Offer to sell on easy-payment plan;

Offer to sell for cash but with strong refunding guarantee;

Offer to supply article through local dealer on reader's authorization. With such an authorization, the advertiser has a good opening to stock the retailer.

The price feature offers one of the best opportunities to give the letter real inducement. If the price is in any sense a special price, make it clear that it is. Sometimes you can hang your whole letter on this one element.

Reduced price, if the reduction is set forth logically, is a strong feature. One publisher uses it in this fashion:

"We have just 146 sets of these books to sell at $18.50. When the new edition is in, it will be impossible to get a set at less than $25. The old edition is just as good as the new, but we are entirely out of circular matter describing the green cloth binding, and as we don't want to print a new lot of circulars just to sell 146 sets, we make this unusual offer. Now is your chance."

Advance in price is almost as strong. It's a lever to quick action:

"On the 1st of October the rate of the MESSENGER will go up to one dollar a line. If you place your order before the thirtieth of this month you can buy s.p.a.ce to be used any time before January 1 next at seventy-five cents a line. After the thirtieth, positively no orders will be accepted at less than one dollar a line. As a matter of fact our circulation ent.i.tles us to a dollar a line right now.

"Don't let this letter be covered up on your desk. Attend to this matter now, or instruct your advertising agent to reserve s.p.a.ce for you, and get a big bargain."

Price, in this case is, in fact, a part of the close. It spurs the reader to "order now."

Setting a time limit, in which a proposal holds good, is also a strong closer. A large book publisher finds it effective to make a discount offer good if accepted within a certain number of days.

Guarantee offers are strong. Don't content yourself with the old "absolutely guaranteed" expression. Be definite. "Order this buggy, and if, at the end of a month, you are not entirely satisfied that it is the biggest buggy value you ever had for the money, just write me, and I'll take the buggy back without quibbling. Could any offer be fairer? I make it because I've sold 246 of these buggies since January, and so far no man has asked for his money back."

The sum-up is as important a part of the sales letter as it is of the lawyer's speech or brief. It should concentrate the whole strength of the letter at the close, as, for instance:

"So you see that though our machine is apparently high-priced it is really cheaper by the year than another machine. Our offer of a free trial right in your own plant gives you absolute protection. It is quite natural, of course, for us to be desirous of getting your order, but we do not see how you can, from your own point of view, afford not to put the Bismarck in your factory."

And finally, help the prospect buy. The sales letter designed to bring the order must provide an easy method of ordering. In the first place, a great many people do not understand how to order. To others, making out an order is a task that is likely to be postponed. By making it easy for the reader to fill out a blank with a stroke or two of the pen, while the effect of the letter is strong, a great many orders will be secured that would otherwise be lost.

It should be axiomatic that if a letter is expected to pull business through the mails it must place before the recipient every facility for making it easy and agreeable to reply and reply NOW. How this can best be done will be taken up more fully in a separate chapter on "Making It Easy to Answer."

One thing to remember particularly in the case of the original sales letter is that if possible it should have a definite scheme behind it. A reason for the offer, a reason for the letter itself.

A safe-deposit vault was well advertised by sending out letters that contained a special pa.s.s to the vault with the name of the reader filled in. Of course the letter gave a pressing invitation to call and allow the custodian to show the vault's interesting features.

Still another clever letter soliciting rentals of safe-deposit boxes proposed that in case the reader now had a box elsewhere, they would take the lease off his hands. In reality they merely gave him free rental until his other lease expired, but the scheme was cleverly planned.

A buggy maker wrote enclosing duplicate specifications of a buggy he had just had made for his own personal use, and suggested that he would have another made for the reader exactly like it and turned under the same careful supervision.

Letters that give the reader something or offer to give him something have similar effect. The letter about a new facial cream will command extra attention because of the small sample of the cream enclosed. In fact, one cold cream company finds it an effective plan to send a sample and a sales letter to druggists'

mailing lists or to names taken from telephone books, telling the reader in the final paragraph that the cream can be purchased at the local drug store.

A letter offering a sample can of a high-grade coffee for the name of the reader's favorite grocer will bring a good response and afford the advertiser a strong hold on the grocer.

A favorite method of securing savings depositors is to send a good "savings letter" that offers a free home-savings bank or a vest-pocket saver.

Even calendars may be given out more effectively by sending a letter and telling the reader that a good calendar has been saved for him and asking him to call at the office.

A striking paragraph of a real estate dealer's soliciting letter is one that a.s.serts that the dealer has a client with the cash who wants just about such a house as the reader of the letter owns.

A real estate dealer, whose specialty is farms, has this telling sentence in his original letter: "Somewhere there is a man who will buy your farm at a good price; I should like to find that man for you."

There is hardly a product or a proposition that does not offer opportunity to put some scheme behind the letter. And such a plan doubles the appeal of the original sales letter. But once more, remember, not to put all your ammunition into the first letter. Be prepared to come back in your second and third letters, not simply with varied repet.i.tions, but with more reasons for buying. Make your first letter as strong as you can, but at the same time--pave the way.

The Letter That Will BRING an _Inquiry_

PART V--WRITING THE SALES LETTER--CHAPTER 17

_Comparatively few propositions can be sold in the first letter; in most campaigns it is enough to stimulate a man's interest and get him to reply. This chapter gives specific schemes that have proved successful in pulling answers--in making an opening for the heavy artillery of the follow-up_

Think what a problem you would have if you started out as a salesman to sell a certain article with no definite idea of where to find your prospects. You might interview a hundred men before you found one who was interested. That would be pretty slow and pretty expensive selling, wouldn't it?

And think what it would mean if you were to send out broadcast a thousand expensive booklets and follow-up letters only to receive one reply from the one man with whom you effected a point of contact. That, too, would be a prohibitively costly method of selling.

Yet one or both these methods would in many cases be necessary were it not for the inquiry-bringing letter. The inquiry letter is a "feeler"--the advance agent of the selling campaign. It goes broadcast to find and put its finger on the man who is interested or who can be interested, and his reply labels him as the man whom it is worth while for your salesman to see, or, who is at least worth the expense and endeavor of a follow-up series.

The inquiry letter is like the advertis.e.m.e.nt which asks you to send for a catalogue or booklet. The advertis.e.m.e.nt writer believes that if you are interested enough to write for the booklet, you will be interested enough to read his sales letters, and possibly become a purchaser. It is the same with the inquiry-bringing letter. It is simply a sieve for sifting out the likely prospects from the great ma.s.s of persons, who for many reasons cannot be brought around into a buying mood concerning your proposition.

The great advantage of the letter which induces the recipient to express his interest in an inquiry, is that you not only make him put himself unconsciously under an obligation to read further details, but you give time for the thoughts that you have started to get in their work.

The fact that a man has decided to ask for more information and has put that decision in writing is of considerable psychological value.

The one thing the salesman hopes to find, and the one thing the letter writer strives to create, is a receptive mood on the part of his prospect. The moment a man answers the inquiry-letter, he has put himself into a frame of mind where he waits for and welcomes your subsequent sales talk.

He looks forward with some interest to your second letter. At first there was just one person to the discussion. Now there are two.

In this respect the letter is like the magazine advertis.e.m.e.nt. Give all the details of a $500 piano in an advertis.e.m.e.nt of ordinary size, quoting the price at the close, and it is extremely unlikely to bring the reader to the point of deciding that he will buy the piano. It is better to deal with some point of interest about the piano and offer a fine piano book free.

And right here it is worthy of mention that interesting books with such t.i.tles as "How to Select a Piano," "How to Make Money in Real Estate," "Bank Stocks as an Investment," or "The Way to Have a Beautiful Complexion," make letters as well as advertis.e.m.e.nts draw inquiries of a good cla.s.s.

In other words, offer an inducement, give your man a _reason_ for answering.

When you have written a letter calculated to draw inquiries, put yourself in the position of the man who is to get it and read it through from his standpoint. Ask yourself whether _you_ would answer it if you received it. Test it for a reason, an inducement, and see if it has the pulling power you want it to have.