose sell-by date is now long since past.
 

If you ever fancied the idea of your firm advertising on TV the chances are you would contact a company that specialises in the production of TV commercials.  What you would probably not do is attempt to make the advert yourself with a video camera and home editing kit.

With direct mail the same rule often applies to the acquisition of a mailing list and the design of a brochure.  When you want such things, you call on the experts.

However where this process breaks down is with the writing of the text of the advert - be that a covering letter or the text of the advertisement.  Everyone seems to think they know how to write - which wouldn’t matter too much if the text itself didn’t matter. But in fact it is the text of the direct mail advert that defines the response rate.

Over the aeons I’ve have the good fortune to meet quite a few good writers of direct mail, but I have never met a single one who has not had to work hard to learn the trade, nor one who can write a good piece of direct mail in a few minutes.

So my message is simple: the text is important, and no one can just knock out a good piece of copy. It needs time, effort, study and practice.

Which leads you to two options. Either you can bring in a professional writer, just like you might bring in a recognised list owner and a professional designer. Or you set aside time to study and practise the art of writing direct mail copy. If this second option is your choice then you need to follow this programme:

First, collect every bit of direct mail that you get and look at the text. Then pick out the mail that you think is particularly well written. Meanwhile, write some direct mail every day because you are only going to get good at this by practising.

Next, when you really do need to get something written give yourself plenty of time. Even if you are experienced at writing direct mail copy, a quality letter is likely to take you at least half a day. Remember, in the early months of writing you might need several days just to write a single page in a way that really works.

Finally, don't assume that you know what the rules are. For example, you might think that you have to mention your company’s name and product repeatedly in the letter, but generally speaking this will just reduce your response rate. The rules are complex and often obscure.

So you need to remember that this is not an obvious and intuitive process - you will probably have lots of failures before you learn how to get it right. Be prepared to spend quite a bit of time and money on this project.
 

If you’ve read any of the direct mail advertisements for Hamilton House you will know that we believe in humour as a marketing tool. In fact we use it all the time. But what is interesting is that the number of people who read our adverts and then say, “you can’t use humour in direct mail” is very high.

As I never tire of telling anyone with a few hours to spare, moving Hamilton House’s advertising over to humour was the best thing I have ever done in marketing. We changed our direct mail from being something that was mostly thrown straight in the bin, to something that people asked us to send them. Each week customers and potential customers call our offices just to comment on our mailshots. Some claim to have a complete set of our sales letters going back years. Others talk of photocopying them and handing them around the office.

Now let’s pause for a second and think of that. Instead of stuffing the mailshot straight in the bin while moaning about junk mail, there are people who take our materials and photocopy them. There are even people who take the letters home to show to their partners!

And yet these self-same people - people I utterly love and adore because they are my customers and they say lovely things about all this silly stuff I write - these people then produce their own advertisements without a single giggle to be seen anywhere.

The fact is that if you look at posters by the roadside, or if you watch most cinema and some TV advertising, you will see humour used as a selling tool. So what is the logic that says we can’t use it when selling via direct mail? Obviously there isn’t one because I sell Hamilton House this way all the time.

I believe the heart of the problem is that some advertisers have an overwhelming fear of upsetting people. But the trouble is, if you stay utterly in the middle of everything so you don't tread on any toes, you never excite anyone either - and the result is totally bland. This doesn’t mean I think you have to tell jokes, nor do I think you should make fun of your own customers. Rather you should think - who is it that my customers have a certain ambivalence about? My soundings lead me to believe that teachers are often very willing to laugh at parents, while solicitors despair of some of their clients. Accountants can snigger at business people who can’t add up, while some architects have this thing about some property developers. Every profession has that group that they will share a gentle joke about.

I am sure you can see where I am going - find that right bunch of outsiders, and make the humour very gentle (at least to begin with) and you find that you do that most magical of things - you form a bond between yourself and your potential customer. And once you have that link, everything else can fall into place.
 

The argument in favour of sending out catalogues to customers and potential customers is that the catalogue will be kept, referred to and used for ordering throughout the year. The argument against this is that the catalogue is hugely expensive both to print and mail, it will never be looked at by many people who get it and some of those who do put it on the shelf never get around to referring to it again.

In fact catalogues do work in some circumstances - but are often not the most effective way of generating sales. There is no doubt that some catalogues work for regular customers. Someone buys from you and you send them out a catalogue, either with the goods or a little later. Assuming that your product or service is fine, then there is a fair chance that the catalogue will be treated as you want it treated - as a source of information for the future.

But even with these people who know you and believe in you there will on occasion be situations in which your catalogue will not get through - simply because some people are too busy to read catalogues, some people don't like catalogues and some people get put off by the huge range of choice and so don’t buy because they can’t decide what to buy.

When we consider people who are not your customers the whole thing becomes much more dubious from a cost-effectiveness point of view. Is it likely that the whole catalogue is going to tempt a non-customer into being a customer? Of course it will happen in a few cases - but the chances are that this number will be too small to warrant the print and post costs. A much more attractive approach is to offer non-customers something else first - maybe a small range of products at very low prices, or maybe something free, given with no requirement to purchase, such as an information or news bulletin which can be sent out by email. In ways like this you move from having a large list of non-customers to a smaller list of potential customers, and these are the people to whom you can send the catalogue.

But there is still one further problem. You have sent out the main catalogue at great expense. But what next? What do you do after a couple of months when the sales have started to drift away? Of course you can issue a completely new catalogue, but if there isn’t too much new to offer this might not be cost effective. Or you can send out some further special offers or highlights of sections from your main catalogue. You can also offer to send another catalogue - if you have not done this you will be surprised at just how many people claim they never saw the first catalogue you sent - even though you know you sent them one.

One final point - many of the people I speak to about catalogues have never tried any alternative approach, such as sending out very abbreviated catalogues or referring readers on to the website for the complete list of products. It is this lack of experimentation that reveals the true problem with catalogues - most people send out catalogues because most people send out catalogues because most people send out catalogues, because....