mail-order business

Most business people have tried getting customers by mail order: by letters soliciting their custom. And most of the solicitors have had the galling experience of receiving little or no response. Very few have succeeded as well as one three-partner start-up. As one partner fondly recalls:

'A four-page letter helped me succeed more than I ever expected. It was to persuade people they ought to employ the services of myself and my partners in a new business...As you can imagine, I laboured long and hard on it. We only sent out 25 copies. My partner rang up the recipients afterwards. We got 12 jobs.'

That success ratio itself testified to the value of the partners' services. For what they had founded was a direct mail agency, specialising in helping clients to win customers through the post. 'Within three years', writes Drayton Bird, 'we were the leaders in our field in Britain. Seven years and eight months later...I sold that company, at which point I could, if I had so wished, have retired.'

Instead (and very unusually) Bird is in Year Three of a second direct mail start-up, after retiring from Ogilvy & Mather as creative director of its very large direct marketing network. Drayton Bird Direct is very small: he and a personal assistant operate from Westbourne Grove, London, on the lowest possible fixed costs. But since that third year should top a million pounds in business, small looks beautiful indeed to Bird.

The low overhead is one lesson gleaned from past experience (which includes a previous business which, Bird says, 'soared to volatile success before plunging into liquidation.') He keeps costs down by 'having a lot of others coming in and out as required, mostly working from home' - all high-calibre people he's worked with before, and all thoroughly imbued with Bird's direct marketing philosophy.

It's set out cogently in his How to Write Sales Letters that Sell (Kogan Page). The passage on his earlier start-up's sales letter is one of many striking anecdotes in thie new £25 opus. Two powerful tips spring from that very story. First, in this type of small, personalised mailing, always follow up by phone, and as soon as possible. Second, the letter occupied four pages: this may go against your every instinct, but long letters outsell short ones.

Hearken to Bird: 'In 37 years of writing, I have never known a short letter making the same proposition do better than a long letter. The last time I tested it, a four-page letter making the same offer as a two-page letter got 52% more replies.' That gives a third very hot tip: direct mail offers the opportunity, not always easy to find, to test one sales pitch against another - then you can concentrate your marketing money on the winner.

Using direct mail, though, isn't Bird's first and foremost route to business success. He 'determined early on that the most important thing is to motivate the people involved.' Finding good people and training them loomed so large that Bird always wrote the recruitment ads himself. That was the cornerstone of the business, and Bird easily survived the mistakes: having three equal partners (one always ends up in the minority) and 'stupidly' landing on the wrong side of the 'narrow borderline between worry and concern.'

Every piece of advice in the book is worth gold, but Bird boils down great letter-writing to seven strong and simple principles:

1. Know your product.
2. Know your customers.
3. Know how to begin the letter.
4. Know exactly what you want the customers to do.
5. Give them an incentive.
6. Get excited ('enthusiasm comes over so strongly'): but stay objective.
7. Know your competitors.

Bird had the advantage in his second, latter-life start-up, of knowing his product, customers and competitors backwards. He was still suprised by success. He targets each year with a percentage sales rise - 'If we can do that, we're doing well' - and each year the target has been overshot by large amounts. But that's the result of another business virtue: for all his enthusiasm (see above) and ambition ('planning expansion into South-East Asia'), 'I'm terribly pessimistic.'