Making The Form Letter
PERSONAL
PART III—STYLE—MAKING THE LETTER READABLE—CHAPTER 11
Over ONE-HALF of all the form letters sent out are thrown into the waste basket unopened. A bare ONE-THIRD are partly read and discarded while only ONE-SIXTH of them—approximately 15 per cent—are read through. This wasteful ratio is principally due to the carelessness or ignorance of the firms that send them out— ignorance of the little touches that make all the difference between a personal and a "form letter." Yet an increase of a mere one per cent in the number of form letters that are READ means a difference of hundreds—perhaps thousands of dollars to the sender. This article is based on the experiences of a house that sends out over a million form letters annually
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There are three ways by which you can deliver a message to one of your customers: you can see him personally, you can telegraph or telephone him, or you can write him a letter. After you have delivered the message you may decide you would like to deliver the same message to 252 other customers.
To see each customer personally, to telegraph or telephone each one, or to write each a personal letter, would prove slow and expensive. So you send the same letter to all your customers, since you wish to tell them all the same story.
But you do not laboriously write all these letters on the typewriter; instead, you print them on some kind of duplicating machine.
But it is not enough to print the body of the letter and send it out, for you know from your own point of view that the average man does not give a proposition presented to him in a circular letter, the same attention he gives to it when presented by a personal appeal. And so little plans and schemes are devised to make the letter look like a personally dictated message, not for the purpose of deceiving the reader, but to make your proposition more intimate. This form of presentation is merely a means to an end; just because a letter is duplicated a thousand times does not make the proposition any the less applicable to the reader. It may touch his needs just as positively as if he were the sole recipient. The reason the letter that one knows to be simply a circular fails to grip his attention, is because it fails to get close to him—it does not look personal.
So, if form letters are to escape the waste basket—if they are to win the prospect's attention and convince him—they must have all the ear-marks of a personally dictated communication. If a proposition is worth sending out it is worthy of a good dress and careful handling.
All the principles of making the individual letter a personal message hold good with the form letter, except that greater pains must be taken to make each letter look personal. Nothing should be put into the letter to a dozen or a thousand men that does not apply to each one individually.