I struggled for years to get Rodale to use personalization in a letter. My other clients found that personalizing a letter boosted response by as much as 30% — a very significant increase to the bottom line.
Working with large mailers, you are pitted against other top writers on every mailing. There’s only room for one control, and you can lose by as little as a fraction of a percentage point in response. It’s cutthroat. The second-place letter could be world-class quality … but any sort of glitch at all in the mailing process — bulk mail not getting delivered, letter shops shaving the number of letters that go out, a critical typo, a bad list segment — can doom it to the dustbin.
Some of the best writers in the world have penned losers for Rodale.
I should have known something was wrong when word started leaking back to me that executives there really loved my latest manuscript. That sent up a red flag immediately — I don’t want executives to love my stuff. I want them to be a little uncomfortable.
It can be the Kiss of Death to have executives love your copy.
When I saw what they intended to mail, my heart sank. I had written the entire piece around a personalized headline. So, if your name was Bob Jones, you would opened the letter to find this headline …
What Women Secretly Wish
Bob Jones Knew About Sex…
But will never, ever tell you to your face!
That hits you in the gut, doesn’t it.
But nooooo. Higher-ups in the company decided that personalization was an unnecessary expense. An expendable item on the copywriter’s ”wish list”. And suddenly the deal was: They would test it like you see it here… and IF it became the control, then later on they might consent to personalization.
It’s an ordinary, run-of-the-mill headline without personalization. It sucks. in fact. It’s a line you’d see on a men’s magazine at the drug store. There’s no urgency. With your name in there, you’d scramble to read on and find out why you’d been implicated.
But without your name in the headline…ho hum. Next.
What hurts is that, once you’re into the bullets that start on page 2, it’s all fireworks. It’s just a damn shame not enough guys got that far.
So here you go. It’s a crisply-written letter, filled with the little things that should have parlayed the interest of the personalized headline into a sale, If only the headline had been allowed to do its job. Let this be a warning to anyone who thinks you can compromise on the sensational aspects of your message and not get stung.
Click here to see the “What Women Secretly Wish You Knew About Sex” ad.
(It will open in a new window or tab, so you can toggle between the ad and Carlton’s commentary.)
[Footer-JCBestAds-BuySWS]