Copy... The Long And The Short Of It

Hi All,

Those of you old enough to remember the seventies and eighties might also remember when those large Reader's Digest letters would land on the doormat. On the envelope would be some "teaser" copy like "Claim Your Free Gift Inside". Then inside would be a "lift letter" from the CEO recommending you read the full letter because it offered a great deal on Reader's Digest membership and the chance to win a car or a holiday.

Reader's Digest employed some of the best copywriters in the business to create these letters, as did Nightingale Conant and many other mail order magnates.

Ah! Those were the days. Those were the days when it was possible to make millions from mail order offers and quite a few people did. I personally know of two people who became millionaires simply by sending out letters offering to tell prospects... how to become rich. I actually made quite few grand myself from selling my own business manuals by mail order. 

And here's how I did it...

In those days the long form sales letter ruled because we all knew that "the more you tell the more you sell". A very different story today of course. But what hasn't changed and probably never will is the desire to make money, or at least the need to know how to make money.

This is how may people did it...

There were 2 very popular weekly publications, one was "The Dalton's Weekly" and the other was "The Exchange & Mart". Now both had classifieds ad sections where you could place a very cheap line ad. So let's say you had an information product you wanted to sell, something like a manual about How To Start Up Your Own Publishing Business. 

You would place an ad in one or both of these 2 publications under the Business Opportunity sections, which might read something like...

Discover New Secret Money 
Making Opportunity. 50 page
manual explains how. For more
details send SAE to Anglox
Publications, 182 Sturminster Rd,
Bristol, BS14 8AR

It would cost about £20 to place an ad like this but it was money well invested. As enquiries started to arrive in the post you began generating a highly targeted list of prospects. So the next step was to send these interested people a long sales letter about your manual, explaining all the benefits and how easy it is to make money and entice them into sending you an order together with their cheque.

This marketing method was known as the "2 step method". Step one was to place the ad and step 2 was to send out the sales letter.

As a lead generator, this method was very good, usually returning about 10% in enquiries. However, conversion rates were pretty much the same as they are today, which is about 2-3 per cent. So let's say your original classified ad is seen by 1000 people and 100 responded. You could expect to make 2 or 3 sales.

The manual might be priced at £29 so there was profit in this method... but not enough to become rich. But the whole exercise was not really about making a shed load of money, although it would certainly be nice, the real reason for this was to test the market. And if it was profitable then you would ramp it up.

Now the next stage was to seek out a list broker, and there were quite a few of those around. You see, everyone who sent for details of your offer went onto your list, and lists could be sold... hence more profits. Some people used to just generate mailing lists and rent or sell them. That was their business and a good business it was too.

The biggest list brokers could almost guarantee results and their lists were fresh so these were the guys you looked for. To rent a list of names and addresses might cost something like £25 per 1000, so you had to work out whether the cost to rent these lists, together with the costs to print and mail your sales letter were going to be profitable, based on you tests.

Here's a breakdown of what had to be considered...

List rental 10,000 = £250
Paper & print costs = £500
Postage costs = £2000

So total costs for this mailout campaign were £2,750.

The number of sales @ 2% would be 200 x £29 = £5,800. Therefore profit would be £3,050.

To put these figures in perspective, the average weekly wage in the early 80's was £120, so 3 grand represented 6 months wages, which you could make in just 1-2 weeks!

Now, roll out big time and rent 100,000 names and addresses. This would be cheaper pro rata and you had buying power on your side. Let's do the maths...

List rental 100,000 = £2000
Paper & print costs = £5000
Postage costs = £20000

Total investment = £27,000
Total Income = £58,000

Total ROI = 10 x 3,050 = £31,000

Now 30 grand was like 5 times the average annual income. If you could make this much from one campaign then you needed to have several campaigns lined up to become a millionaire. Ans that's how it was done. In fact if you used a mailing house to do everything for you, it was totally hands off and you still made around the same amount of profit.

The key to success with mail order was the copy. If the sales letter was good your conversions could be as high as 8 or even 10 per cent! I'll let you do the maths for that one.

Long form sales copy was the answer to many marketer's dreams back then but what now?

Well, as you know the Internet rules these days and so when long form sales letters began appearing on web pages they did at first work very well. Maybe because of the novelty value or maybe because people had more time I don't know, but they certainly don't work quite as well as they did.

Online attention spans are very short now so a copywriter has to get the message across in a different way, which makes his job a little more difficult. The copywriter has to condense the message in a way that attracts attention almost immediately, highlights the benefits right up front, offer a shed load of bonuses, include overwhelming testimonials and sell at an unbelievable price.

So, not much has changed except we have to sell more with less words.

The Internet does have many advantages over the mail order route, especially in terms of presentation of offers, with graphics and video now almost standard procedure. But the best advantage of all is instant gratification and instant cash in the bank. The customer gets what he wants right away and you get the cash just as fast... luvverrrly!

If any of you want to know about how many marketers made their money by placing ads in national newspapers, let me know and I'll dedicate the next blog to it.

Hope you enjoyed this one, all for now.

Bill

KnightWriter
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