Welcome to Part 4 of this series “Scientific Advertising In The 21st Century”.
“Mail Order Advertising – What It Teaches” is the fourth chapter in the classic book by copywriter Claude Hopkins.
And again it goes to the heart of what Hopkins saw as key to success in advertising. Testing, tracking and measuring so that advertising is accountable.
“The severest test of an advertising man is in selling goods by mail…There cost and result are immediately apparent…The advertising is profitable or it is not, clearly on the face of returns. Figures which do not lie tell one at once the merits of an ad.”
Hopkins goes on to expand on the theme of measurability and how it leads to efficiency and economy. There is a relentless focus on costs and how anything that doesn’t contribute to returns must be ruthlessly excluded.
For example, small type is typically used in print ads because it cuts the cost of space, while having no negative impact on the results.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Hopkins was against “long copy”. This chapter contains the often quoted line “The more you tell, the more you sell”. The caveat is that the longer copy must be used effectively.
There’s another interesting point relating to customer behaviour…
“Mail order advertising usually contains a coupon. That is there to get some action from the converts partly made. It is there to cut out as a reminder of something the reader has decided to do.”
As marketers, we must never forget that the customer will buy when it suits them, not necessarily when we want them to! So it’s important to somehow be in front of the customer at the time they are ready to act. I’ll talk more about this later in the context of modern day marketing.
In the rest of the chapter, Hopkins provides some further examples of the benefits of testing and measuring. He also makes the point that mail order advertisements can (and should) be used as the models for all other advertising.
Why? Because they’ve been tested to work under the most difficult conditions. You’ll often hear successful marketers say that selling “straight off the page” is the most difficult thing to achieve in advertising. It is hard to sell goods that can’t be seen or touched!
So, if you have a successful mail order piece, suitably adapted it should work in other situations.
That brings us to lessons we can draw for today’s marketing.
Firstly, of course, mail order remains a perfectly viable marketing channel. The drawback is the relatively high cost involved to get started but the returns for a successful campaign can be great.
Secondly, with the emergence of the internet, marketers now have another, and much cheaper, way to test a mail order advertisement. It’s not exactly the same as classic mail order (placing an ad in a newspaper or magazine). But by driving traffic to a sales page (through Pay Per Click ads or other means) the same effect is achieved.
And it’s vastly easier and quicker to test advertisements online. The internet really is an ideal direct response medium. Which, I suspect, is the reason we’re now seeing traditional direct marketers moving on to the internet in a big way.
Once you have a successful internet campaign, then that can be recycled and applied in other channels. Including, of course, traditional mail order.
The final point I’ll make concerns the need to be in front of the customer when they are ready to buy. Of course, you can’t get people to clip a coupon from your internet sales page. But you can offer them a free report or some other item they can download.
Even better, of course, is if you can get then to give you an email address so you can follow up. The reason successful direct marketers place such emphasis on collecting contact details and building a list is that it makes the selling task much easier.
Remember, making the sale “straight off the page” is the hardest thing for any marketer to do. Digressing slightly, in the modern era Joe Sugarman is one of the leading exponents of this art. His “Adweek Copywriting Handbook” is an excellent guide.
Claude Hopkins would have felt very at home with the internet, I suspect.
In Chapter 4, Hopkins talks about something every copywriter has to master – Headlines.