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Ogilvy on Advertising — Chapter-12: Direct mail, my first love and secret weapon
- Source: /library/Ogilvy on Advertising/source-file.pdf
- PDF pages: 245–255
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12 DIRECT MAIL, MY FIRST LOVE AND SECRET WEAPON With tips on direct advertising in magazines and television One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open it as a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who happened to be the author of this book. I invested his money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood. From that day on, I have been a voice crying in the wilderness, trying to persuade the advertising establishment to take direct mail more seriously and to stop treating its practitioners as non-commissioned officers. It was my secret weapon in the avalanche of new business acquisitions which made Ogilvy & Mather an instant success. Today, direct mail has exploded – an explosion caused more than anything by computers. They make it possible to select names from mailing lists by every imaginable demographic classification, by frequency of purchase and by amount of purchase. With a computer you can remove duplication between mailing lists and within a list – a process called ‘merge and purge’. You can even avoid mailing to people who don’t like receiving mailings. Computers make it possible for every letter in a mailing of millions to include the name of each addressee, not only in the salutation, but several times in the body of the letter.
Most direct-response buying is now done with a credit card, and the companies that issue the cards know who has bought what. If you have charged a trip to Disney World in Florida, I can send you a mailing for Disneyland in California. The biggest users of direct mail are magazine publishers in search of subscriptions, catalog houses, food stores, department stores, record clubs and book clubs. It has been estimated that total sales by direct mail in the United States are now more than a $100 billion a year. Unfortunately, there are a lot of fly-by-night frauds in the direct-mail business, including, say the New York Times, 10,000 phoney ‘pastors’. In 1980, 1,500,000 consumers complained to the Better Business Bureau about firms which had failed to deliver the merchandise they had ordered, or had delivered it too late or in damaged condition. In the whole spectrum of marketing, direct mail is where you find the swindlers. That said, the vast bulk of advertising by direct mail is on the level. Advertisers who distribute their products in the normal way, through wholesalers and retailers, have great difficulty in isolating the results of their advertising from the other factors in their marketing mix, but direct-mail advertisers can measure the results of their mailings to the dollar. This makes it possible for them to test everything they do. In direct mail, testing is the name of the game. You can test every variable in your mailings and determine exactly its effect on your sales. But because you can only test one variable at a time, you cannot afford to test them all. So you have to choose which to test. Experienced practitioners always test some variables, but seldom those which experience has taught them make little difference in results. Next to the positioning of your product, the most important variables to be tested are pricing, terms of payment, premiums and the format of your mailing. The price you ask and the terms of payment you offer arc critical, and they can be tested by sample mailings. A highbrow magazine tested three terms of payment for subscriptions. In one, the subscriber was asked to pay $65 for 56 issues. In another, $42.50 for 39 issues. In the third, $29.95 for 29 issues. Guess which won? Although it cut the price 40 per cent, the third generated 35 per cent more net revenue. When collections of Moscow Olympic Games silver, gold and platinum coins were sold by direct mail, a mailing which offered only the silver coins led to more sales of the complete collection than a mailing which offered the complete collection itself.
When your profit margin allows, it pays to offer a free premium. Always test different premiums. One of the most effective is cash prizes in sweepstakes. Sweepstakes, premiums, free offers and low prices will build up your initial response, but the customer who is attracted by these devices is not always the customer who turns into a long-term buyer. Asking for the full price and cash with the order will reduce the number of people who respond. But it may turn up more customers who are likely to stay with you over the years. Only testing will tell. The more you test, the more profitable your direct mail will become. Once you have evolved a mailing which produces profitable results, treat it as the ‘control’ and start testing ways to beat it. Try adding a premium, or putting in an expiration date, or adding enclosures – like a personalized letter from your President. They cost money, but if they increase your profit, why worry? Sometimes an expensive control can be made less expensive without reducing your orders. You can test a smaller mailing piece, or eliminate the personalization, or print your brochure in two colors instead of four, or eliminate the brochure altogether. You may be in for a pleasant surprise. Less can be more. Innovations, provided you test them, can work wonders. Prospects for a new Cessna Citation business jet were surprised when we sent them live carrier pigeons, with an invitation to take a free ride in a Citation. The recipient was asked to release our carrier pigeon with his address tied to its leg. Some of the recipients ate the pigeons, but several returned alive, and at least one Citation was sold – for $600,000. My brother Francis wrote a letter in Greek to the headmasters of private schools, selling cooking stoves. When some wrote back that they could not read Greek, he sent them another letter – in Latin. This produced orders. Successful mailings do not always depend on premiums, brochures and other such paraphernalia. I have seen letters produce satisfactory results all by themselves. But they have to be long letters. When Mercedes-Benz were saddled with 1,170 obsolete diesels, we mailed a five-page letter and unloaded the surplus. For Cunard we used an eight-page letter with marked success. DIRECT-RESPONSE ADVERTISING IN MAGAZINES AND TELEVISION So far this chapter has been about direct mail. Now I am going to tell you what I have learned about a parallel science – advertisements in magazines and on
television which invite people to send their orders direct to you, without going to a store. In print advertisements, your headline is the most important element. The other day I saw one headline produce five times as many orders as another. If your headline promises your strongest and most distinct benefit, you are on your way to success. Good photographs of your product cost more than bad ones, but they also sell more. When you want to show something that cannot be photographed, like cutaways of the inside of your product, use a drawing. Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money. Only amateurs use short copy. Cross-heads give breathing space to your copy, and make it more readable. They should be written in such a way that skimmers get the main points of your sales story. Testimonials increase credibility – and sales. If one testimonial tests well, try two. But don’t use testimonials by celebrities, unless they are recognized authorities, like Arnold Palmer on golf clubs. Winston Churchill said, ‘Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all.’ This applies in spades to mail order copy. Set your copy in black type on white paper. You will already know how much I loathe ‘reverse type’ – white on black – for the very good reason that it reduces readership. There are only two exceptions. People read theater programs in the dark, holding them up against the light coming from the stage, so they are easier to read when set in reverse. So are slides projected onto a screen. Readers often skip from the headline to the coupon, to find out what your offer is. So make your coupons mini-ads, complete with brand name, promise and a miniature photograph of your product. Many readers tell themselves they will mail the coupon ‘later’, but never get around to it. One survey showed that twice as much response is lost in this way as is received by the advertiser. Here are four ways to keep your prospects on the hook: • ‘Limited edition’ • ‘Limited supply’ • ‘Last time at this price’ • ‘Special price for promptness’
It used to be thought that the more cluttered your layout, the more you would sell. My observation has been the opposite. Tidy, well-organized layouts actually increase coupon returns. WHERE TO ADVERTISE You know exactly how many inquiries, and ultimately how many orders you get from each insertion in each publication. One magazine may perform twice as well as another. Such variations can be enough to make the difference between profit and loss. Watch the media your competitors use, in particular the media they continue to use. Watch for editorial changes in magazines. They may attract your kind of reader, or may drive them away. Go easy on two-page spreads. They cost twice as much as single pages, but seldom produce twice as many orders. Test different units of space, like a page and a business reply card versus a page alone. Although the card may double the cost, it can sometimes generate four times as many orders as the page alone. When you advertise repeatedly in the same magazine, response rates almost always drop. In some magazines, your ad may make a profit six times a year, while you may be able to use other magazines 12 times before they become unprofitable. TELEVISION It may surprise you to know that the right kind of television commercial can persuade people to order products by mail or telephone – mostly telephone. The ‘right kind’ are those which set up a problem and demonstrate how your product can solve it; give a money-back guarantee; include the price; and ask for the order, explicitly and urgently. The demonstrations should promise not one benefit, but several. (This runs counter to the Procter & Gamble formula.) My partner Al Eicoff has had more experience than anyone in selling direct on television. He has almost never seen a commercial shorter than two minutes produce profitable sales. These marathon commercials don’t seem to irritate people as much as a cluster of short ones – ‘like five salesmen knocking on the door, one after another’. You must allow 20 seconds to give information on how to order. This is long enough to give your toll-free telephone number and post office box number,
complete with supers; and to repeat the charge-free telephone number at least twice. Most advertisers measure their purchases on television time by cost per 1,000 viewers reached, but Eicoff measures them by the number of orders he receives each time a station broadcasts one of his commercials. He then eliminates the time periods and the stations that don’t pay off. The most productive times are early morning, late evening and weekends. January, February and March are the most profitable months. The better the program on which your commercials appear, the fewer sales you make. When viewers are bored by an old movie, they are more likely to pick up the telephone and order your product than when they are riveted by an episode of Dallas. Remember, there is no correlation between the size of your audience and the number of orders you receive. • • • Every chapter in this book is of necessity an over-simplification of a more-or-less complicated subject, and no more so than this one. If you want to know more about direct response, start by reading Successful Direct Marketing Methods by Bob Stone, published by Crain Books in Chicago. This direct-mail shot for Moscow Olympic Games silver coins worked well.
This advertisement, written by Vic Schwab, sold a million books in three years – by mail order. The promise in the headline and the content of the copy were irresistible.
James Webb Young was the creative head of J. Walter Thompson for 40 years. In
his spare time he ran a mail-order business in Santa Fe under the name Webb Young, Trader. This is one of his advertisements, and an object lesson in mail- order advertising. One insertion in Life sold 26,000 ties. What parent could resist this British direct-mail advertisement? The copywriter was David Abbott.
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This advertisement announces the opening of a Direct Response office. Note the long copy, stuffed with specific information.