In a ?Views? column in DM News (4/25/05. p. 32), George Le Pera makes the case that long sales letters are better than short sales letters.

Accoding to Le Pera, who is creative director at Chinnici Direct (New York, NY), long letters cement relationships, strengthen brands, stand out in the mailbox ? and get read.

Being a freelance copywriter who specializes in writing long sales letters, I want to agree with George.

But I don?t think that a long letter is always better than a short letter in every situation.

Your thoughts?

I hate to admit it, but I?m a mail order rip-off artist ? but as a consumer, not a marketer.

And if you follow the advice I?m about to give you, you can get some of the greatest deals on Earth ? by ?ripping off? direct marketing companies.

I don?t mean illegal or immoral rip-offs, such as ordering a product and then not paying the bill ? knowing full well the direct marketing company is unlikely to ever collect such a small debt from you.

I mean taking advantage of direct response offers, keeping the premium, and then immediately canceling or returning the product ? just to get the premium!

For instance, Gevalia Coffee has the most incredible offer you can imagine in their print ads ? sign up for their monthly coffee service, and get the first shipment of two coffees for $10 ? plus a FREE coffee maker!

We took the bait. Sure enough, you get two delicious gourmet flavored coffees ? well worth the $10 alone ? PLUS a beautiful coffee maker.

We canceled the service as soon as we got the machine and our first two coffees, so the whole kit and caboodle cost us a grand total of ten bucks.

What?s the lesson here? Direct marketing companies routinely make overly generous offers on the ?front end? to get you in as a customer ? because they know that a large number of people who take the bait will stay to buy more ? and so the offer becomes profitable.

Another example is Easton Press. I accepted their offer of a beautiful leather-bound edition of Moby Dick and paid just $5.95 (the average price of their leather bound classics is around $50.)

I immediately opted out of the continuity program (“100 Greatest Books:), so you?d think I got something for (almost) nothing from them.

But they kept sending me more mailings for other series and single books. And now there?s a pile of about $300 worth of handsome leather-bound books on the shelves of my home library ? and countless hours of enjoyable reading ahead for me.

So, who?s really coming out ahead here?

Well, I love the books. And Easton Press is making money.

So I guess we BOTH are winners here, which is how good DM works. Right?

I?ve always maintained that good copywriting is clear and conversational ? but there are many marketers who apparently disagree.

For instance, here?s an excerpt from a brochure promoting a conference on Buying and Selling eContent:

?Instead of building universal, definitive taxonomies, information architects are finding there is a tremendous benefit to creating un-taxonomized miscellaneous pools of enriched data objects so that users can sort and organize to suit their own peculiar needs ? [resulting in] information systems are far more contextualized.?

I call this example ?What did he say?? It?s pretentious, laden with jargon, and it?s not how people talk.

What do YOU think about this copy ? profound, enticing, acceptable, a turn-off, or just plain terrible?

?I discard all marketing materials received in my mail without reading them, period,? writes Aileen Cassidy in a post on this blog. ?There is simply too much of this material clogging up my mailbox to have it invaded by strangers.?

Aileen makes the common error of concluding that, just because she doesn?t like direct marketing, direct marketing can?t possibly work.

?Everyone I know feels the same way,? she contines. ?So how come these methods are so aggressively pursued? Do they really improve sales? I am curious.?

I think Aileen already knows the answer to her question, which is this: of course they are profitable. Otherwise, marketers wouldn?t keep doing them.

Condemning — or advocating — a marketing tactic because you personally don?t like it or like it is the most amateur mistake you can make.

The best advice in this regard comes from my colleague, top DM copywriter Peter Beutel, who warns us: ?Don?t get caught up by personal preference.?

What you think or don?t think works — or should work — is irrelevant; what actually works or doesn?t work is all that matters.

Right?

A business owner recently told me, ?I hired an ad agency that seems to know nothing about direct marketing. When I asked their copywriter whether she?d read John Caples, her response was, ?I?ve never heard of him.??

He was surprised — and dismayed.

But is this as big as sin as he makes it out to be?

In my opinion, yes.

Direct marketing is more complex than most other forms of marketing (online marketing being the possible exception).

There are lots of principles you need to understand, based on millions of dollars of tested results.

To ignore this body of knowledge, accumulated at great cost, is foolhardy.

Especially since this knowledge is readily obtained by reading the books that the top direct marketing experts have written … books in which they freely share what they know.

Click here for my list of the 10 marketing books every direct marketer absolutely must read.

How many of these have you read? If you haven?t read them, why not? What books would you recommend instead?

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It?s this?.

By proclaiming that ?markets are conversations,? and that talking with customers is the ultimate marketing methodology, Cluetrain ignores this important truism from Rene Descartes:

?To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.?

That?s where we direct marketers have it all over the Cluetrain crowd.

We aren?t guided just by what people say they want or will do; we primarily pay attention to what they actually do ? in other words, what they buy.

You can determine what your prospects will buy based on your own test mailing ? or by studying the successful control mailings of your competitors in the same category.

Because those control mailings are working, they tell you the appeals that are causing customers to open their wallets ? those marketing approaches that are making money right now.

Actions speak louder than words, and what people actually buy is infinitely more important than what they say they will buy.

Which do YOU think is a more accurate indicator of what your market wants ? a ?conversation? or a purchase?

The answer to the ?Test Your Direct Marketing I.Q.? quiz (see below) is (a). When someone makes a donation, you should send a solicitation asking for more money as soon as possible ? ideally, that same day or the next day.

To me, that?s counterintuitive: I?d think that if Joe just gave us money, he would be tapped out and want to wait awhile before giving us more. But testing shows that the opposite is true, and has allowed direct marketers to develop the RFM formula, which stands for recency, frequency, and monetary.

RFM says:

* Recency — the person who bought (or donated) the most recently is the most likely to buy (or donate) again.

* Frequency — the person who buys frequently is more likely to buy again than the person who buys infrequently.

* Monetary — the person who spent the most money is more likely to buy again (and will spend more) than the person who spent less money.

There are very few rules that hold in DM, but RFM is one of them. It is nearly a universal truth, with virtually no exceptions.