The Irresistible Offer, and Making Money

There is no shortage of advice for this game.

The mailbox is a limitless supply of surprises. Today, it presented a special offer from Golf Magazine, one that I could not refuse.

In direct mail, there are offers, but more important, there are deals, and Golf’s latest was a doozy.
This simple envelope expressed a blunt sentiment: ONE TIME ONLY!

“April is 5 months off, but we want you NOW.”

Does that sound like something your parents would have said?

How about Golf’s business manager, in response to the giddily optimistic circulation manager who came up with the crazy deal?

Half a year in the upper midwest is golf-free, so why not?

This was in fact a renewal letter. An advance renewal, 5 months out from April 2015, which is the last issue date.
So here’s the deal: 12 issues for a year, PLUS six more issues, for $10. Basically 63 cents an issue.

Desperate?

Digging through my recycle bin, I found a September Golf blow-in card offering 12 issues for $16. That’s 75 cents each.

Relax, there’s always a better deal coming.

At this juncture, one could decide to defer, just because, who knows, golf may never occur again on the planet due to snow, so what’s the point?

But then the real deal emerges. In addition to the 6 free issues, the renewal also came with a 90-page expert guide: “The Best SHORT GAME Instruction”. Downloadable with paid order. Sweet!

Lining up the three wood for a water hazard.

Let me perambulate for a moment to say that I play the short game very well.

I can shoot a 56, +/- 2 strokes in 9 holes consistently. I don’t need to play 18 holes to break 72. I can do it in 12, no sweat.

But maybe the book could offer some consolatory advice.

The question we should ask, is how can Golf make any money giving away the magazine almost for free?

The circulation director shuddered with this deal.

As it turns out, Golf needs me as much as I need their Instruction book. You see, they promise to their advertisers to deliver 1,400,000 magazines a month to avid readers like me.

Looking at Golf’s 2013 rate card, one will find that a full-page color ad goes for $207,100. That’s about the price of a house trailer in Fort Myers.

There are lots of angles in buying ad space, but at the end of the day, a 125-page Golf Magazine carries about 40 pages of color ads, generating $8,300,000 in sales. About $5.92 per reader.

The essential irresistible offer: FREE advice.

The magazine may cost as much as $2 to print and mail, so that leaves nearly $4 left to create, write and photograph. Should be enough!

And what about my $10? Where does that go? Well, assuming they wrote to 120,000 subscribers with an April 2015 end-date, their mailing cost is about a dollar each, all in. $120,000. Odds are, about 15,000 may renew, which is $150,000 to cover the mailing with something left over for the gent who wrote the SHORT GAME guide.

So that excited Circ manager maybe isn’t so crazy after all.

Now we’ll see if the guide can make my game any shorter.

Thanks for following the math on this. If you have any tips on improving my game, just write!

direct mail, Marketing

Victoria, Golf and Testing

Every magazine’s sales tool: the “blow-in” card.

The beauty of direct mail is that you can test to find out what works.

So that is why Victoria’s Secret and Golf Magazine enjoy your attention today.

“Pretty” is nice, but in direct mail it’s the offer that counts.

Opening the December issue of Golf Magazine, 4 different blow-in cards fluttered onto the kitchen table.

Why 4? Because there are a number of triggers to test on the reader.

This card focuses on the discount off regular price.

The FREE gift is the sales incentive here.

Buy one, get one free for a friend, plus a FREE gift.

As it turns out three of the cards have identical offers, but each with a different deal. Or look. One will feature the discount off the cover price. Two will bathe the reader in yellow ink, but one of those is really pushing the FREE gift–a really cool Golf Distance Finder, with “BEST DEAL!” screaming to check the top box. The fourth card is a gift sub card, making a two-for-one deal, plus a very classy Free Gear Bag.

Each card is key-coded to track which works best. Kudos to the subscription manager who recognizes that one deal does not suit all people.

Based on response, you can bet they will tweak the next set of cards, but odds are, they won’t reduce the count: four.

Now turn to Victoria’s Secret, where we get two mailers within the same week, each taking pre-eminent positioning at the kitchen table during lunch.

The mission of these cards is to drive traffic. At least one will snag the reader.

May I note that the “staff” over at Victoria’s don’t probably enjoy lunch?

Fortunately, they do get full, heated-room privileges, which accounts for their restive, but somewhat hungered composure.

The two mailings are spectacular for their origami and construction. Best of all, each mailer contains 4 different mini-cards with specific deals.

Each card’s mission is to entice the shopper to get to the store.
If the Free panty doesn’t do it, the Free Tote Bag will.

The advantage of personal direct mail– the ability to track and analyze.

The production on these pieces is clever. One is a 10-page booklet, with 4 mini-cards attached to one page. The back of each card has a live bar code on it. Meaning they can track response to the mailing, the offer, and yup, to the shopper too. Yikes!

Four cards in a 10-page mailing: unstoppable!

The cards themselves are 24 mil, meaning for you lay folks, thick enough to jimmy a hotel lock.

But they are small, demanding less space in your wallet or purse.

I recall as a small youngster having a wad of direct mail coupons which I pretended were dollar bills….kept them in my plastic wallet. I liked flashing “money” when shopping with my mother. I don’t think she would have gone for the Victoria’s cards so much.

Testing through direct mail offers the luxury of control: distribution, offer, targeting and tracking. When done well, marketers can get the most for their dollar spent. That means they learn to send you things you like, and don’t send you things that turn you off.

Sharing testing strategies across different media, like mail and magazines is also productive, and enhances perspective.

“Gee Dad, it looks better over here!”

So I wonder, could we test the FREE Golf Distance Finder with Victoria’s Secret?

Thanks for reading this far! I hope your mail box provides as much enjoyment as does mine!

Thank You

Lest We Forget

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

~Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD, Canadian Army 1872-1918

Media

The Radio Phenomenon: Our Soundtrack

The Country Music Association awards aired this week.

Putting aside the occasional Stetson and raffia straw hat, the confab was verging on a Pop music celebration. “All About The Bass” opened the show, followed shortly by Steven Tyler, Ariana Grande, and closing with The Doobies.

There wasn’t a tractor, dog, train or pickup truck in sight, though Chevy was a prime sponsor.

What was phenomenal, in the true sense of the word, was the repetitive tribute to Radio.

The winners were both exuberant and humbled, and thankful, many to God, but nearly all of them to the radio industry that played their song.

In a world that is held tightly in the clutch of the Web, and Cloud, Radio is the phenomenon to be respected. It hangs on.

A media report reveals that 84% of the 18-64 adult population watches Television over 4 hours a day. In second place, 56% listen to Radio, over 2-1/2 hours a day. The colossus Internet ranks third at 41%, for less than 2 hours a day.**

Somehow, the ancient invention of the 20th century persists to enjoy public subscription despite all the noise to the contrary.

Another report tells us what we could guess, that over 93% of the public listens to Radio. More surprising, only 70% have Broadband Internet.

But here’s the real stunner: Country & New Country music is the #1 most listened-to format on the radio. News and Talk shows rank second. Pop Contemporary comes in third.

At this moment you may be asking yourself, there’s only one Country station where I live..how can it be that popular? As it turns out, the vote is split among 55 radio formats.

You may have already known this, but there is a fine definition between “Hot Adult Contemporary” and “Urban Adult Contemporary”.. quite set apart from 11 categories of Hispanic formats: “Mexican Regional” to “Spanish Sports”.

Someone somewhere is very sensitive about whose group they join.

But a solitary Country holds its ground, with the biggest corral if you will, thereby capturing the single largest audience share.

Which brings us back to Radio. Country stars count on it, and they call it out like an old friend. As do all of us, from the morning wake up call, to the last broadcast we pause to hear before turning off the car’s ignition at the end of our commute.

It succeeds because it offers a reliable sound track to our lives, unlike Internet and TV which are greedy for our sole attention. Admit it– you can’t drive a car and watch football, and you can’t read a blog while mowing the lawn.

Radio is always there, a generous background to our busy day.

Thanks for reading! The reason I enjoy driving is, frankly, so I can listen to the radio!

**The link disconnected. Here is a replacement! http://www.raisingthevolume.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Radio-Usage-Trends.pdf

http://stateofthemedia.org/2012/audio-how-far-will-digital-go/audio-by-the-numbers/

direct mail, Marketing

Presidential Letter-Writing: Good, Bad and You Know…

A key principle of direct mail strategy is building the personal connection. Traditional mail order mavens personalize a relationship with a letter from the president, or owner of the business. When a customer buys, not only are they endorsing the product, but they are also connecting with the owner, who is implicitly guaranteeing satisfaction.

So when you are making the choice to use a letter or not, you are really deciding, “is this going to be personal, or just business?” Put another way, is this admail, or direct mail?

Within the letter-signing world however, there are good and bad examples.

The best is the personally signed note. Not economical, but surely convincing.

The least persuasive is the typeset signature. Paranoiacally concerned a signature analyst is going to tear it apart.

But there is something far more worrying.

Perusing the news, I saw a photograph of the President’s signature on the Affordable Care Act. Put aside the law’s contents, what was striking was the shaky signature.

As if our leader had pauses in memory, moments of hesitation, stopping half way through a letter, and then continuing the curve until the next stop.

You may already know this, but in case you have been a life-long libertarian ignoring all laws, and thus this quirky writing habit of CEOs, the jerky writing is attributed to using multiple pens to sign the official document.

In the case of the ACA, there were 22 pens. See how healthcare costs add up so quickly?

But I digress. I did a search on this multiple pen phenomenon, and up popped a Time Magazine article with the same signature incident, along with the headline suggesting that our President may have an undiagnosed case of OCD.

See how a signature creates an image?

Obsessive-compulsive or not, one cannot mail a lot in a full 12-hour day with this type of pen-stutter.

Better, is the thoughtful touch of our third President, Thomas Jefferson.

Recognizing the power of automation, married seamlessly to manual control, he introduced the polygraph to the Department of State. This contraption was invented in 1803 by John Isaac Hawkins, of Frankford, Pennsylvania.

Using the polygraph Jefferson was able to create up to five letters with one sweep of the pen.

Did he know how important direct mail fundraising would become 200 years later?

Sports, Wildlife

October 29, An Unintended World Series Moment

Sarnia – Ontario Border Town.

Moments after Game 7 started, a quick visit to the parking lot of our hotel presented this fleeting pleasure: the smell of Fall.

It’s cool here, about 45’F, and the air is refreshingly moist, a mile away from the St. Clair River.

There is an enchanting fragrance in the air. It’s the sweet musty smell of old leaves. Millions of oak, maple and ash leaves, colorful all day, have fallen to the ground, and are settling in to their final journey of decay. Above them, several million more are hanging on, urging their last breath through the night air.

The bouquet excites the olfactories. It ignites memories of secret Halloween raids on dark nights, running down alley ways and through back yards, over fences, chasing, or being chased.

All the while, there’s this intoxicating sensation from long ago: the cold brew of spent leaves, spiced with distant wood smoke, floating across the yards, streets and empty verandas of a small country town.

Upstairs, it’s 2-0, San Francisco over Kansas City, top of the 2nd.

I really hate to leave this, but it’s baseball.

Economics, Environment

Gassed: How Our Utility Co Turns Down The Heat

Odds are, if you get a gas bill, you are also getting a report card in the mail too.

“Loser!”

Our gas company mailed us a Home Energy Report for last month, telling us how we stacked up against our uproariously wasteful and spendthrift neighbors.

Turns out: WE are worse than them.

It is a sad reality that I respond to competitive taunts, and right now, our gas company is yanking my chain.

You see, they previously sent us a report for last winter. It had a little smiley face–which really is smirking–that says “GOOD”.

But I know what it’s thinking: “LOSER!”

“Good maybe, but not great.”

Beside Mr. Smiley is a bar chart that highlights our “Efficient Neighbors” in green. These are the raucous ones last New Years Eve that roasted a quarter steer on the gas grill while they played Marco Polo in a mammoth hot tub. They have 9 kids, two washing machines and a greenhouse.

"With all due respect, your numbers suck, big time."

“With all due respect Mr. Brown, your numbers suck, big time.”

Then the report shows a longer blue bar — which is bad–that is entitled “YOU”. In bold.

So I am now energized (hah hah) to understand how our humble little household can possibly respond to this blatant miscall.

I wonder if the gas company is playing with me.

There was once a TV movie in which a dad and his son fill up the neighbor’s gas tank every night to listen to him brag about his car’s great mileage. Then after a few weeks, they siphon gas out every night to hear him complain about the guzzler he is driving.

Is there a prankster somewhere in the seventh floor of an office building in Chicago who is twiddling with my score, just to see how I react?

“Just check that thermostat again.”

Worse yet, maybe they are not playing tricks at all. Maybe our modest ranch is actually a gas-guzzling super nova. A galactic black hole sucking energy into a cosmic chimney.

That might account for the drafts.

I am going to give the gas company the benefit of the doubt for the moment. When I investigated the source of these reports, I learned that they come from a company called Opower.

There is a lab-coated millennial there who is modifying my “demand response behavior” while flipping through Hunger Games.

Essentially, Opower has placed my house on a giant leader board with about 50 million other households, and lo and behold, we are not on the top of the list.

Dinner at our neighbors.

I’d like to see the hermit who is. Probably dressed in yak skins and eating his fish raw.

To their credit, however, they have shamed enough people in the last few years to reduce natural gas consumption nearly 2%.

And what is more confounding, improved consumer satisfaction ratings for the gas company by 5 points!

Talk about a world upside down. Running against the natural order of things.

Our new HVAC guy, en repose.

I am not beaten though. I will climb that list. I will lay down a 2-foot-thick blanket of moss in our attic. Line the windowpanes with hay bales. Wrap the basement in a giant Snuggie and remove the furnace.

Better yet, I will hang out with our neighbors.

Thanks for reading! If you get these reports too, I feel for you. But they are actually a pretty useful tool. Unless you live in the woods.

direct mail, Marketing, Politics

Fall Seat Sale: The Check’s In the Mail

A dollar a seat… get ’em while they’re hot!

My walk to the mailbox today was rewarded with a letter from John McCain’s desk.

It was especially exciting to get his letter, because he enclosed a personal check! Usually this works the other way around.

Anyway, I opened his letter to find a check for $36 bucks. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your political stripe, it was made out to the Republican National Committee.

This is a very crafty gambit.

Is it really the desk writing? I wonder.

Seldom do we receive checks, and this one, measuring a modest 6″ x 2-3/4″ looks like the real thing.

What I liked about the approach of this fundraiser was the rationale. The U.S. Senate has 36 seats up for grabs in the mid-term election, and McCain is donating a dollar for each seat.

I know, I know. It should be more, but hey, have you seen his suits?

Sartorial comments aside, the dollar-a-seat strategy is a door opener for the tight-fisted, like me. He is asking me to match his donation.

But I am puzzled. The RNC goes on to say it requires only $8,000,000 in the next ten days. This seems like chicken feed compared to the dollars normally needed to buy an election. I hope they know what they are doing.

The envelope needs to be opened, just to see the check!

In any event, they are counting on 222,222 folks like me, at $36 each, to respond. At a 2% response rate, they must be asking over 11 million people.

I will leave the financial logistics to the back room guys.

I would point out, however, that after wresting $36 from my cold, thrifty mitts, John could have at least coughed up an additional 49-cents for the stamp on the return envelope.

A stamp! A stamp! The Senate for want of a stamp!

You see, the face value of a stamp may seem like a lot to the RNC, but in this case, each one is worth $36 dollars.

Don’t forget to vote!

direct mail, Sports

Mail Order Law Course

Only a couple weeks ago I excitedly popped my member application into the mail to the U.S. Golfing Association.

Tell me you agree: there is nothing like the anticipation attached to mail order, waiting for that parcel to arrive. In this case, the USGA won me over with membership to their organization, and sweetened the deal with their 2015 Chambers Bay Open hat.

The Hat: Mailorder Delivers!

But there was more. They also promised an official member card, and a golf bag tag, and… the USGA official book, Rules of Golf.

Today, my package arrived, and I had torn it open by the time I had walked up the driveway.

Up until now, I had viewed the game of golf as an enjoyable diversion: walking the fairway in search of a runaway ball, or flumped on a couch Sunday afternoon, taking vicarious enjoyment and frustration while millionaires bounced shots off spectators onto lush, hand-tweezed greens.

“I did not know that!”

With the Rules of Golf in hand, the sport has new deeper meaning, with profound implications.

It’s much like my driving a car for all my life. Only now to find that our state Rules of the Road, or Driver’s Handbook has 96 pages of rules, none of which I knew.

The USGA book is twice the size.

As a duly accredited and newly admitted USGA member, I opened the Rules of Golf. About the size of the iPhone 6, it has 208 pages, written in 6-point type. It fits in my back pocket, and just like the iPhone 6, it bends easily.

It turns out that there are only 34 rules. Well, 34 subject areas perhaps. Then the lawyers have their say.

But in a moment of merciful brevity, the governors have provided “A Quick Guide to the Rules of Golf”. Kind of like a Cliff Notes. It’s only 7 pages, which you might browse through as you pay your green fees.

In a like-minded spirit of expedition, I am not going to review all the rules with you here, but I would be remiss in not highlighting a few key canons of the game.

For instance, the attention to nuance as noted on page 9: “Understand The Words”. You won’t find this type of consideration in the Drivers’ Handbook.

Grammar 101, with the bark left on.

Or the oblique reference to emotion in the section on Unnecessary Damage, page 21.

“Now settle down, or we will stop the cart!”

Not to mention on page 37, the inside lore of match play, which identifies the condition for being a “dormie”. We gather this is not a sleep mate, necessarily.

And the curious, repetitive references to remnants of manufactured ice which apparently is randomly found across the boundless green of the course. One needs to study the forensics on this phenomenon.

And it pops up again…

Lastly, as we can expect, the USGA staffers make earnest attempts to define a circumstance for clearer understanding, as shown in the “Nearest Point of Relief”, page 30.

Not necessarily “fast acting” relief.

With that, I am off to the club, with my legal team in tow, and “for the good of the game”!

Thanks for reading! In the midwest, the days are getting shorter, and the opportunity to enjoy a walk in temperate climate and sunshine is shrinking. Kudos to USGA and their mission to bring golf to all who would enjoy the sport.

“For The Good Of The Game” is copyright USGA.

Economics

11 Ways To Avoid Paying Your Bills — A Reminiscence

In a previous corporate life, I worked for one of America’s most well known and longstanding brands in the financial sector.

We once used the following pamphlet as an advertising specialty for the company’s pre-eminent and trusted commercial collection division. This one-pager was a distillation of the numerous, incredibly brazen dodges companies would use to avoid paying a bill.

I lack the original direct mail piece, and would love to have it, and to credit the creator. It’s brilliant.

Instead, I am sharing my memory of it with you, for a chuckle:

11 Ways To Avoid Paying Your Bills

1. Always wait for the third past due notice, and then write and ask why you never received an invoice.
2. Next, ask for an itemized account. When it arrives, write back and say that’s not what you wanted at all.
3. Don’t ignore sales taxes. These give you unlimited scope for delay. For instance, if they charge sales tax, advise them your purchase order said you were tax exempt. Never mind that there was no purchase order. And if they don’t charge tax, why not?
4. Always ask for the invoice to be broken into two installments for accounting purposes. Then get somebody else in accounting to start the process all over by asking why there are two bills? And then only pay one.
5. Send a check with figures not matching words. When they call, ask them to return the check. Send a new one, but don’t sign it.
6. Mail back a copy of the invoice, and staple the torn corner of a check to it. They will turn their department upside down looking for your check. When they call back, tell them you will check with your bank.
7. Tell them you will need two signatures, and the co-signer is on a world cruise with someone in their company for two months. Discretion suggests keeping this quiet.
8. Send a check for the exact amount, but made out to a fictitious company. When they call you back, tell them you will check with the other company.
9. Ask for a breakdown of labor and materials. When you get it, insist that the numbers are reversed.
10. Tell them that all of their invoices have been seized by the Department of Commerce, as part of a nation-wide investigation.
11. Finally, insist that you already sent them a check, and fax a copy of a previous cancelled check. When they track that down, they will ask for new check. Mail them the fax.

There you have it! As I said at the outset, this is from my written notes, copied from the original, author unknown. If you can track that person down, please let me know, and I will credit them.

And of course, this is my reminiscence of a tongue-in-cheek direct mail piece, by no means a recommendation or endorsement.

Mean time, pay your bills.

Phil Brown

"Like triple cream– rich, pungent, a little barnyardy, and spreads easily. A good cheese."

The Irresistible Offer, and Making Money

Victoria, Golf and Testing

Lest We Forget

The Radio Phenomenon: Our Soundtrack

Presidential Letter-Writing: Good, Bad and You Know…

October 29, An Unintended World Series Moment

Gassed: How Our Utility Co Turns Down The Heat

Fall Seat Sale: The Check’s In the Mail

Mail Order Law Course

11 Ways To Avoid Paying Your Bills — A Reminiscence

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