The sales letter that gets read

A letter arrives, is held for a few seconds over a bin, and is either kept or discarded. Everything depends on that moment.

The envelope is the first decision

A letter that announces itself as advertising on the outside is discarded unopened by most recipients. A plain envelope with a real stamp is opened by nearly all of them.

The cost difference between a franked bulk envelope and a stamped one is small relative to the difference in open rate.

Make it look like a letter

The most common error is enclosing a brochure and calling it direct mail. Brochures are read as advertising and discarded accordingly.

A letter that looks like correspondence, so a single sheet, a real signature, a normal typeface, no photographs, gets read. It is counter-intuitive and consistently demonstrated.

The structure that works

1. A first line about them, not you. Reference their situation, their street, their industry, something specific.
2. The problem, named in their words.
3. What you do about it, concretely.
4. Proof, one reference or figure, locally relevant.
5. The offer, specific and time-limited.
6. The action, one route, made easy.
7. A postscript. The most-read part of any letter after the opening line. Put the offer there again.

Length

The evidence favours longer letters for considered purchases. A two-page letter frequently outperforms a one-page letter, because the reader who is interested wants the detail and the reader who is not stopped after the first paragraph anyway.

The condition is that every paragraph does work. Length as padding fails.

The response device

Whatever you ask for must be physically easy. A telephone number in large type, a pre-paid reply card, a short web address, or a QR code that goes to a dedicated page rather than the homepage.

Reply cards still perform, particularly with older audiences, and the physical act of returning something correlates with genuine intent.

Following up

A letter followed by a telephone call a week later, where lawful for the recipient type, produces several times the response of the letter alone.

For business recipients this is generally permissible. For consumers, unsolicited calls require prior consent in most jurisdictions.

Testing

Mail in two batches. Change one thing: the envelope, the offer, the opening line. Compare response. Two rounds of that produce a letter that works considerably better than the first draft.