Page 169 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

78 SAY “HI”

It’s great when you win a new customer. All that work on your
e-shot, direct mail campaign, or sales promotion paid off. Your
return on investment looks good. You’ve shifted some stock. Your
database is now bigger by one. Well done you.

A lot of direct marketeers at this point go off in search of more
new customers. But that’s missing a vital link in the chain that
could bind your new customer to you for life. Or at least for
long enough to make sure you’ve sold them everything you
could ever hope to. It’s simply saying “Hi.” And perhaps “thanks for
your order.”

The idea

From an international news magazine
Here’s your customer, having just placed an order or sent you a
check or their credit card details. Maybe the thing they ordered
has arrived but maybe not. So there’s this vacuum. You fill it with
a welcome letter. In subscriptions marketing, which I do a lot of,
it’s the first stage in a process of getting the subscriber to extend
their subscription. Because every profession likes to coin its own
neat little phrases, subscriptions marketeers call it the “renewal at
birth” letter.

For this news magazine, I wrote a letter that new subscribers would
receive as soon as their order had been processed. Welcome letters
shouldn’t sound too professional or slick (though the absence of
slickness itself takes some slick copywriting). Here’s how I opened:

160 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS