happy donors

A classic direct-marketing lesson to remember:

If you send a thousand appeal letters, and twenty people say “yes!” with a reply donation, how many said “no”?

The answer:  We have absolutely no idea.

What led up to the moment your potential honor held your envelope?  Did he just ding the car?  Did she just get fired?  Didn’t you hear the phone … just started ringing?

Of the infinite variety of distractions and disturbance that can beset someone, how many are your donors wrestling when they start to sort the mail?  Any one of them could be enough to have eyes slide over your outer envelope, not even registering your name, as it heads for the trash basket just a few feet below.

We are mailing (and emailing) into the muddy waters of the human condition.  Chances of getting noticed are slim indeed.

Even if your potential donor is looking a tad more carefully at the envelopes, what’s the competition?  Is your animal shelter one of a half dozen animal welfare appeals to arrive that day?  Coming in second has the same outcome of not arriving at all.

OR … you make the cut, your envelope engages, but the prospect puts it aside for later reading.

Very, very slim chance of a gift after that.  All but certainly a later trashing.

Ah, or the best outcome of the moment: your donor opens the envelope and starts to scan the letter.

Unfortunately, she’s not reading it with the concentration that you had when writing.  (Or when the nonprofit client read it, for that matter.)  Voegele speculates that…

“When looking at the circumstances surrounding the receipt of mail we estimate that the concentration level when reading unsolicited promotional material is only about 10 per cent of that observable during a personal conversation.”

Admit it, when talking with your spouse, doesn’t your mind wander from time to time?  Not 100% concentration, eh?

I have sat with a sales person, who had every face-to-face advantage, and drifted into thoughts of a work project, all while nodding appropriately and, to his eyes, paying reasonable attention.  But he didn’t stand a chance of a sale.

Even when before your prospective donors’ eyes, you can lose, unless you can grab their attention, with a strong P.S., a dynamic opening, scannable paragraphs with underscoring, maybe a boldface word or two … with entire pages laid out so that the readers’ eyes are trapped by SOMETHING that buys continued readership.

That’s why we use simple words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and write with DESIGN in mind … the page in front of an inattentive mind.

Do a net net on all of the above, though, and it could be that MOST of the people who read your appeal sent a gift, eh?

Dipping to Siegfried Voegele’s Handbook of Direct Mail once again, some of his thoughts on a letter’s “P.S.” …

“If the reader gets down to the signature and discovers a ‘PS’ he does not return immediately to the beginning of the letter.  More than 90 per cent of all recipients read the ‘PS’ first, and relatively slowly at that, word for word.  We need more time to read a PS line than for a normal line in the letter…

“The ‘PS’ is consequently the first paragraph in the letter, not the last!  It is the first block of text.  This makes our aim much more accessible.  We are looking for text block readers after all.”  (Siegfried Voegele, Handbook of Direct Mail, Prentice Hall, 1992, p. 201.  Now sadly far out of print.)

One part of Voegele’s “Dialogue Method” looks at the increasing levels of engagement that reader has with a communication.  First, scanning.  Second, reading a “text block” … a paragraph, usually.

So engaging readers in the PS not only starts the engagement, but it quickly advances them to reading a text block … the “second run through” of the communication.

Again, much of Voegele’s thinking is fundamental to direct marketing creative strategy in the US.  I’ve preached and heard that the PS is read before the letter opening for decades.  Yet he rationalized today’s conventional wisdom with research, giving “what works” some added detail and weight.