Issue #60
— Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Posted by Denny Hatch
Get Used to It. Direct Mail Is Sexier Than Email.
The brilliantly inventive Mt. Kisco, NY, freelancer
Barbara Harrison (alas, now retired) was commissioned by Howard Potter of
Oppenheimer & Co. to announce a new short-term fixed income fund.
It was
to be touted as a steady, safe investment. When the market was up, it promised
to make money. In bad times it was designed to weather financial storms and
maintain its value.
Harrison’s assignment: get the lead generation effort past secretaries
and directly into the hands of CFOs, VPs, investment and pension fund managers
of corporations, banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses and the like.
These
wholesalers would then retail this new fund to individual investors.
Harrison’s sales pitch had to physically get to the desks of busy and
important people. A postcard or simple letter and prospectus would not cut
it.
Email?
Fuggedaboudit.
Harrison’s Drop-dead Brilliant Campaign
This was no ordinary copy assignment. Mere words cannot take a boring-as-dirt investment vehicle and make it come alive.
When you think of a new mutual fund, no exciting image pops into your head—such as a shiny new BMW, Carnival cruise or stack of golden Bisquick pancakes with maple syrup.
Harrison's horrendous challenge was to come up with something more than a dreary prospectus full of numbers, percentages, returns on investment, lawyer-written promises of safety and a page of gray, mouse type warnings and exclusions.
Harrison aced it! She dreamed up an elegant three-dimensional mailing with a dazzling gift—a high-quality gold-plated gyroscope—one of those toys that children love to play with endlessly.
When you think of a new mutual fund, no exciting image pops into your head—such as a shiny new BMW, Carnival cruise or stack of golden Bisquick pancakes with maple syrup.
Harrison's horrendous challenge was to come up with something more than a dreary prospectus full of numbers, percentages, returns on investment, lawyer-written promises of safety and a page of gray, mouse type warnings and exclusions.
Harrison aced it! She dreamed up an elegant three-dimensional mailing with a dazzling gift—a high-quality gold-plated gyroscope—one of those toys that children love to play with endlessly.
The key copy in Harrison’s letter and the brochure:
The gyroscope
is a precision instrument that seems to defy the forces of gravity to maintain
its orientation in space. As a model of stability and space-age navigation, it
is a fitting symbol of SCOPE, the managed portfolio that protects your
principal from market gyrations while guiding your investment toward enhanced
income.
The best gyroscopes are still made by
hand.
Like SCOPE, some things depend on the
expertise of individuals to maintain their advantage.
As a result of her creative efforts, Oppenheimer
named the new fund "SCOPE" with a gyroscope logo.
By that
that August, Oppenheimer had mailed 2,500 packages, staggered in time so that their
individual reps could follow-up with sales calls.
One
salesperson walked in to a prospect’s office and discovered him happily
spinning his gyroscope on the conference table.
"If
your fund is as good as your gyroscope," he said, "I'm
interested."
Takeaways to Consider
• Launching a highly complex financial product such as SCOPE Fund—or, for example, marketing a multi-million-dollar Gulfstream corporate
jets—requires a longer sales cycle than a wham-bam-thank-you ma’am great offer
that can be paid for with a credit card.
• In most cases, a number of people will be
involved in the buying decision.
• The answer: Lead Generation Marketing with a
series of carefully orchestrated steps.
• The objective of every step is not to make a sale
or confuse the prospect by force-feeding a lot of information. You simply want
a yes/okay to go on to the next step.
• Barbara Harrison did not involve the prospect in
the nitty-gritty and pros/cons of the investment. The only object: get the
prospect to say yes to seeing a salesman.
• Seattle direct marketing guru Bob Hacker has said
if you spend too much money on the first step—first lead generation effort—the
program cannot make money.
• The three most important words in direct
marketing: “Arithmetic. Arithmetic.
Arithmetic!”
• Lead Generation Effort must be tailored to the
size and capabilities of the sales department. An avalanche of responses all at
once could bury the reps. Too few and they would seek solace at the nearest gin
mill. The object is to keep the sales reps very busy, not overwhelmed.
Hats off to Barbara Harrison for her copy and design wizardry!
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Word count:632
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You Are Invited to Join the Discussion!
At age 15, Denny Hatch—as a lowly
apprentice—wrote his first news release for a Connecticut summer theater. To
his astonishment it ran verbatim in The Middletown Press. He was
instantly hooked on writing. After a two-year stint in the U.S. Army (1958-60),
Denny had nine jobs in his first 12 years in business. He was fired from five
of them and went on to save two businesses and start three others. One of his
businesses—WHO’S MAILING WHAT! newsletter and archive service
founded in 1984—revolutionized the science of how to measure the success of
competitors’ direct mail. In the past 55 years he has been a book club
director, magazine publisher, advertising copywriter/designer, editor,
journalist and marketing consultant. He is the author of four published novels
and seven books on business and marketing.
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dennyhatch@yahoo.com
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'Direct Mail sexier than Email'... Amen to that Denny! Direct mail has never 'been away' (as the hipsters think), and is making a huge comeback this side of the 'pond'. My most recent new clients are a London-based real estate company full of twentysomethings, and their primary marketing focus for a while has been, yes, direct mail! Of course there are the new GDPR regulations which have frightened off a lot of overseas mailers from our fair shores, but the rules/privacy laws and permissions required are far less strict than for email/online campaigns. So if any US/overseas direct mailers are looking for an experienced contact over here in the U.K. to help them with their U.K./European mailshots, you can find me on LinkedIn. The gyroscope grabber mailing is great. Thanks again for another interesting post and keep up the good work. Best wishes, Nick 'Goutbuster' Wrathall
ReplyDeleteNick,
DeleteMany thanks for taking the time to write and for sharing your beliefs in Direct Mail.
My opinion: Direct mail is complex and expensive. The millennial techie-weenies have become besotted with “data-driven marketing.”
Over here that became the slogan of our direct marketing association—the DMA. When I came into the business, DMA stood for Direct Mail Association. As I understand it, our DMA was absorbed by some other organization and it may be out of business.
I am real dubious of the craze for “Big Data” and Data Driven Marketing. The idea you can scrounge the Internet and everybody’s private emails so you can steal every teensy dot of data about every person in the world, send it up to that person’s digital dossier in the clouds—those intimate dossiers that are rocketed around the world hundreds of times a day—and make sense of them is bullshit.
Just because you have all this data, how do you make sense of it?
Nothing beats direct mail for testing, reading results AND PRIVACY!
http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2019/04/50-how-chinese-stole-yekutiel-shermans.html
Dunno what going on over there (beside Brexit and am not sure about that). The this is what’s happening over hear in the colonies.
Thanks again.
And do keep in touch!
Cheers!