"You can offer your most particular guest a cup of Regal coffee and know she has never tasted a more delicious flavor and fragrance."
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This is the beginning of a letter that successfully introduced a new coffee. Here is a tactful compliment—the taking for granted that the recipient entertains guests of some importance—guests who are particular and will notice her coffee. There are few things that the average woman is more concerned about than that her guests will be pleased with her refreshments. The suggestion that she herself would enjoy or even that her family would enjoy this coffee does not make such direct appeal to a woman as this assurance that it will please her particular guests.
The house that uses the same kind of letter on men and women will never score such big results as the firm that understands the different processes of thinking and the different methods of making the appeal. With the man it is reason, logic, argument; with the woman it is suggestion, flattery, persuasion. The correspondent who aims to establish a large mail-order trade with women must study their whims, their prejudices, their weaknesses and their characteristics before he can make an appeal that brings in the orders and makes permanent customers of trial buyers.
It is the little things—this subtle insight into feminine nature that marks the successful selling letter to the woman. They are not things that can be set down and numbered in a text book; they are qualities of mind that must be understood and delicately handled. Rightly used they are more powerful than irrefutable arguments and indisputable facts.
How To Write Letters That Appeal to MEN
PART VI—THE APPEAL TO DIFFERENT CLASSES—CHAPTER 23
ONE-HALF of the form letters sent out to men are thrown away unread. A bare ONE-THIRD are partly read before discarded, while only ONE-SIXTH of them—approximately 15 per cent—are read through. The reason why such a large proportion is ineffective is this: the letter-writer, through ignorance or carelessness, does not strike the notes that appeal to every man. Here are some of the subtle ways by which correspondents have forced the attention of MEN by appealing to traits distinctly masculine
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If you received a dozen letters in your mail this morning it is probable that there were just twelve different angles to the appeals that were made. For most correspondents are not thinking about the man they are writing to but are concerned solely with thoughts about the propositions they have in hand—and that is why the great bulk of the letters that are opened in the morning pause at the desk only momentarily before continuing their way to the furnace room. It is the exceptional correspondent who stops to analyze his letters, looking at them from every viewpoint, and then tests out his conclusions, trying one appeal after another until he evolves certain principles that pull letter writing out of the class of uncertainties and enable him to depend upon definite returns.