2005 - 10-27-05

I'm going to ask you a question and I bet very few of you get the answer right.

You're all aware of the sales letter I wrote of which 600 million were mailed, right? Let's say you wrote a letter today just as strong as the one I wrote lo those many years ago... and... you could mail 600 million of them. Let us say those letters would cost you 70¢ apiece to mail. Here's the question:

How Much Would It Cost You

To Mail Those 600 Million Letters?

Well, let's see: At 70¢ per letter it would seem it would cost you to mail all 600 million letters a grand total of $4.2 million.

Right?

WRONG!

It would cost you approximately only $3,500 to mail all 600 million of those letters. Here's why: You would use your $3,500 to mail 5,000 letters and as the money started coming back from your orders every day, you would "re-invest" the proceeds of that day to mail more letters. In other words, you would be mailing more and more letters every day and soon, you would be compounding your mailings with the speed of light. It wouldn't be long until you would be mailing more letters than your infrastructure could handle.

For example, in the heyday of the family crest promotion, we were using a semi-truck to haul our mail from the Donnelly Corporation in Oakdale, Illinois to the little town of Bath, Ohio where the letters were actually mailed. We did this because we thought having the Bath, Ohio postmark was an important element in the success of our promotion. But here's the deal: We had to truck those letters TWICE a week because the Bath, Ohio post office only had enough room to hold one semi-truckload of mail at a time.

Now let's suppose I had been using the 30-day hold on that promotion. It would have taken us a lot longer to mail those 600 million letters. That's because, instead of using every day's receipts to be able to afford to pay for the stamps, etc. needed to mail more letters, we could only increase our mailings once a month after we were able to cash the checks (people didn't use credit cards back then) we would have agreed to hold for 30-days.