“As we are a mail-order concern, our business is derived entirely, either directly or indirectly, from our magazine advertising. During the year 1909 we paid the Postoffice Department for carrying our first, third and fourth class mail matter the sum of $433,242.”
What an advertisement in one issue of one magazine did for another women’s “wearing apparel” house is recorded in their books as follows:
The postage required to answer the 15,000 replies from the one-column insertion in the magazine, also to send the merchandise required by 2,000 of the inquirers, also to “follow up” other inquirers, etc., amounted to $5,460.
The government charge for carrying this advertisement through the second-class mails was $38.83.
That $5,460, by the way, did not include the several hundred dollars spent on postage by the inquirers themselves.
The president of a concern which publishes encyclopedias, natural histories, classics, etc., investigated the relations with the postoffice of a recent page of his advertising inserted in a single magazine, and the correspondence which resulted.
The stamps and money orders bought by the inquirers and by the publishing company, as the result of the 4,000 answers to this one advertisement, amounted to $884.
The publishers paid the postoffice to carry that page, at second-class rate, $12.
Thus, even if it had not already been disproved that the second-class rate is insufficient, it would still have been mightily unfortunate for the department’s business if that page advertisement had not appeared. A good business man would be willing to lose several times $12 in order to do $884 worth of business as profitable to himself as first-class mail is to the government.
Scores of apparently small advertisers are found in any issue of any popular magazine. They are just as good customers to the postoffice, in proportion, as the big concerns using columns or pages.