The Nickel Letter

Sometime in the world of marketing you hear the expression ‘Interruption Marketing.’

You’ve seen this many times - it’s something the marketer has done to distract you out of your regular daily business and get your attention. It’s entirely possible you’ve got some social media apps on your mobile doing this to you right now.

In relation to sales copywriting (in both email and snail mail) copywriters rely on some sort of a ‘Hook’ to grab the attention of the reader away from other things they might be doing.

Gary Halbert - one of the most successful and notorious of our industry - was well known for using the ‘Nickel Letter.’

Quite literally it was a windowed envelope, with a hand written address, and an actual stamp (so it signaled that it came from a person) and in the window you could see the coin pinned to the letter.

The thought exercise went something like this:

Homeowners get a bit of regular mail, some bills, and a bunch of junk. So the image is of a person sorting their mail over a trashcan. Regular mail and bills are pulled out, and most of the junk mail falls directly into the trash without a second glance.

Sure, some of the junk mail does work. As an industry, it would have dried up and gone bankrupt if it didn’t work.

Gary’s goal was to get a letter in the hands of a potential client, and get them to stop in their tracks over the trashcan and open the letter then, and there.

Those guys liked to use the idea treating the letter like it was incredibly expensive, or their lives were on the line if it didn’t get opened. What could you sent that would guarantee the recipient would open it?

Lots of people get mail, but nobody gets a letter’s with a hand written address, an actual stamp, and a nickel pinned to it. That thing is getting opened. It’s a hook he used many times.

The idea in direct response marketing is to start with something that cuts across the noise and grabs attention. That’s the hooks first job. The second is to get the customer to move onto the next step.

“Dear Jane Doe, you may be wondering why I pinned a nickel onto this letter…”

The next step is to read the first line of the letter.

And that first line’s job is to get you onto the step after that..

And so on, and so on, until the sales pitch is presented and the call to action is made. Those guys liked to describe it as getting customers on a slippery slide that they couldn’t get off of, until they were so entranced and committed that they would happily buy the product or service that you have that will solve their problems.

It can be powerful.

Direct response marketing is called that because it’s goal is to get the prospective client to respond-directly. To pull out their credit card and buy something, to fill out a form, to enter contact info...

The nickel letter has staying power because, though effective, it remains in relative obscurity. Many new marketing idea and channels start strong, and get weaker over time as customers learn to ignore them. Remember, billboards were a new, irresistible eye-catching thing.

Once.

Billboards still do their jobs, but they settled into a more stable level of usefulness. Like banner ads on websites, or even social media.

Many marketers try to be early adopters of things like twitter or snapchat when they’re new. They try to be early on all of them - including the competitors that eventually bow down and bow out.

The Nickel Letter had (and has) such a good track record because it was never used widely enough that people learned to ignore it. The lesson isn’t to start using the nickel letter (although you definitely could), the lesson is to think about what you could do to make 100% sure your marketing message gets seen?