What is the reader doing at the very moment he or she gets your mail?    At the moment of The Hit?

Consider these three people:

1. The retired person who lives alone, and for whom the post is a significant part of the morning's events.
2. The teacher who has taught three lessons, has a headache, goes to an overcrowded and very stuffy staffroom, queues for a coffee, tries to avoid the deputy head who wants to talk about a parental complaint, holds the coffee, and then with the other hand tries to flip through five pieces of direct mail and three internal memos, all the while knowing that the next lesson is going to be dreadful because he/she still hasn't found a good way of dealing with class 8.
3. The company manager whose mail is put in his/her in tray during the morning, and who chooses a moment to have a break from meetings, computer work, phone calls, etc, to work through the ten or so items.  The manager sips the peppermint tea, flavoured with just a dash of honey, picks up the first piece of mail, opens it..... and then the phone rings.

These people are all in different situations and so read mail in different ways.  I am writing this at home, and I have on my hopelessly untidy table on which the laptop sits mail going back three or four days.  At work all my mail is looked at the morning it arrives.  Same person, different responses.   You have to understand how the person you are writing to is going to handle your mail, and adjust how you deal with your mailshot.

The fact is that when you create a mailshot, by the time you release it you will probably know every single thing there is to know about it.  Some of the direct mail clients I deal with argue about commas and semicolons.  I've been known to join in the debate about "different from" and "different to".

But your reader is not like that.  That is not an excuse for poor writing, but it is a warning.  If you spend all your time thinking about grammar you are probably not thinking about the moment that your piece hits your reader.  Although there are exceptions - and the more senior person living alone and receiving mail at home could be an example - most people read their direct mail at high speed.

Which means you have to write it with the understanding that it is going to be read at high speed.

The rule is simple - think about the person you are sending this to, and the situation in which that person will read your mailshot.  Then write for the situation.

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The full set of pages covering The Theory of Direct Mail are shown below.  If you want to move to the next page, just click here

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