Whenever Hamilton House Mailings writes a letter or brochure for our clients we recommend that they test our approach with their own approach.

Here’s the result from one particularly interesting experiment of this type – and the lessons that can be drawn.

One of our clients wanted to do a promotion to a list of people who had not bought from them before. The key element of the promotion was a discount offer – to induce the readership away from their present supplier.

So, the purpose of the mailer was simple – to encourage the recipients to see the offer, read the catalogue and go on and place an order with our client for the first time.

Our client (we’ll call them Company A) designed the promotion so that their offer appeared as the front page of the promotion – the first thing the reader would see. It was utterly clear, highlighting the discount that they were offering for the next few weeks.

We argued that an alternative approach might work better and suggested that, instead of a hard hitting advert which was wholly about the special offer, we should lead with a letter which, in a conversational mode, talked about matters of interest to the recipient and which only mentioned the special offer in a short PS.

In other words our approach was very laid back and restrained – exactly the opposite of the more brash approach of Company A.

There was considerable concern about the Hamilton House approach – not least because the letter (clocking in at around 300 words) was considered to be “too long”. “Nobody would read it”, I was told.

So concerned was Company A, that they took the Hamilton House letter and circulated it among half a dozen people taken from their target audience. These people as one said that they too would not read the letter, and criticised it (again) for its length, its style and its approach.

So why did we set out our advert in this way – and what happened. Could it be that the common sense approach of our clients was right and we were wrong?

The full story is available here http://www.theory.bz/Factor%2065.pdf – or if you prefer, give me a call and we can talk it through (01536 399 000).

Sorting out alternative approaches like this is very much what our Velocity programme is about. We don’t do the obvious, but we do get surprising results. Velocity is described on www.velocity.ac – or again, please call.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.