2005 - 07-29-05

Agora is a great direct marketing company. No
one can argue with their monstrous success. And
I realize Agora has utilized many of the very
best copywriters in the world. But, I'd like to
suggest to you what they have not used is a
great direct mail strategist... someone who
focuses not only on writing great direct mail
copy... but also... direct mail strategy.

The way your mail is structured now, much of it
is not delivered. And what is delivered, an
enormous amount of it is never opened. And what
is opened, only a very small percentage is
actually read.

The "Options Hotline" promotion I am giving you
with this cover letter will achieve almost 100%
delivery by the Post Office. It will be opened
by almost 100% of the people who receive it. And
it will be read by almost 100% of the people who
open it.

It's pretty obvious to see why this will work so
much better than what you usually mail.

"But what about the bothersome logistics of
preparing a mailing like this?" you and your
superiors ask. Greg, I can tell you this... I
personally have created promotions that required
more complicated lettershop endeavors than this
particular promotion. And, I was able to
outsource it easily and to get 125,000 of those
letters mailed every working day of the week.

Let me tell you about just one of those
promotions. I created it for Health Laboratories
of America located in Phoenix, Arizona. It was,
I believe, the most widely mailed diet promotion
in history. The letter worked so well, we almost
couldn't find a list that wouldn't pay a profit.
Eventually, after years of mailing tens of
millions of pieces, we finally ran out of lists
we could mail to at a profit. So you know what
we did?

We got the file of everybody who had a driver's
license in the United States. Then we did a
computer program that did a simple calculation
based on the height and weight information
contained in that file. This enabled us to "kick
out" all the porkers who had a driver's license.
We mailed millions of those letters to those
porkers at a very considerable profit.