Ok, maybe not the greatest, but one of the greatest according to Denny Hatch, who built a business collecting, analyzing and reporting on decades of direct mail controls called “Who’s Mailing What?”.

You’ll find the full and fascinating story on this letter, its author and a great lesson in crisis management in the Denny Hatch Archive that has recently been added as part of the SOFII treasure trove.

Denny also wrote the book, Million Dollar Mailings: the art and science of creating money-making direct mail, about which David Ogilvy said, “This remarkable has inspired me to revive my life-long crusade to extricate the direct mail fraternity from the ghetto to which they have always been confined by the advertising generalists”.

Fair to say Denny knows a thing or two about winning direct mail.

Why bother making a great control better?  Here’s a dirty little secret, most innovation is incremental, around 70% in fact.  Incremental innovation is making small scale improvement to add or sustain value to existing products (e.g. direct mail controls) or services.  Think Gillette or Coke.  Both are world-class, incremental innovators.

And it’s with this in mind along with a nod to the science part of Denny’s book title that we elected to edit and revise a Covenant House control using Copy Optimizer.

This control was written by the founder, a person with zero writing background prior to authoring the direct mail for the charity he founded.  One of the acid tests for the Copy Optimizer has been to score long standing controls and copy written by some of the better regarded copy writers of this and prior decades.  So far, every long-standing control and copy writer of note – e.g. Jerry Huntsinger, Roger Craver, Jeff Brooks – have scored well, and well above the average.

This Covenant House control is no different.  It scores extremely well, further validation of the science of the linguistics that matter to making letters more personal, involving and narrative.  But, the Covenant House letter Copy Optimized scores even better.  And we know, based on a large sample, better scores equal better response, with an over 80% match rate on charity provided samples of “good/bad” response rate letters.

Denny notes that Father Ritter, founder of Covenant House, was a natural writer and storyteller.  That helps.  Being classically trained or having decades of experience does too.  But, our brand of innovation in the sector is (or should be at least) about improving on our understanding of the “why” behind human response.  This tool applies linguistic science to communication making all of us better by providing a more complete set of rules with measuring sticks.

Here are a few examples that make the control so good and so atypical of sector writing overall.

• Very few nouns. Sector average loves nouns and it’s a big problem, making the copy dense and informational, the opposite of Involving.
• Very few big words (i.e. word length), adjectives or prepositions. Again, sector average loves all of these.  Take prepositions…no seriously, take them (out).  Most of the time the prepositional phrase can be eliminated – addition by subtraction.
• Lots of amplifiers (e.g. highly, very, totally), 1^st person pronouns and “because” clauses matching the writing style of personal letters or conversations.

However, there are still opportunities for improvement and the Copy Optimizer is ‘breakthrough” in that we’ve made it easy to go from good to great, begging the question of why wouldn’t you?

Here is a sampling of the linguistic features that were under-represented in the control and added in the Copy Optimizer editing process.

• Contractions
• Private verbs – expressions of thoughts, beliefs, opinions (e.g. hoped, felt, thought, wanted, needed)
• Present participle clauses and perfect aspect verbs (both of these help the narrative qualities of a letter)
• Demonstrative (this, these) and “it” pronouns

There were still more opportunities for improving the letter but this post was on deadline…

Here is a tracked change version for your viewing pleasure.

Kevin

P.S. The Copy Optimizer has been described as ‘breakthrough”, providing objective, science-based scores for writing improvement and fighting the good fight against whatever version of “copy writing by committee” barrier you face.

P.P.S. We’ll have the beta version of the DIY tool available soon, if you have questions or comments before then, please ask me directly (kschulman@thedonorvoice.com)  or comment here.