Читать книгу The Letter Book - Robert Collier - Страница 12

Table of Contents

To sum it up, every good letter contains these six essential elements:

1. The opening, which gets the reader’s attention by fitting in with his train of thought and establishes a point of contact with his interests, thus exciting his curiosity and prompting him to read further.

2. The description or explanation, which pictures your proposition to the reader by first outlining its important features, then filling in the necessary details.

3. The motive or reason why, which creates a longing in the reader’s mind for what you are selling, or impels him to do as you want him to, by describing— not your proposition but what it will do for him—the comfort, the pleasure, the profit he will derive from it.

4. The proof or guarantee, which offers to the reader proof of the truth of your statements, or establishes confidence by a money-back-if-not-satisfied guarantee.

5. The snapper or penalty, which gets immediate action by holding over your reader’s head the loss in money or prestige or opportunity that will be his if he does not act at once.

6. The close, which tells the reader just what to do and how to do it, and makes it easy for him to act at once.

These rules, of course, are for the man or woman who is studying the art of writing resultful letters. After a time, they come to be a sort of second nature, so that you weigh each of these features without being conscious that you are doing so. You may even mix them all up into one grand goulash, so that to the beginner they will seem to be not there at all, but they or their close relatives are in every successful letter.

Rules, however, are merely the start. They are the mechanics of a letter. Real letter-writing only starts there. It is getting the feel of your message that counts. I remember the first sales letter I ever wrote. I knew as little about the writing of letters as any one who ever took his typewriter in hand to tackle the job. But I was full of an idea, and it came out all over that letter. And that is what counts.

I was doing mining engineering at the time, in a little town called Powellton, in West Virginia. We had an unusually good vein of gas coal, which was called the Powellton Seam; and the 200 old style, beehive ovens, with which we turned out Powellton Coke.

Like all the other mines in the district, we depended for business upon brokers in the big towns. They would contract with the large users for so many carloads of coal or coke, of a certain general grade, and then place their orders with whichever mines made them the lowest price, allowing them the greatest margin. The result was that all the mines were in much the same boat, whether their coal happened to be better or worse. When times were good they bid against each other for laborers, and between the lack of them and the lack of cars they were able to run the mines only three or four days a week. When times were bad they underbid each other for the little business available, and managed to work only one or two days a week.

That condition had been general for a good many years, with our mines as with practically all the others in the district. And there was no reason to think it would not continue indefinitely, as, in fact, it has with many of the mines in that district.

But from much cogitation, there one day dawned upon us an idea so obvious you will wonder why we did not think of it first thing. It was this: We had an unusually good grade of gas coal and a splendid coke.

There must be certain purposes for which that coal and that coke would produce far better results than any other made. If we could find these purposes, the businesses that needed coal and coke for them would cheerfully pay any reasonable premium for our particular product, and not only would we make more money, but we would cease to be dependent upon the whims of the brokers and would be sure of a regular volume of orders through good times and bad.

So we started experimenting, and found that for gas-making purposes we had easily the best coal in the district. Figured on the basis of cubic feet of gas produced, to say nothing of the by-products, any gas company could well afford to pay from 25 to 33 percent more for our coal.

That was all we needed. From that moment, every gas company within a radius of several hundred miles was our target. We disregarded the usual "per ton" prices to a great extent, centering our whole argument upon how many cubic feet of gas they got from each pound of coal, and what that gas cost them, including the delivered price of their coal.

How much are you paying per cubic foot for your gas? (was the basis of our letters). If we can show you how to cut the cost by a fourth, are you interested enough to prove it? The Blank Gas Company of Cincinnati has cut its costs by more than that, and here are the figures as given in a letter from their Superintendent. (Here we quoted exact figures and costs). The Bank Company of Indianapolis and (here we mentioned four or five other companies well and favorably known to the trade) have had similar experiences. We'll be glad to send you the exact figures from each if you will take the time to read them.

But better than any figures from other plants is this chance to write new figures of your own in your plant. Send the enclosed card, without money. On receipt of it, we will ship you a carload of Powellton screened gas coal, our regular standard quality.

Test it. Try it any way you wish. At the end of your tests, figure how much gas you get per pound of coal, and what that gas cost you! If you don't find that the Powellton Coal has saved you at least 25% on your cost, then that carload we send you won't cost you one cent. But if you do see where you can save from 25 to 33% of the cost of your gas, then you are to give us your contract for all the gas coal you use for the next year, at a price of $1.25 per ton f.o.b. Powellton, W.Va. Remember, no saving—no cost. But if we save you 25%, we get your contract. Is it a go?

I knew none of the rules of letter-writing. I could not have told you the difference between a clincher and a monkey wrench. But was bubbling over with enthusiasm for our idea, and that enthusiasm must have permeated our letters, for we got so many orders from gas companies, it kept us pumping to fill them all. And what was more to the point, they stuck. When I left Powellton, we still had on our books nearly every gas company we had ever put there.

One would stray away now and then, of course, lured by the sire song of a bargain. When that happened, we said nothing—just got a few average samples of the other man's coal and sent them, wit samples of ours, to a laboratory for comparative test. When the reports came back, we carried them out in figures of the cost of the coal and the final cost of the gas per cubic foot and sent the result without comment to the superintendent or other responsible executive of the gas company. In most cases the business was soon on our books again.

The coal problem solved, we set about finding a similar solution of the coke question, for the gas companies preferred screened coal, which meant that all the dust coal or slack was left us for cooking purposes.

We had made frequent analysis of our coke, of course, and knew that it was unusually low in sulphur, phosphorus and ash. So we set out to see which type of foundryman considered these qualities most valuable.

We soon learned that to the maker of steel rails, phosphorus was anathema, so we had little difficulty in persuading the Ashland Steel Company that a coke as low in Phosphorus as ours was easily worth 25 cts. more a ton than any other they could buy. 25 cts. a ton doesn’t sound like much, but when you multiply it by sixty to ninety tons a day, which was what the Ashland Steel required, it soon runs into money.

That was a good start so, much encouraged, we looked around for others. And in the makers of stoves and ranges we found possible customers who were quite as particular about sulphur as the Steel Company had been about phosphorus. In thin castings like those needed in stoves and ranges, sulphur means bubbles and cracks, and costs more money than any saving in price can possibly make up for.

But stove founders were, for the most part, located pretty far away from us, and other good cokes just about as low as ours in sulphur content were as readily available to them. To get their business on other than a price basis, we had to find some better argument than low sulphur content.

We worked on that for quite some time, talked to different founders to get a line on their problems, studied numerous books on the subject and finally stumbled on the answer almost by accident.

It happened that we had been figuring on a big contract with the Bucks Stove and Range Company of St. Louis. They were one of the most efficiently run concerns in the business, and they wanted the best, regardless of what it cost. So before placing their contract, they bought a carload of coke from each of half a dozen concerns whose analysis and claims seemed to indicate that they were in the running.

We had shipped them a carload and intended to run out to St. Louis in order to be on the spot when the contract was awarded, so that if it seemed that a last-minute reduction of 10 or 15 cts. a ton would turn the scales in our favor, we could throw it in. When lo and behold, without notice of any kind, in came the contract by mail at the price we had originally quoted!

To say that we were pleasantly surprised was putting it mildly. But we didn’t let either our pleasure or our surprise get in the way of the fact that here was probably the answer to our problem. If our coke stood out so well in a comparative test that we had landed the Bucks order without effort, in the face of the best cokes and the best salesmen that the Connellsville could show, then there must be something unusual about our coke that every other stove founder ought to know. And we lost no time in setting out for St. Louis to learn what it was.

And here is what we found: Its high carbon content and low ash gave Powellton Coke a heating power that would melt an unusual amount of iron and a structure that supported a phenomenal weight, with the result that where a good coke did well to melt eight or nine tons of iron to one of coke, ours melted as high as fifteen tons of iron to one of coke! Figuring the price of the coke at $7 a ton delivered, it cost the Bucks Stove and Range Company 80 to 90 cts. to melt a ton of iron with ordinary coke, whereas with Powellton Coke it cost them only 47 cts.! Can you wonder that they gave us the order without urging or bargaining?

Our problem was solved, and, as is often the case, through no skill of ours. The Lord had been good to us in the kind of coal he gave us, and instead of patting ourselves on the back, we should have been kicked for not cashing in sooner on our products' peculiar advantages.

But we were too happy over having found the answer to do any worrying about what was past and done with. It took us just about three days to get a letter into the mails to every stove founder within five hundred miles of us. This, you must remember, was back in 1907 or 1908, when Bryan was still a name to attract attention anywhere.

When Bill Bryan first sprung his 16 to I ratio upon a waiting world, founders and business men generally called it visionary and impractical—said it wouldn't work.

So when Bill Smith, Cupola Foreman for the Bucks Stove & Range Company of St. Louis, proudly strode into the President's office with his report of a 15 to I melt, he wasn't surprised to meet with only skepticism on the part of that official.

"You're getting your politics mixed with your melting figures!" accused the Boss. Bill may lack some of the eloquence of his namesake, but no one ever accused him of running away from a scrap. So the upshot of it was that the President agreed to be on hand at the next melt.

Sure enough, Bill's figures proved to be right! They didn't equal Bryan's 16 to 1, but they averaged a good 15 tons of iron to every one of coke!

Of course, Bill modestly disclaims the credit. "Any one could do it with that coke," he says. "It's got a structure that'd carry the Eiffel tower. And as for sulphur bubbles—it just never heard of such words."

And that's the reason Powellton Coke gets the Bucks Stove & Range contract this year, in direct competition with and after thorough tests of every good coke on the market. That's the reason the Gallipolis Stove Company, the Huntington Range Company and a dozen others have been using Powellton Coke for years.

Of course, some of them stray away occasionally. We're none of us proof against the siren song of low price, but when they begin to figure the cost of their coke in tons of iron melted, as the Bucks Stove & Range Company did; when they find that on this basis Powellton Coke is costing them only 470 a ton of melted iron against 800 to 900 for any other brand, and when they add to that the cost of scrap castings due to sulphur and phosphorus, they always come back, and it's a long time before they stray again.

If you figure your coke cost, not on the delivered price of the coke, but on tons of iron melted—if you are buying high carbon heat-content, and not sulphur, ash and phosphorus—we have some figures that will interest you.

May we send them?

That letter brought home the bacon. For a while we had almost a monopoly of the stove and range business in our territory. We did not keep it altogether, because good coke structure depends largely upon skill in making the coke, and other ovens with the right kind of coal succeeded in making almost as good a coke as ours. With intensive study, they found ways of loading the furnace so that their coke would melt just about as high a percentage of iron as ours.

But do not imagine we were resting on our laurels, or out playing golf all this time. We realized it would not be long until some one caught up to where we were then, so we tried to keep at least one good jump ahead.

We tested not only our coal and coke, but different ways of screening the one and making the other. We tried cooking longer and shorter periods, charging the ovens with bigger or smaller charges—everything, in fact, that we could think of that might make our product better.

And we did not stop with our own product. We had numbers of experiments made in the more effective use of our coal and coke We had never heard of the rule that a letter should talk—not about your own product but about the pleasure or profit your customer will get out of it, but we had learned from long experience that coal and coke were drugs on the market and could only be sold on a price basis, whereas cubic feet of gas, or thermal units of steam, or melted tons of iron were things that sold themselves.

In line with our idea of making every possible improvement in. our product, we got a few books on letter-writing and applied the principles outlined in them to our letters. I remember the first set of books we got. It was System’s "Business Correspondence Library"—three volumes—and it became our Bible for direct-mail work Looking back on it now, I do not believe we could have found a better ground-work for our studies. Certain it is that it helped us to sell many thousands of tons of coal and coke, when without it we might have lost the sales. I think it is out of print now, but next to Herbert Watson’s "Applied Business Correspondence," I believe it had helped more men to a knowledge of how to use letters for profit that any set of books ever written.

John Blair, founder of the New Process Company of Warten, Pa. once told me the same thing. His introduction to good letter-writing came from the same little set of three books—after he had made him bow with a few successful efforts of his own, about which more anon.

To go back to our interrupted labors: Starting in 1907 or 1908, and continuing for five years, we sold practically all the products of our mines and ovens by mail. We used dozens of different letters and circulars, with all kinds of variants upon the one appeal, but unfortunately my book of letters was lost a few years ago, and the company had then changed hands, so the only sample I have to show is the letter quoted above.

It was about this time I had the good fortune to meet Thomas H. Beck, then sales manager—now president of Collier’s. He had been sales manager of Proctor & Gamble, the Ivory Soap people, where he was responsible for as revolutionary an idea in its way as was ours of selling cubic feet of gas and tons of melt.

Soap flakes, it seems, were sold to laundries by the barrel of so many pounds weight. One barrel of soap was considered much like another, so sales were made almost entirely on price. Then it occurred to Tom Beck to have Ivory Soap flakes analyzed and the results compared with analysis made in their laboratory of all the competing brands. What was his surprise and delight to find that the competing brands contained something like (let us say) 15 percent water, to only about 5 percent water for Ivory!

If a barrel of soap cost $2, a laundryman could pay Ivory $2.20 and be getting his actual soap content for the same price per pound that he was paying the $2 competitor. If in addition he was paying $1 a barrel for freight or delivery service, that made an extra premium of 10 cts. he was handing to Ivory's competitor.

It did not take Tom Beck more than half a minute to figure out the possibilities that this opened up. As soon as they could be got into the mail, he had letters on the way to every laundry in his territory asking them whether they were buying soap or water, suggesting that it might be cheaper to get their own water from the faucet rather than have it freighted all the way from the factory to them, and then be charged for it at soap prices in addition.

To say that he started a furor among soap makers is putting it mildly.

The net result to him was that it enabled him to land the far bigger job with Collier's, and to me that it gave me a sympathetic ear into which to pour an idea I had long been nursing for selling Collier books by mail.

Which takes us into another chapter.