#92 The Greatest Personalized Direct Mailing

Post #92 —Wednesday, April 29, 2020

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2020/04/92-greatest-personalized-direct-mailing.html
  Posted by Denny Hatch

The Greatest Personalized Direct

Marketing Mass Mailing in History

    This is it!  

    American Express Platinum Card Launch, April, 1986.


NOT!

Platinum Card Pitch, April, 2020

The late Gary Halbert was a flamboyant, hugely successful direct mail entrepreneur and copywriter. Throughout his career he proclaimed:

• People have two piles of incoming mail: the “A” pile and “B” pile.

• The “A” pile is personal stuff—bills, personal letters, business letters, a scrawled note from the kid in college asking for emergency money.

• The “B” pile is everything else. It has a printed BULK MAIL postage indicia in the upper right corner and blazing teaser copy that announces this is advertising mail.

• Halbert loved to amuse his audiences with a riff. “Imagine an envelope from your lawyer with a huge teaser: HERE’S HOT NEWS ABOUT YOUR NEW LAWSUIT!”

• Everybody opens all of their “A” pile mail. If people don’t know what’s in an envelope, they’ll open it.

• The object for direct mailers: Get your “B” offer into the prospect’s “A” pile.

• Ergo: never use Bulk Rate and never use teasers on an envelope you absolutely want opened.

             Look at the Two Envelopes Above
Pretend these two letters arrived in your mailbox yesterday instead of 34 years apart. The envelope on the left is clearly meant for your “A” pile. 

 From WHO’S MAILING WHAT!, May 1987

TECHNICAL TALK:
If we had to pick the splashiest solo mailing to go out in six-figure numbers over the past two years, the American Express Platinum Card effort would win hands down). It travels in a closed-face 7-3/4" x 4-5/8" envelope of exquisite Artimus Text paper with platinum embossing and 1/8" platinum edge on the envelope flap. 

Inside is a 3-page personalized letter on matching paper with a reproduction of the card embossed in metallic platinum, and a metallic platinum edge at the top of page 1. The second and third sheets have the metallic platinum edge only. There is a matching Business Reply Envelope. The Acceptance Form is on slightly heavier stock. A beautiful 4-1/4” x 7¾" 16-page 4-color brochure spells out benefits. Interestingly, the only place the $250 price is shown anywhere in the mailing is deep in the text on page 3 of the letter. 

Why is this mailing so splashy? Quite simply because it is a rare example of direct mail technical perfection -- from a mailer willing to pay for that perfection.

It is produced by ABS in Wichita, KS, an organization that has 155 Diablo printers and over 200 people who match and insert all the components by hand. Most clients send "tape, text and art" and ABS takes the job through completion -- always guaranteeing to meet the deadlines that have been contracted for. For virtually all clients. ABS chooses paper and envelopes and produces mailings in which the outer envelope, order form and page 1 of the letter are personalized. Additional pages of the letter are offset and collated along with any brochures and the Business Reply Envelope.

For This Extraordinary Platinum Card Effort. Here's the Drill:
American Express ships in a load of single sheets of Artimus Text paper (with Consumer Card Group President Edwin Cooperman's signature pre-printed in blue on sheets to be used for page 3), matching envelopes and order forms. Each effort is completely typed on the same Diablo printer so there is an exact match -- outer envelope. page 1 of the letter and the order form. Because American Express is insistent that the entire letter be an exact match, pages 2 and 3 of the letter are also typed on that same Diablo printer, even though there is no personalization! 

The mailing goes out Presorted First Class with two 18-cent U.S. postage stamps.

Only American Express knows the actual cost because they are supplying paper and brochures. But an educated guess would be somewhere between $1000 - $1100/M [$2,300/M in 2020] and that's with no list rental (the mailing goes only to Amex cardmembers). 

While most ABS clients (Sotheby's, Porsche. Learning International, Value Line) have units of sale in excess of $75, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is using a personalized effort whose average unit of sale is $17; according to Dolores McDonagh at the National Trust, the ABS package pulls up to 20% better, with the increased response making up for higher costs. 

Many traditional mail order people would slit their wrists rather than go for such an outrageous cost-per-thousand. But American Express -- wisely, we think -- looked beyond CPM. The Platinum Card image is being upheld and enhanced. And members are pouring in at what must be a very attractive cost-per-order.

Sad Note: In 2017 Target Marketing closed down WHO’S MAILING WHAT! They trashed the entire archive of 200,000 mailings. It was an irreplaceable 35-year history of great years of direct mail. (“We needed the storage room,” they said.) 
     The mailing was never scanned, the copy lost forever. Above is the only reproduction of this masterpiece from the pages of WHO'S MAILING WHAT! Damn. Damn! DAMN! This was definitely an “A” pile effort. I was able to recreate the envelope and the order card. 

The letter:
Dear Denison Hatch,

The criteria for Platinum Card membership are quite demanding.

In fact, those ultimately chosen must be numbered among our finest American Express^® Card members.

Invitations are extended only to those Card members who deserve—and would appreciate—the added convenience, financial flexibility and security this Card provides.

It is for this reason I recently extended you an
invitation to acquire the Platinum Card. Not only
because… blah, blah, blah.

NOTE: Dick Benson used to say if you can come up with a business model that enables you to call your customers “members”—giving them a sense of exclusivity—you can improve results by 15%. American Express was the only credit card company that flattered their customers by calling them “Members.”

Here was as a masterpiece of flattery and exclusivity. Only Gold Card Members were invited to move up to Platinum. It was a genteel, literate adult-to-adult communication. In short, “A” pile stuff. I loved it. I signed up.

Yes, I signed up? Was I nuts? Insecure?
Why spend $250 ($587 in today’s dollars)?
This was a period in our (relative) youth when Peggy and I did some Third World traveling—Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Belize. One of the fringe benefits was free travel insurance. If the worst happened, we would be airlifted out of the jungle to civilization for medical treatment and flown home. It was phenomenal added value. (I have since downgraded to Gold Card membership.)

                              Was the mailing successful?
When this one arrived in my mailbox, the offer had been mailed for over two years. By then, then the mailing had brought in a quarter-million Platinum Card members paying $250 a year for a cool $62.5 million a year in dues alone. To get these kinds of numbers. Response would have to be well into two figures.
  
                    Now Look at the 2020 Deal Killer
           And How I Was Grotesquely Insulted

“A letter should look and feel like a letter,” said the great guru Dick Benson.

     This letter I received last month was a polyglot of multiple typefaces, distractions, action devices and order mechanisms in the margins and at the bottom.

     Okay, so much for rule-breaking design by “Artistes” who prefer “Pretty” to “Profits” and their product managers who do not know squat about how to communicate.

 Note the line of copy in mouse type at bottom center. The text:

Please see the Additional Disclosures Insert for more details

For the record, my history with AmEx goes back to post WWII years.

• In the late 1940s, Ralph T. Reed, president of American Express, his wife Edna and daughter Phyllis used to summer at the Rockaway Hunt Club next door. They were our guests for cocktails two or three times a week. We liked them a lot.

• In 1950 Doubleday published the official corporate biography, AMERICAN EXPRESS: A Century of Service, by Alden Hatch, my father. 

• In 1956 I commuted to New York for a summer job working in the AmEx mailroom. 

• I have been an American Express Cardmember since 1964.That’s 56 years. Never missed a payment. Absolutely pure record as clean as a hound’s tooth. (I’m a Gold Card Member now.) 

Takeaways to Consider

• Remember the lede of their original letter to me:
Dear Denison Hatch,
The criteria for Platinum Card membership are quite demanding.
In fact, those ultimately chosen must be numbered among our
finest American Express^® Card members.

• Can you imagine sending a 6356-word mouse type “Disclosure Document” to a someone who has been your customer for 56 years and is “among our finest American Express Card members?”

• What am I? Some kind of petty crook out to screw American Express after 56 years?

• Put another way: Would you want to do business with a company that sends you an offer and includes a 6356-word CYA Disclaimer in unreadable mouse type? Yuck!

• "The large type giveth, the small type taketh away."
—Tom Waits

• My personal message to Ken Chenault, President of American Express: “Are you people out of your effing minds?”

• Computers do not know how to treat a “Member” as in a “member of my family.”

• “The computer is a moron.” 
    —Peter Drucker

• “All mail is opened over a waste basket.”

    —Leah Pierce, Copywriter

• “A letter should look and feel like a letter.”

    —Dick Benson

• Never, Oh Never allow artistes/designers, lawyers, accountants, or assorted bean counters to dick around with your direct marketing efforts!

PRIVATE OFFER: I scanned the “Disclosure Document” into Word so I could get a word count. Any subscriber who would like to see the raw scan of this 6356-word marketing travesty, email me: dennyhatch@yahoo.com

REQUEST: If I send you this phantasmagorical nuttiness, I ask you to read it and share your thoughts in the Comment section below. Thank you.

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