Gary Halbert · whole document (16)
Boron - Chapter 12
Well, here I am once again starting to write without knowing where I am going. All I know is that when I keep moving and writing and flowing that generally something decent emerges. We'll see.
No, wait. I know what I'll tell you. How about what else goes inside the carrier envelope in addition to the letter? One thing for sure is that you must include a reply envelope. Now, when it comes to reply envelopes, you basically have two choices. The options are to make the reader pay the postage when he mails the envelope or for you to pay the postage for him. There are two ways for you to pay the postage. One of these is to simply put a "live" stamp on the envelope so that it will be all ready to mail when he receives it.
There are a couple of advantages to this strategy and one big disadvantage. The disadvantage is cost. Right now, at 20¢ per stamp it will cost you $200.00 extra per thousand to do business this way. And, naturally, because of this, most mailers never even test this option.
That's too bad. Really. Because sometimes, this strategy will pay off. Therefore, I believe, when either or both of the following conditions exists you should test a SRE (Stamped Reply Envelope):
Condition #1: You are selling a high-ticket item where the profit structure is such that one additional sale per thousand letters mailed will yield more than enough profit to pay for your SRE's.
This means, of course, that each sale you make has to have a mark up of at least $200.00.
You know what? What I just wrote may not be quite accurate. Because, if you think about it, if those SRE's bring in two or more orders per M, then your mark up on each sale would only have to be $100.00. If they bring in three extra orders per M, the mark up would only have to be $70.00 per unit to make it feasible.
And so on.
Condition #2: You should test a SRE whenever you can make the recipient of your letter feel guilty if he doesn't reply. This works especially well for charity or fund raising letters. For example, you might have a line in one of your letters that goes something like this: