Open Me Now: Direct Mail Envelopes That Work . . . and Those That Don't, Second Edition

If you’re a student of selling by mail, you may have wondered why ""experts"" write book after book and magazine article after magazine article about letters and almost nothing about the envelopes housing those letters. The reason I do is one that becomes obvious the first time you create a brilliant, award-winning, irresistible direct mail campaign and it bombs. ""What’s wrong with these people?"" we cry. ""This was aimed right at them. They need it. The price is right. The letter is loaded with dynamite, and we spent a ton of money taking pictures for the brochure. What happened?"" The question should be: ""What didn’t happen?"" If the message is aimed right at them and they need it and the price is right and the letter is loaded with dynamite and the pictures in the brochure are worthy of hanging in The Louvre, what’s missing? Where did we goof? The envelope. If they didn’t open the envelope, all that brilliance was reduced to a zero-watt intensity. The envelope is the greeter, separating us from everyone else…from all the other business mail driven by self-intensifying databases (the best prospect are the best targets and thus get the most mail and thus are harder to reach and even harder to convince). The envelope is the bellwether, molding the recipient’s attitude. It whispers, says, commands, or shouts to the person holding it, ""Open me now!"" What happens next can determine the fate not just of a mailing but of the organization behind it. And that’s why this book exists. Thanks for agreeing with my premise: If they don’t open the envelope, all the brilliance in every other component is reduced to a zero-watt intensity. Now, let’s get some megawatt envelopes into the mail!

Herschell Gordon Lewis is former chairman of Communicomp, a full-service direct marketing agency absorbed into Interpublic. He now heads Lewis Enterprises, through which he writes and consults individually for clients in the U.S. and a number of other countries. He is arguably the best-known direct response writer and consultant in the United States. For 200 consecutive issues Mr. Lewis wrote the monthly feature ""Creative Strategies"" for Direct Marketing Magazine, He currently writes ""Curmudgeon-at-Large"" for Direct, ""E-Marketing"" for Internet Retailer, ""Burnt Offerings"" for The NonProfit Times, and is the copy columnist for Multichannel Merchant (formerly Catalog Age). He also writes ""Copy Class"" for the UK publication Direct Marketing International, and catalog critiques for the UK publication Catalogue & eBusiness. For years Mr. Lewis conducted the copy workshop at the International Direct Marketing Symposium, Montreux, Switzerland, and he has appeared frequently at the Pan-Pacific Symposium in Sydney, Australia. He also has addressed national Direct Marketing Associations in countries such as England, France, the U.K., Spain, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Brazil, Singapore, and South Africa and has been engaged to present copywriting seminars in many countries, including Austria, Mexico, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Dubai. He is frequently called on to speak at meetings of the Direct Marketing Association, in the United States.