A system of physical culture for women put quarter pages in several magazines during the month of November, from which 3,905 letters were received. In this case, the total postage, including follow-up and correspondence back and forth, was $1,104.09 for that month of November alone.
Narrow limits would be expected in the demand for expensive silverage. Yet a silversmith’s two advertisements in the November and December magazines brought 45,000 requests for catalogues. These had already involved by January 13, with the following up, etc., a postage bill of $5,510.
Another big postage bill was also incurred, incidentally, by a company which uses magazine advertising to bring buyers into drug stores, etc., asking for certain shaving soaps and the like. Still their postage bill during 1909, as a result of inquiries from their advertising, was $3,656.08. This does not include the stamps bought by the inquirers—probably $1,000 more.
| A similar soap was described in a page advertisement which, printed in one magazine one time, brought more than 30,000 letters. First-class postage on them and the answers to them aggregated more than | $900.00 |
| The charge for carrying that page, at the second-class rate, was about | 120.00 |
THE LARGE STAMP PURCHASES OF ENTIRE BUSINESSES DEPEND ON MAGAZINE ADVERTISING.
All the above examples are of postage sales caused by magazine advertising directly, in point of time. Just as directly caused are the sales for correspondence between manufacturer, jobber, retailer, agent, etc., in the many businesses that have been built up by magazine advertising.
A camera company writes: “There is a magnificent revenue to the government through our correspondence with these dealers, through their correspondence with their customers, and through their sending our printed matter, furnished by us, at a postage cost of $100, and such dealer could not afford to go to this expense were it not for the fact that this local advertising which he does is backed up by our general magazine publicity.”
This one result of magazine work is figured by the company at tens of thousands of dollars every year in postage.
The postage-stamp revenue created by magazine advertising keeps on for months, and years even, between the advertiser and the consumer, in cases like correspondence schools, for instance.
One prominent company writes that it not only spends $429 per month in postage, answering inquiries which themselves account for about $100 more, but that it enrolls per month more than 2,200 new scholars—and every scholar, by the time he has received all his numerous “lessons,” etc., costs the school about $3.50 more in postage. Thus each month creates about $7,700 more in postage bills for this school, not counting nearly as much again which the scholars must spend.