Tales from the Little Red Truck: Our Worst Letter Ever

So yesterday I talked about A-abc's most successful sales letter--the free Infiltrometer analysis. Today I'll talk about our worst--the video duct cleaning letter.

When we first saw the video duct cleaning machine, it seemed like a great idea. We loved the fact that we could prove the results of our cleaning. Our clients loved it too. We sold a bunch of jobs, but not because of this letter.

Before sending out this piece, everyone who read it thought it was a winner. Not just based on that reading, but based on a comparison to other successful letters we had written, and other offers we ran for video duct cleaning. It incorporated a lot of the things we had done before, so there was good reason to think it would be successful.

We sent out a test mailing (which we always did, even if we thought it was perfect) and when the results came in, we were once again astounded.

It had a 0% response. That's right, nobody called.

You would think we would have destroyed every copy of this letter as quickly as possible. We may have tried, but at least one survived, and it's included below. Luckily, we had only sent it to a test of 1,000, so our loss wasn't great. Although testing was sometimes frustrating and time-consuming, it proved prudent on more than one occasion.

If there's one thing I know about advertising, it's that NOBODY knows what will work. You have to take the time to test your ads.

Normally we would change up the letter and send it again. I don't think we ever sent another letter for video duct cleaning though. Not because of the lack of success we had with our test, but because the video duct cleaning machine kept breaking down. We had to abandon that technology.

Tales from the Little Red Truck: The Amazing Infiltrometer Letter

In the late 80's and all through the 90's, I was working with Ahron Katz at A-abc Appliance & AC in Dallas. Ahron was one of the pioneers of the service industry, and one of the first in our area to offer flat rate pricing, same day service and a 100% satisfaction guarantee -- as well as host of other unique and innovative marketing ideas. Our tagline, "The Company with the Little Red Trucks" was so effective at helping build our brand that marketing experts like Matt Michel started watching us very closely. Oh yeah, and it made us lots of money.

The best response we ever had to a sales letter was a 1994 promotion for the amazing new Infiltrometer. It was sent out to our HVAC Maintenance clients (Preferred Client Club Diamond Card holders).

The letter drew an amazing 36% response!

Of course, we were offering a very valuable, FREE service to a very hot, relatively small and trusting list, but it certainly raised the bar for all our future mailers, and led to my life-long frustration with never coming close to that number again!

The letter got us in the door and our salesmen/techs did the rest. We averaged over $1,000 for every FREE call we ran (we didn't run every call we set up, for various reasons). If only our list had been bigger! We only had about 400 Diamond members at the time.

The letter is included here and, as you can see, we didn't concern ourselves with keeping it short or "easy to read." In fact it broke a lot of other design "rules" too; it had an extremely long headline in sentence-case, it used a sans-serif font for the body of the letter, it made extensive use of underlining, bold and exclamation points and it was kind of cramped, especially on page 1.

Despite all that, the letter worked. It worked because the reader believed what we wrote and trusted us to deliver. A lot of that was due to the ongoing effort we made throughout all our marketing to promote Ahron as THE expert in the field. It was an extremely effective strategy and I'll write more about it in future posts.