You have now got five seconds at the most to grab the reader's attention, and hold them in a vice-like grip so that they cannot get away.  You have to say something so utterly wonderful that they absolutely have to read on.

For most of us, most of the time, what we do is solve this issue by putting a headline in the focus zone (see the previous section for details of the focus zone).

Whatever you choose to write here, you have to decide if on its own (and that is a key point - ON ITS OWN) it is going to work wonders for you.

Let me give you an example of some openers that I have written and which have worked well:

• What would your colleagues say if you told them they could cut their preparation time in half?
• Do you always believe everything your colleagues tell you?
• Do you believe in love at first sight?
• What are you going to do this summer?
• What is the simplest way of cutting your manufacturing costs in half?

They all grabbed attention and got the sales required.   There are in fact five ways of writing advertisement headlines that fit into the theory of direct mail centred on perception, and which do have a huge impact on response rates.   They are:

1. Focus on price
2. Ask an interesting question
3. Focus on benefits
4. Be amusing, surreal or in some other way quite different
5. Be emotional

The theory predicts that these will work because they focus on the individual reader and what is happening at this moment, and that is exactly the case.  When we look at the approaches that don't work, for example:

1. Simply announcing the product (as in The New X91 is released!)
2. Selling features (with its double zoned focus envelope)
3. Listing contents (as when selling a book)
4. Cover pictures and screen shots - irrelevant to what the product does)

So you talk about the customer and his/her needs - not about the product you want to sell - and you do that in the first five seconds.

Unfortunately some people have misunderstood this approach and tried to achieve these ends by using mailmerge.  They argue that by putting my name and address in a letter I will feel this is personally for me.   So what is wrong with this?

What's wrong is everything.  It is not only wrong - it is actually insulting to suggest that I will think for a moment that you are writing to me personally.  And what is wrong is that around 50% of names and addresses have errors in them.

I have repeatedly experimented with mailmerge and much of the time I can’t make the rate go up enough to pay for the extra costs.  The only time that I have made it work relates to occasions where I can find a genuine reason to incorporate information into the letter which makes it feel as if there is some real reason to write to me based on research.  So a letter that says "our research suggests that owners of the CRK92 model are in fact generally paying over the odds for car insurance because most insurance companies are linking this model with the much more accident prone CRK92x..." is ok if I do indeed have a CRK92.

The point at once is this.  Most of us like a bit of privacy and we don't like the idea that someone has got hold of our personal details.  Now we'll overlook it if there is some profit in it for us ("look I know you have a CRK92, because it is a matter of public record, you are the registered owner - but the main point is that I can knock £100 off your insurance because my company recognises that you are not driving a CRK92x"), but we won't if you are trying to suggest you really know some inside stuff about me.

I am further convinced that mailmerge doesn’t work much of the time by the fact that so few people ever come back to me and tell me that they have tried mailmerge against non-mailmerge and got a better result by using mailmerge.

That’s the practical argument – does it work or not?  If you are convinced it does work, and you have not tested it recently, I urge you to test it first.

But let’s just go further into why it might work and why it might not.

The supposed reason Mailmerge might work is that it makes me believe you are really writing to me.  The problem is that I know that it is mailmerge.  Even my mum, who died a while back aged 91, knew that all these people who offered her everything from hearing aids to holidays in the Caribbean weren’t really writing to her - it was just a computer.

So in fact the main reason why mailmerge might work is one reason why it doesn’t work – because none of us believe it.  It is a con.  Writing to me with mailmerge in the letter is actually a way of treating me, the recipient, with contempt.

But there is more.  Let’s have a look at the example above.   The address given is Mr Anthony Atwood, 9 Home Close, Little Oakley, Northamptonshrie, NN18 8PQ

I know such a letter will get to my home - it did.  But the reality is that it is full of errors.  I kept this one because it is so amazingly wrong, but it really only needed one of the errors to make my point.  My surname is spelt incorrectly, the road name is slightly wrong, the village name is slightly wrong, the county is mis-spelt, and there is one error in the postcode.

Now because this is my name and my home, I tend to notice these things if they are thrust at me in a letter.  I probably miss them on the envelope because I tend to open the envelopes without looking at them, but on a letter…

So now you are really insulting me.  You are trying to con me by saying “I am writing personally” but you are getting every detail of my address wrong.

Worse, the letter addresses me as Dear Anthony – and although that is indeed my name, and the name given on my birth certificate, everyone calls me Tony.   I have written around 80 books in my life, and every one of them had the name “Tony Attwood” as author.   In effect I am not, and have rarely ever been, Anthony Attwood.

Now you might argue this is an extreme case – that no list under the sun has so many errors in the address as this one.  And yes, I agree, this is a bad example.

But (and this is the key point) loads of mailing lists do have errors in them.   Not errors that stop the mail being delivered, but tiny slips which you won’t notice but the recipient will.   Just how huge a problem this was, was revealed in the Bad Ad project in 2005 when hundreds of people who joined the project sent me samples of their direct mail.  Everyone, it turned out, was getting wrongly addressed letters.   In one test we found around 50% of all direct mail arriving at four addresses (two business, two private) that we followed, contained errors.

Perhaps the worst error was that one of the company’s we were checking managed to get listed as a printing company, when it wasn’t that at all.  Which meant the directors kept getting letters talking about the particular benefits of their services to printing companies – which rather destroyed the whole effect.

Maybe you still don’t believe me - but if that is the case, return to the privacy issue.    Are you going to feel good when someone reveals just how much they know about what you bought?

Whatever you feel I urge you, before you do another mail merge, to split the mailing in half, and do one half with and one half without the mailmerge.

*************************************************************

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