Category: Marketing

The Robert Collier Letter Book

Early in my copywriting career, I stumbled across the Robert Collier Letter Book at the L.A. Central Library. Discovering it was out of print, I flirted with telling them I’d lost it… and soon wished I had, because the only copy was lost when the library burned down.

Now, the Robert Collier Letter Book is available once again via the web (use this Amazon link). It’s just as relevant and meaty as I remembered. Robert Collier was an early “Giant of the Mails” who shared his knowledge in 1937, but people are people and selling is selling so most of it still applies today. For example:

“All of us are consciously, or unconsciously, using ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ from morning, noon till night. Some of us use them to sell ideas, others service and others actual merchandise.

“Little Willy wants an extra slice of bread and jam; sister wants 15 cents for the movies; Dad is scheming how to get out of the house for lodge that night, and Mother is planning to have Dad sweep out the cellar–while around the corner the Preacher is planning a visit on the household to make it more church conscious and one and all, have their own pet ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ they plan to use on one another!”

If you work in marketing or selling, or even if you don’t, I say: get this book.

On persuasive writing.

Before my most recent copywriting class, a prospective student sent me this email:

“Can you please let me know how applicable the course content will be to writing technical press releases, magazine articles, editorials  and advertisements. I am an engineer who recently moved into product marketing and am interested in improving my writing skills, but I’m not going to be doing any direct marketing campaigns.”

My response:

“Fair question… One of the principles I teach is that persuasive writing applies to any situation because you always need to convince people to do something. In some cases that “something” is simply getting them to read what you’ve written… So you want to translate described features into why this is important, and write in a way that’s easy for people to follow. I’ve had a number of people who don’t actually work in marketing take the course and no complaints that the material wasn’t relevant enough to invest a day in it. Also, it may help you to know that since we’re in San Jose many of the attendees work in tech and want to discuss tech writing challenges and I myself have a lot of tech writing experience. (Though the ones I share in the course are tech direct marketing, not straight technical writing.)”

She did end up registering, and I followed up and asked this morning how she liked it. She said:

“Yes thanks I really enjoyed the day. There are techniques I will be able to apply to my press releases. Also, it reconfirmed some of my personal beliefs about writing styles and what works. It’s good to learn what are the proven methods to capture an audience.”

How do YOU browse the web?

I don’t know how much data you need to be statistically significant, but I expect it would take my modest website awhile to get there in terms of analyzing who does what when they go browsing on www.otismaxwell.com. But I’ve noticed a very consistent pattern on the “examples” page where you can access samples of work. Virtually everyone who visits this page looks at the FIRST entry and the LAST entry but very little in between. It’s sort of like the P.S. in a direct mail letter, which research says is often the first thing read. Folks see what is at the top, what is at the bottom, then they form their judgment about this copywriter’s work.

What’s wrong with the post office?

I am the world’s biggest cheapskate, yet on more than one recent occasion I stepped out of a line at the Post Office and drove across town to UPS to ship the package for three times the cost with slower delivery. I see other people doing the same thing. They arrive, look at the line, shake their head and leave.

What’s wrong with the post office? Why can’t they just take our money and mail our stuff since that, after all, is that they’re there for?

Part of the problem is that the USPS has become the shipper of last resort. Nobody is simply buying stamps. Everybody is shipping a poorly wrapped package to some mysterious place, and fluid is leaking out, and they want insurance, and the clerk tells them to rewrap the package and get back in line. (At the HEAD of the line, so even if you’ve worked your way up to the front you’re not sure you really have.)

And that’s not even the biggest problem.

Everybody’s started using Priority Mail which seems sort of like blackmail, paying extra to insure your package will arrive when it’s supposed to. So, now the post office has started selling something called “Priority Bundles”. If you say you want to ship Priority, they ask you if you would like proof of delivery, or insurance, or a signature at extra cost. Of course, it takes a lot of time to explain these options and still more time to do the paperwork. And the line grows longer.

I can see the USPS’ logic: their clerks and customers are there anyway, so selling the extra services provides pure profit. But they disregarded the opportunity cost which is so great that other customers abandon the post office… perhaps permanently.

Much of my business depends on reliable of transmission of lots of mail, so this kind of thing makes me nervous. I’m reminded of what the new Postmaster General said in Canada a few years back when he was asked some question about direct mail advertising and reliability. I’m assuming this guy was a political appointee and had not read his briefing book. He said something to the effect of “that’s ridiculous, nobody would ever had a business that depended on the post office”. Right.

Aargh! My website is down.

My hosting company, Dreamhost, is running a signup special–a year’s hosting for $7.77–and there is grumbling on the user discussion boards about the fact they didn’t offer this to current customers. A few days ago I would have been among the grumblers, but then I got caught into a URL forwarding mess (still unresolved as of this moment) which makes the saving of a buck or two seem trivial.

Thus far the inability to reach my website has cost me a/$40-50 in paid-for clickthroughs from Overture and Google where people couldn’t access the link they had clicked on; b/an unknown amount of goodwill, certainly a few hundreds of dollars, from people who’ve clicked on the website since I put it up, came back, and now assume I’m dead or out of business. I’d pay many times $7.77 to undo the problem.

I went with Dreamhost because they got good reviews, were not the cheapest but were cheap, and because the founders went to Harvey Mudd, the place where I used to play video games late into the night when the coop down the hill at Pomona was closed. Though they haven’t been especially helpful, the current issue doesn’t seem to be their fault. (The domain www.otismaxwell.com is at another registrar which seems to have messed up the nameserver instructions and can’t fix it easily).

This reminds me of the early days of fax machines. Suddenly you had to have a fax number, and if the fax number which didn’t even exist last week was down (usually because the machine ran out of paper) it was a business emergency. This is the sort of aggravation that is compounded with one-person businesses because the same amount of person power is involved as for a much bigger company but it’s just you doing the work.

By the way, my backup site is still working: www.otismaxwell.dreamhost.com

The Shoemaker’s Children


The Shoemaker’s Children
Originally uploaded by otisregrets.

Direct marketers in their self promos are some of the worst practioners of our craft, and this invite to a Catalog Age webinar is a great example. The subject line should tease… an intro headline should pay it off… then quickly get to the meat in the body copy of the invite.

Instead, this email repeats the same headline no less than three times before they get to the meat and the benefits. The row of identity-building images across the top is also a problem. This is appropriate for collateral but not for the recipient of the email; I already KNOW who I am. The muffed salutation… let’s say that is a service bureau problem… even so, if you’re not sure your data is clean maybe just forego the dear so-and-so ?