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The first of the Three Laws of Direct Mail states that The more your direct mail reflects the world-view of the recipient, the more successful it will be.

This article takes that starting point and shows clearly and succinctly how anyone writing direct mail can apply this First Law in order to double the response rate. This is achieved through thinking more about the potential customer than is normally the case and applying these thoughts to the way in which the text of the advertisement is written.

This approach and the reasoning that lies behind it was developed by Tony Attwood when writing advertisements for the publishers First and Best Ltd. With immediate feedback on each advertisement in terms of the number of books sold after each advertisement Tony was able to trace the variation in response rates back to the way in which he had perceived the reader, rather than the way in which he had presented the product.

The article then relates this approach to the Second Law which states that one has little more than five seconds to grab and hold the attention of the reader of a piece of direct mail. It is here that much traditional copywriting falls down as it rarely finds ways of achieving this.

This article sets out the most fundamental points about writing direct mail the fundamentals recognised by the real professional copy writers. It has enabled thousands of direct mailers to change their style of writing and produce copy that really does double response rates.

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