So we come to the ordering.  It is perfectly obvious that you must make this as easy as possible. And i t is perfectly obvious that many firms do not.

You have to do this from the customer's point of view.  I don't mean by this that you have to allow anyone who calls in to place an order on the phone with no written backup for any amount of goods they choose.  Of course you control whom you give credit to.  Likewise you don't have to respond to the person who says "I've got a lot of work to put your way, but I need this order today - in three hours time.  Do that and you won't regret it in the future."   We've all dealt with people like this, and in my experience most of them are crooks.

Reasonable people place orders in reasonable time, and are reasonable about the issue of credit.  If my firm suddenly does get itself in a mess over some products we need the last thing in the world we do is turn to a new supplier. We use our regular suppliers, and ask them to help us out.

My view therefore is that the new customer who comes and demands outrageous terms and conditions in relation to an order should be given the number of your rivals.  You don't want to lose money when this person doesn't pay, but probably you don't mind too much if your rival does.

But for your regular and normal customers  you have to deliver the service they want.

This means the phone has to be answered in four rings, the email has to be replied to within the hour, the letter has to be answered the next day, the fax within a few hours. 

The people who get this right are firms like Play and Amazon.  You place your order and immediately the order is confirmed back to you.  Then you get a confirmation to say it has been sent, and an estimated time of arrival.  And if that is not enough you can go on line and see what the hold up is.  Play go even further - they give you a telephone number in case the automatic system goes wrong.  Now that is service.

But here's a thought to ponder.  As part of my work I offer to review people's promotional literature.  You send it to me (tony@hamilton-house.com in case you fancy doing it now) along with your phone number, and I call you back.  

The number I am usually given is the main company number, so I find myself calling companies I don't know and asking for a person I don't know.  OK I am not placing an order, but still, I could be a potential customer, and I am certainly out here trying to give some help - and I am not charging.

I got fascinated by the number of calls that didn't quite work.  These figures below are very rough, and it can well be argued that I am not analysing a representative group of companies at all, but this is what I seem to get.

Around 5% of the companies I call (during normal office hours) don't answer within ten rings.  I give up on ten, so they might answer thereafter, but nothing happens up to ten.

Around 5% put me onto an answering machine, during office hours.  Now to be clear, I have excluded from this the people who have given me their own number that goes to voicemail.  These are firms where the main number jumps straight to an answering machine.

About 40% are not available when I call.  Taking this 40% what we find is that:

• 20% take a message and call me back
• 10% take a message and never call me back
• 10% don't even offer to take a message but just say "he's not available" or a variation on that theme.

Of course I can't say that this is typical of British industry - but it does give me pause for thought.

So what we need are simple efficient ordering systems built from the point of view of the reasonable customer.  In 2005 we changed our ordering systems and asked our clients to fill in Adobe forms which could be emailed straight back to us.   Some of them objected - they had just sent us emails in the past, so what was all this bureaucratic nonsense about.   What it was about was that we did an analysis and found that some 40% of the orders we got involved us having to go back  to the customer to ask another question because we either didn't have all the information, or we had contradictory information.   I don't think we have actually lost any customers, but we have certainly made ourselves more efficient.

Ah, I hear you say, surely this now contradicts the whole theory, because I am no longer considering the world from the customer's point of view, but instead from my own.  My response is, up to a point.   True some customers don't like the new forms, but as a result of the new process we have become more efficient.   What was happening before was that we were phoning and mailing back to customers saying, we don't quite understand what you want here so we cant process your order - and orders then were late.  Now it doesn't happen - because you can't actually send us an order unless the form is completed.   So, overall we give a better service to the customers - even if some of the people concerned haven't quite seen that yet.

Now if you are ready to move on click below:

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The full set of pages covering The Theory of Direct Mail are shown below.  To get back to the home page of this website just click here

Below there is a list of the factors that make up The Total Theory of Direct Mail:

1. Below is a list of the factors that make up The Total Theory of Direct Mail:

   1. Why most firms ignore the theory and produce direct mail that fails.
   2. When and where the mailing is received - what the recipient is doing at the moment of impact.
   3. The personality of the individual you are mailing, and how that affects the mailing.
   4. The envelope - it is the first thing you see - does it make any difference?
   5. The interaction between the brain and the paper - there are issues of neurophysiology at work which must be taken into effect.
   6. The mail is opened - the next five seconds are vital; so what does mailsort do at this point? 
   7. Differentiation - now the customer decides, "Have I seen this sort of stuff before?"
   8. The customer decides to read - but then colour can get in the way.
   9. Using images to try and hold attention - the grabby image problem.
   10. Skipping - no matter what you try, most recipients do it.
   11. The end - as likely to effect the result as the start
   12. The second page - its function and layout.
   13. Subsequent page interference - so unexpected most people refuse to admit it exists - but it really does happen.
   14. What do you want the reader to do next?  
   15. Ordering - are you making it easy?

This article is an extract from the book "Doubling Response Rates: The Theory and Practice of Direct Mail" (c) Tony Attwood 2006