Elegant Solutions

The big direct mail company's creative people came
up with many sophisticated ideas to get the vendors to capture the names. Do you
know what the winning idea was? Simply this:

Pay Them!

A story I've told before: As a rule of thumb, a
personalized letter (with the salutation "Dear Mr. Last Name") would
pull 300% more in orders than a standard letter which started out "Dear
Friend," or "Dear Resident," or "Dear Occupant."
However, in the late 1960's and the early 70's, the cost to type such a
personalized letter was enormous. If I remember correctly, it was nearly $10 for
each letter.

Then computers came along and made it possible to
create what looked like an individually-typed, personalized letter. However, few
people knew how to do this... so... computer-generated letters were still
enormously expensive.

Then along comes Sir Gary of Halbert with a killer
"Elegant Solution". I said to myself, "Self,
why don't you get phone books from all the big cities in the United States and
extract, for example, everybody who has the last name 'Clarke'. Then, just type one
letter with the opening 'Dear Mr. Clarke' and also personalize it several times
throughout the body copy with a 'Mr. Clarke' here and there."

I continue this conversation with myself, "After you finish typing that one letter, take it to a printer and
tell him you want 1000 of these letters printed up. While the printer is doing
his thing, you get 1000 envelopes typed to all the Clarkes from those phone
books."

But I wasn't finished yet, "And
Gary, once you get the 'personalized' letters from the printer, you fold and
stuff them in all the envelopes which contain the names and addresses of all
those 1000 Clarkes. Put a live stamp on each one and drop them in the
mail."