Use humour

Humour is widely used in radio, television and particularly cinema advertising but hardly used at all in direct mail – which means that an approach which of itself works very well, works even better in direct mail because it is rare. 

Your first sales letters with humour need to be gentle – just enough to get a chuckle. If you are writing to people quite often you can then gradually increase the volume, as it were.

A good starting point is to make yourself out to be at one with your audience and share with them some sort of issue that annoys them. So, if you are selling to a business you can look at their day-to-day work, find the thing that really annoys them and raise a chuckle through your awareness of that. 

When I started writing letters selling our direct mail service I knew I was only selling to people who already used direct mail – I was rarely going to convert people who didn’t use direct mail. So I wrote letters about my attempts to sell direct mail to non-believers. I always failed, and the laugh was both on me and on the strange attitudes of people who refuse to use direct mail in their advertising. Those who were already using direct mail read my letters and gradually started switching from their existing suppliers over to Hamilton House.

Humour has many applications.  The sales letter that has gone out with our promotion of the article "You are not reading this" is considered by many to be utterly surreal - but they read it and ask for the article on raising response rates.

Here's one other piece of information you might find interesting.   I have the job of promoting a course called the Certificate in Educational Administration.   It costs £850 to go on this course for a year, so we are not talking about something trivial.   The course is sold both to administrators and their bosses in education - and this means that mostly we sell via the benefit or the question method.

But we also need administrators to feel that the course is run by good people who understand them, their needs, their wants, their position.

So I started to write a spoof diary of a school administrator.  After about 15 entries I asked administrators to tell me what they thought.  The response was overwhelming - so we kept it going for a while. This spoof diary with its odd storyline and crazy humour drew school administrators into the website which is there to sell the Certificate course.  In one way it distracted from the course, but on the other hand it generated a lot of interest, a lot of goodwill, a lot of correspondence, and it enhanced the position of the course. 

Free analysis of your mailshot

This article is written by Tony Attwood, Chairman of Hamilton House Mailings Ltd.  If you would like to discuss the writing or design of your mailing campaign, or indeed a single mailshot, with Tony, without cost or obligation, just call 01536 399 000, or email Creative@hamilton-house.com   You can also send Tony a copy of your latest advert and he will call you back with his thoughts on how your response rate could be raised - again without cost or obligation.