There is a large range of possibilities under this heading. The enthusiasts of this craft or that — knitting, jewellery making, pottery, leatherwork, marquetry, painting, toy making, modelling etc — have a continuing need for the raw materials of their crafts, appropriate craft tools and books on the subject. Few people live within easy reach of a shop that can cater for the needs of their particular craft, and it is this that gives such products their mail order appeal.

Advertise in the relevant hobby journals. With many crafts, you may be able to start your business with no more in the way of advertising than a simple printed list of items and prices sent to enquirers responding to your classified advertising.

Most raw materials are easy to pack and mail and have a good price/weight ratio. Satisfied customers can be expected to re-order basic supplies regularly, and they will also be in the market for occasional purchases of equipment.

Curtains

Various mail order opportunities can be considered here. If you are a skilled curtain maker you could offer a made-to-measure service, sending sets of specimen materials to prospective customers, together with instructions on how to measure up windows. Such a service could be advertised in the personal columns of papers and magazines.

Alternatively, you could deal in ready-made curtains of standard lengths; these are probably best sold from full-colour display advertising. Or you could deal simply in curtaining materials, selling lengths for customers to make up themselves.

Easy to pack and mail, with virtually no risk of transit damage, curtains are unlikely to cause after-sales problems as little can go wrong beyond stitching coming adrift, and that should certainly not happen in any properly made curtains.

Because heavy drapes tend to be more expensive than lightweight ones, a good price/weight ratio should be maintained throughout the range. Follow-up possibilities are, first and foremost, more curtains; every home has many windows, and customers who have used your service for one room are obvious targets for follow-up sales for their other rooms.

Don’t forget net curtains as well — even easier to handle and mail than drapes.

Dealing in coins and medals is, of course, a matter of both buying and selling. Unlike retailing, where goods pass from manufacturer to wholesaler to mail order dealer to the public, the coin and medal business is a ping-pong game between dealer and public, goods moving from the public to the dealer and then back again from the dealer to the public. Sometimes dealers trade among themselves, and sometimes indeed the public do, and there are auctions at which all the combinations of dealer to dealer, dealer to public, public to dealer, and public to public may be found. In the main, however, the coin and medal business is from public to dealer and back again, and the mail order dealer must be able to get his prices right when both buying and selling.

Unlike the retailer of normal consumer products, the dealer can’t establish what the trade price is and then work out his own selling price accordingly, confident that he can always pick up further supplies at a known price if he gets a sudden rush of orders. If the coin and medal dealer gets a sudden rush of orders for a given item, he is likely to find himself having to buy in extra stock at a premium. The dealer has to perform a delicate balancing act if he is to pitch his selling prices attractively and yet cover his costs and show a profit. The balancing act is made the more difficult by the inevitable delays between placing advertising and having it published, and between drafting price- lists and having them printed. And yet if you are knowledgeable and able to deal shrewdly, coin and medal dealing can make a profitable mail order business.

Car burglar alarms

Next to his house, his car is often the most expensive of a’man’s possessions. The cost and difficulty of fitting an anti-thief device are trivial compared with the cost and inconvenience of having one’s car stolen. Car burglar alarms can be small, light and easy to mail, and, if properly installed by the purchaser, should not give rise to excessive claims for repair or replacement.

Car compasses

These are popular with keen motorists, particularly those compasses that fix to the dashboard. There are also the novelty kind that attach to a car key ring. Both kinds are easy to mail, the latter particularly so.

Car ramps

For the man who likes servicing his own car, a pair of ramps that allow him to work comfortably underneath it are a great advantage. Fairly small, easily mailed, and with no working parts to go wrong, they are well suited to mail order selling, and may be promoted as a pleasing gift for the motorist on, for example, the run-up to Christmas. They will, of course, appeal to the motorist himself all the year round.

Car vacuum cleaners

Mini vacuum cleaners that can easily get into the crevices in the limited space of a car interior make popular mail order lines. They can, of course, also be used for other purposes, such as cleaning up armchairs and other upholstered furniture. They are light and easy to use, and light and easy to mail. Naturally, they have working parts and are therefore subject to mechanical and electrical failure.

Many people live within reach of a bookshop, and most people live within reach of a shop selling books, but shops of both kinds necessarily cater for the general interest. It is very difficult for the mail order bookseller to compete with the shops for the sale of the most popular titles; the Net Book Agreement ensures that most books are sold at fixed prices determined by the publishers, and so have to be sold for the same price whether the seller is a high street city bookshop or a one-man mail trader operating out of his garden shed. Furthermore, the discount publishers usually allow to booksellers is too small to support a mail order operation, being about a third of the retail price rather than the two-thirds that the mail trader typically needs.

However, mail order is worth thinking about for books of specialist interest, ie ones that are not normally found on the shelves of the high street shops, provided that you can get your advertising to the specialist market and there is a sufficient number of buyers in the market and a sufficient number of titles that you can offer them.

Buying and selling secondhand books within a specialist area is also a mail order possibility, as is the trade in remainders (ie publishers‘ unwanted stock sold off to the trade at low prices and not subject to any kind of resale price maintenance).

Books are easy to pack, easy to mail, and with no working parts to go wrong. Follow-up possibilities are good: more of the same. Keep your customers posted with your latest catalogues.

Most mail ordering bookselling is in fact undertaken by publishers direct selling their own titles. To enter the market by this route, you need to have a good number of titles, and the confidence — and money — to have them printed ready to sell by mail before you have any evidence whether they will sell at all. One possible approach is to start by selling books of similar interest published by other people; then once you are sure that the market exists and you can reach it, you can start publishing your own titles, and one by one substitute your own books for those of other publishers on your list.

Calculators

An enormous variety of calculators is available, some little bigger than credit cards, others large enough to be convenient for desktop work, some that also tell the time, play tunes, print calculations, and so on. At the top end of the market are the programmable calculators, which might fairly be regarded as the bottom end of the computer market, but at the more humble level there are low-priced calculators offering a range of functions to meet most needs, mathematical, scientific, financial, or just plain old-fashioned adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.

Most calculators are small, lightweight and easy to mail. The price/weight ratio is favourable. Though calculators can go wrong after sale, most are well made and reliable, and the virtual absence of mechanical parts, except in the printing models, means in practice that most calculators live out a useful life without anything ever going wrong.

Although calculators are widely available, most are sold in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion by shops whose assistants frequently understand little of the capabilities and applications of the products they sell. This is where the mail trader can score. Produce sales literature that lovingly specifies every last thing that the calculator can do, and the way it does it. Give worked examples of different calculations, showing how the problems would be keyed into the machine and how the answers would be displayed.

Use either display advertising for off-the-page selling or classified advertising for two-stage selling.

There are many opportunities for follow-up sales to satisfied customers: more complicated calculators, other microchip-based devices — electronic games, home computers, clocks, watches, and so on. You can also follow up with items of related interest; for example, someone buying a calculator with a number of specifically business-type functions could well be amenable to offers of other business equipment, such as typewriters, telephones, photocopiers.

The bicycle as a means of cheap and healthy transport has greatly increased in popularity in recent years. Even so, specialist bicycle shops are not numerous, and mail order is worth considering as a retailing method, particularly for bicycles which are a little out of the ordinary. Consider folding bicycles, for example. These have all the characteristics of bikes in general, but they also have a certain gadgety appeal, a recurrent theme in mail order. They fold down for easy storage at home or in the boot of a car or even into a bag which may be easily carried. The owner can, for example, ride his bike to the station in the morning, fold it into the bag, take the train to town, and then cycle to the office at the other end, hanging his bike up in the cloakroom until he needs it again to go home. Features like these provide excellent material for the advertising copywriter.

From the customer’s point of view, there is the further mail order appeal of the chance to try the machine out for a few days, secure in the knowledge that it can be returned for refund within the trial period. This is particularly important as many potential purchasers will be doubtful whether they have the skill, strength and stamina to use the bicycle to advantage.

If your product is a good one, after-sales problems should be minimal though some are bound to occur and you must be sure in advance that you have the organisation and skills to deal with them. Handling and mailing are obviously more awkward than with many products; you need warehouse space and will probably have to use a non-Post Office carrier. Price/weight ratio is good.

There are no immediately obvious follow-ups; much depends upon the nature of your original sales pitch and the places you advertise. If you sell through cycling journals — and therefore to enthusiasts — you could follow up with other products of the outdoor life, such as camping gear. If you sell through general papers, promoting your product as a means of economical commuter transport, you might follow up with other items which promise to cut the cost of living, such things as devices to reduce home heating bills, or items of self-sufficiency appeal for growing your own food or brewing your own beer.

Binoculars/telescopes

There is a very wide range of such optical equipment available. At the top end of the range, items retail at £100 or more, and clearly this is not a good product for the non-specialist mail order beginner to choose. But at the bottom end of the market, the near-toys need not cost very much at all, and have a strong appeal to the buyer.

Binoculars confer power. You can see things other people can’t see. And at a more mature level, you can use them in sport, for bird-watching, satellite spotting, and so on.

Cheap binoculars may be lightweight, and even good quality glasses with, say a 10 x 50 lens, may not weigh more than a kilogram. The glasses may come in boxes with good manufacturers’ packing, needing only a little more outer wrapping for mailing. Price/weight ratio is very favourable for expensive glasses; indeed, there are many superb glasses specifically made to a very light weight, but that could take you into the £200- plus class where even with postal insurance the mailing costs are relatively insignificant.

Theatre glasses may be worth considering. These are always light in weight, and can make an attractive offer in the gift market.

Even cheap binoculars and telescopes should have a very long working life, and any optical products worthy of the name should give rise to few after-sales problems.

The mail order appeal of audio equipment is as for many other items which need to be used by the customer before he knows it has the qualities he really wants. Buying any sort of audio equipment in a high street shop is always a lottery: it’s easy to judge which machines look good and have the range of features one seeks, but judging the crucial quality of sound is virtually impossible in the noisy, bustling environment of a shop. The essence of the mail order appeal is Try it in the quiet of your home; return it if dissatisfied.

There is an enormous range of audio equipment on the market, some of it very compact and lightweight and therefore easy to handle and mail, with a good price/weight ratio. Personal stereos are worth considering as particularly convenient to deal with, but larger and heavier equipment need not be ruled out as it is usually well packed by manufacturers and should not suffer in transit unless deliberately mishandled.

Follow-up possibilities include records for record players; cassettes, blank and pre-recorded, for cassette players; and accessories — headphones, extension speakers etc — for everything.

Bags and cases

Holdalls, handbags, briefcases, shoulder bags, suitcases etc are widely available in the shops, so the mail trader must look for some special selling feature in the items he plans to promote. Concentrate on a single item or set of items in your advertising which, ideally, should be illustrated. Look for items with a large number of useful features to which your advertising can draw attention, such things as special pockets for credit cards, passport, cheque book; well-concealed and zipped pockets for cash; cases that can open out at need to form larger cases; cases that can fold down to pocket size when not in use; and so on.

Though some of the large cases are bulky, none is difficult to mail or needs very much packing for secure transit. Sets of cases can often be packed one inside another, thus simplifying despatch.

You can lift your advertising pitch out of the rut by offering to have the owner’s initials embossed on the product. Set up an arrangement with a local firm to do this work for you quickly and at no great cost, and allow for that cost in your all-in price to the customer so that you can offer personalised luggage for no more than the price of the luggage itself.

While most people have only a limited need for large travelling cases, smaller items like handbags, for example, have a strong fashion element to them, and follow-up sales of other designs should be possible.

Bedding

Plain sheets, fitted sheets, pillow cases, blankets, continental

Quilts, eiderdowns — every household has a number of sets of bedding, and though these items are not bought frequently by any given household, the number of households in the market at any one time is very large and spread over the entire population.

Though some of the items are bulky, all are easy to handle and to pack, and short of direct vandalism are virtually damage- proof in transit. Provided you deal only in products of good quality, after-sales problems should be minimal.

The price/weight ratio is acceptable and the prices of the items high enough to justify the cost of a well-mounted advertising campaign. While all items can be sold singly, complete matching sets make attractive mail order offers either as gifts — to newly-weds and others setting up home for the first time — or as necessary items for the buyer’s own use.

Follow-up items include other household textiles and fabrics, and indeed all other items of general household interest.

Mailing Lists Construction

A list is constructed either by research or as the by-product of some other activity. Construction determines who goes on the list and who doesn’t. The list compiler must have a clear set of criteria to which every name on the list must conform. A well constructed list ruthlessly excludes all other names.

Researched Mailing Lists

Research is often a matter of combing through existing lists in order to select from them people with the desired characteristics. Suppose you sell a personal security device of particular interest to people who live on their own. One way of constructing a prospect list would be to consult the electoral roll, the annually published list of everyone in the country entitled to vote at parliamentary elections. Since the electoral roll gives addresses, together with the names of eligible voters at each address, you could create your list by noting those addresses at which there was only a single voter. The method wouldn’t be foolproof, as it would also, for example, pick households where there was indeed only a single eligible voter but also one or more children — though possibly you would consider such households also to be prime targets for your product.

Perhaps your product will only work in conjunction with the telephone. In that case, you could use the electoral roll to produce a provisional list, from which you remove people without phones by checking for entries in the telephone directory.

Most research is time-consuming and expensive to undertake or to have undertaken on your behalf. The quality of a researched list normally depends upon the ingenuity, thoroughness and meticulousness of the researcher.

Two-stage selling. Though not normally thought of as such, two-stage selling is really a special kind of direct mail. Stage ne, pulling in the enquiries, is the research method by which you compile the list to which you mail the full details of your _offer. In the nature of the thing, an enquiry list of this kind is _very reliable indeed, and the people on it self-selected and therefore positively wishing to be mailed.

The value of the enquiry list for later mailings is much more doubtful, and it is generally not a good idea to merge enquirers and customers into a single list unless the two groups can be segmented.

By-product Mailing Lists

These lists are not constructed to be mailing lists, but come about as the incidental result of some other activity. The construction is often of very high quality as no one has had to justify the cost of compilation by reference to ultimately expected sales.

The electoral roll is this kind of list. Others include membership lists of different organisations, the share registers of public companies, lists of people with particular academic or professional qualifications, and, above all, the customer lists of commercial organisations. Notice it is only the quality of construction we’re talking of here. It you want a mailing list of deaf-aid wearers, for example, you couldn’t get a better constructed list than one composed of the names and addresses of people who have actually bought them. But the same list could be very poor in other respects — if, for example, it hasn’t been updated for 10 years.

The best constructed list of all is your own customer list, the by-product of your sales successes. There is something particularly satisfying about acquiring a valuable mailing list as the by-product of a successful sales operation. Herein lies the evolutionary secret of profitable mail order — success breeding success.

Segmentation

Computerisation allows lists to be easily segmented. A segment is a subset of the main list. Consider, for example, a list of mail order purchasers of computer software. In addition to the names and addresses, each entry on the list can be coded to sho_w, for example, whether the customer has bought games, utilities or business applications; whether his purchases have been under £30 in value or over £30; whether he has bought once only or more than once; whether he is indeed ‘he’ or `she’; is age group; and so on. Some of this information becomes automatically available to the list compiler from the orders received; some of it has to be actively researched, perhaps b_y asking customers to fill in brief questionnaires.

However it’s done, the list‘s value to the user is now enhanced. If he wants to promote, say, a new accounting package at £60, he can select precisely the segment of the list that looks most promising: purchasers of business applications who spend ove_r£30. By eliminating the rest of the list, he may lose the odd sale or two, but he is almost certain to gain on balance by not wasting money mailing to the mass of the list who were never in the market for the new product. Yet at other times — say, when mailing his autumn catalogue — he can use the complete list.

A segmented list is really a composite of a number of lists, except that no name has to be stored more than once, no matter how many segments it features in.

If, for example, you were selling handbags, you could run a classified advertisement reading something like LATEST HANDBAG CATALOGUE free from Hannah’s Handbags etc. But how would you advertise the cat-scratch device? LATEST CAT SCRATCHER: free details from . . . ? Even in the columns of a cat lovers’ magazine, that would be unlikely to excite much interest. To bring out the real nature of the product would require many more words and probably illustrations too. Whether it is a matter of added words or added pictures, the result is the same — added cost.

Since advertising is likely to be the small mail trader’s largest single expense, it is sensible to try to have a product that can be _advertised simply. This means not only that you should have a clear idea of where the product may be effectively advertised, as searching for suitable places by a random process of trial and error can be a very costly business, but also that you should have a good idea of how the product may be advertised in the minimum space, with the smallest number of words, and the simplest kind of illustrations — if any.

Favourable characteristics

The simplest thing to advertise is a well-known branded product at a bargain price. If Stereo is selling at £50-£60 in every hi-fi shop in the country, mail order advertising in the classified columns of the hi-fi press need be no lengthier or more complicated than by return of post. Only £39, post free.

Most products, however, will require more verbal description and sometimes visual illustration as well. The more unusual your product, the more difficult it will be to describe it briefly or illustrate it cheaply. If you are committed to mail order selling, keep in mind from the start the special problems of where and how to advertise, and don’t take on board a product that is likely to need full-page colour supplement advertising if your funds only run to more modest promotions in the hobby press.

Most of all, look for a product with a prime selling feature — some special characteristic, easily highlighted in advertising, which gives the product a special mail order appeal.

Money-back guarantee

This is one of the phrases that mail order has given to the English language — and one it can well be proud of. It is quite extraordinary to what lengths high street shops will sometimes go to avoid refunding to dissatisfied customers. Here at least mail order shows the way. It may be a commonplace of mail order advertising; BCAP and the MOPS may require it whether it’s stated or not; the general public may expect it as a matter of course. But still, always mention the money-back guarantee. You’re going to make refunds to dissatisfied customers anyway, so why not say so? The words are comforting to prospective customers, and their use is one of the simplest ways of attempting to turn ditherers into purchasers.

Free offers

Offering the purchaser something additional to the main product at no extra cost can be a powerful inducement to buy. BCSPP warns about the possible misuse of the word ‘gift’, and both it and BCAP require that anything described as `free‘ should be genuinely so, and that the price of a related product should not be increased in order for the ‘free‘ offer to be made.

However, we all know that nothing in life is free — somebody has to pay for it; and in all businesses except those that go bust, that `somebody’ is the customer. If you build the free gift into your advertised offer from the start, you will be able to pitch your product price accordingly without giving offence to anyone. If you add the free gift at a later stage, as a refinement to your offer, you should hold your product price steady, and aim to recoup the increased costs — and indeed enhance your profits — from the additional sales generated by the inducement.

While all markets are different, free offers work best if they have a genuine appeal to the purchaser of the main product. A piece of jewellery offered to purchasers of handbags, or blank cassettes with cassette recorders are the sort of offers to consider. Some advertisers seem to succeed with seductive offers of ‘mystery’ free gifts; and although the mystery, once revealed, is frequently trivial and disappointing — a packet of needles or a plastic comb are typical — the promise still retains its allure for some purchasers. Study the other advertisers in your own market and see what they’re up to.

Limited offers

Most mail order purchases are made on impulse. Your customers buy your product not because they have reflected long and hard on the matter, and have got up that morning thinking, ‘Right, today’s the day I’m going to send off for one of those Whatsits’; it doesn’t work like that at all. Your advertising forces itself upon the prospect’s attention, either because it happens to be on the page of the paper he’s looking at, or because it’s something that’s just dropped through the door. If your sales message interests him at all, his most likely response is to think that he might do something about it later; but ‘later’ almost never comes. Other things catch his attention, and your advertised offer is forgotten. If it is to succeed, it must succeed now.

Whatever the limit, it must be a genuine one; and that makes it something of a two-edged sword. While it may effectively create a sense of urgency, and thus produce a number of sales that might otherwise have been lost, it may also prematurely kill off the ad so that anyone noticing it for the first time after the deadline may well be discouraged from ordering anything at all.

to be continued

Need and demand

Do not confuse need with demand. It is not enough to have a product which can do many seemingly vital things if nobody actually wants to buy it. There may be a need for everyone to make regular six-monthly visits to the dentist, but there’s little demand for it. Conversely, there’s no need for people to eat sweets, chocolates, cakes and biscuits, since we can all survive very well without them, yet the demand for these products continues at a high level. As a trader rather than a teacher, reformer or missionary, you are concerned with demand not need, and you must choose the products you deal in accordingly.

Let other dealers make the running

In mail order, you will have enough problems to cope with without also being a pioneer — that’s why you need a flourishing existing market. If you use the press, you need to be on the same page as the other traders because this is where the customers habitually browse; if you use direct mail, you need a well maintained list of existing purchasers of products like yours. Those are the market-places — do you know where to find them?

Look in the national press, the popular journals, the hobby and special interest press, the trade and professional press, and find out where the markets are for particular types of products; consult a list broker to see if suitable lists exist. If you can’t see a flourishing existing market for your proposed product, then avoid the product and look for another.

You’ve found a market — but is it big enough?

Once you have identified suitable markets, there still remains the question of whether they are large enough to support a business based upon the product you have in mind. Unless you are intending to mount one-off campaigns — making a big splash with a particular product for a week or two and then dropping it and switching to something different for the next fortnight and something different again for the fortnight after — the markets must be of a sufficient size to support your regular promotion of the same or related lines.