ildUertiSing Manaffer of "The Times." mail-order business is a science—the science of system. It is an art—the art of letter-writing. It is an inspira tion—the inspiration of salesmanship. And the keynote of it is the study of human nature. The essential difference between a mail-order and an ordinary business is, that in the former there is no personal contact between buyer and seller, no opportunity for exercising the persuasiveness of per sonality in conversation, and no hold on a customer except through cold paper and ink. All the work of attracting and keeping a etientete is done through the post or the press. Catalogues, leaflets and letters are the firm's representatives.
The United States offer the easiest field for the working of a purely postal business. Distances between towns are great, and much of the purchasing done by farmers and isolated settlers must necessarily be through the post. A mail-order business in the U.S.A. may be a mammoth store selling everything from a packet of needles to a reaping-machine. Mont gomery, Ward & Co., and Sears, Roebuck & Co., of Chicago, are firms handling a daily mail of 40,000 letters or more, even in the quiet season. In the United Kingdom, where the centres of population are closer together, the possibilities of tile system are smaller, but a mail-order proposition may be profitably combined with a personal-sale business. At present there is no big purely mail-order business in the Ignited Kingdom.
Opening a is essential to get inquiries for catalogues. Unless people ask for particulars of goods, one cannot get to grips with them. The preliminary work is to find people interested in the class of goods one has to sell.
The safest way of opening, though it is somewhat expensive, is to obtain carefully selected lists of names, and to circularise them periodically and systematically. The ways in which such lists can be obtained must of necessity vary with the particular line of business. A furniture house would obtain registers of houses leased at a rental which would accord with the style of furniture they make a speciality of. Lists of newly-married people, or of•people settling in new neighbourhoods, might be useful. In the States lists of customers of different firms are to be bought, but these are of doubtful value, for the buyers of one class of goods may not be interested at all in a line of another nature. The alternative method of
opening is through advertisements in the daily, weekly, or monthly Press. It is a cheaper method, but not nearly so satisfactory. The difficulty is to gauge the calibre of the people who will reply to the advertisements. A list of names offers fewer possibilities of customers, but far surer, if the names be carefully selected. With a good list and the right literature and the right samples, the seed may be trusted to fall on fertile ground. The system of advertised free samples is usually a money-sink. People will write for free samples who have no intention whatever of purchasing, even when the samples satisfy them.
Having obtained the names of prospective customers, the firm sends out illustrated catalogues to them, with covering letters drawing attention to any particular line in which the people have expressed interest, or which would seem likely to meet their requirements. Attention should be enticed to one particular point. It is then more probable that the prospective customer will reply, thereby opening up the possibility of bringing him into the active list.
The aim of the covering letters should be to "draw" him.—In regard to the actual form of the catalogue, this is a matter to be decided by the needs of individual businesses. In general it is advisable to devote the greater portion of it to a well-illustrated account of the goods offered, leaving the articles to speak for themselves. The price should be clearly marked, so as to catch the eye without difficulty, and the arrangement of the pages should be on some clear and logical system, so that the customer may find with the minimum of trouble the class of article he needs. The bulk of the catalogue should talk plain, straightforward business to the reader.
It must be borne in mind that people are inclined to look with suspicion on any overtures that have for their ultimate aim the extracting of money from the reader's pocket, and that it is necessary to impress strangers with absolute confidence in the integrity of the business and its principles of fair-dealing. This is always more difficult to do by post than by personal talk, as in conversation a man instinctively sums up the trustworthiness or otherwise of the seller, and the effect of personality goes far to inspire confidence.