There are many follow-up possibilities with other safety and security devices, both for the home and the person. The potential market is very large, but the advertiser’s problem is to persuade people that they need such products. The problem relates to the typical need/demand distinction that every trader must be clear about. Few people give much thought to their need for security devices until they suffer some misfortune that the device might have prevented. To sell successfully, advertising must bring home to the potential customer the risks he runs, and the relatively small price he need pay to get some measure of protection against these risks. Well composed display advertising or mailing literature is needed. It is not easy to sell from classified advertising unless you can find a column which specifically appeals to those actively seeking security devices.

Form a clear picture in your mind of your target prospects, and develop a persuasive argument that is relevant to their particular risks and fears. As always, your task is not to describe how wonderful the product is in itself, but to make clear what it can do for the customer. Little old ladies, for example, probably don’t want to know that a personal safety device has a 95dB siren; but they may be interested to learn that there’s a gadget they can wear unobtrusively on the wrist or round the neck which can enable them to call for help in an emergency.

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.

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 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.

Update your Website

After putting a great deal of thought, effort, and money into creating your new web site, you need to keep it up to date to maintain its effectiveness. Having out-of-date information on a web site reflects badly on the business concerned. For certain businesses, such as estate agents, having out-of-date information makes the site useless. People will not visit a poor site twice. If you do not have the time or resources to dedicate to updating detailed information on your web site, then keep it simple; the site could act as an initial point of contact, telling visitors how to contact your business through other means.

In addition to keeping the content of your site current, you need to monitor the major search engines to ensure they not only locate your site, but give it a high ranking when the right keywords are typed in. From time to time arrange to have your site checked over from a technological point of view, to ensure that it remains compatible and easy to use with the latest browser software.

On the other hand, most people’s homes have little spare room, and even the humblest business venture takes up some space. There are also domestic aspects to consider, since family members may resent the intrusion of a business – after all, homes are designed to be lived in rather than used as places of work. If the business is likely to be noisy, smelly, or to upset your neighbours, then it is probably not a good idea to work from home. Despite these hurdles, many businesses operate quite happily from home. They usually maintain a very low profile, with few visiting customers or suppliers.

If you are considering working from home, your first requirement is space. Unless your your already has a purpose-built study or office, you need to think about where you are going to work. The spare bedroom or loft are popular options; otherwise, can you use an alcove or corner of a room where your desk or other equipment will not be too obtrusive?

Next, you can consider the services, such as heating (or cooling), lighting, power, and phone connections. People work more efficiently, and make fewer mistakes, if the temperature is about 20°C, with adequate fresh air. Ideally the room would not get full sun, which produces glare on computer screens and paper. Domestic room lighting is usually inadequate for prolonged close work or reading. You need good background lighting, which can be provided by fluorescent strip lighting, and then halogen desk lights for reading or other close work. Strip lights have the advantage of being relatively cheap to run, although some people dislike the quality of light that they produce.

If you are thinking of working from home, you should always let your insurers know exactly what you are doing. There are special policies for home-based businesses. Also there are legal constraints and possible tax considerations.

Most carriers charge more for their services than the Post Office; and the Post Office has a rate scale that increases with weight, and a maximum weight for parcels of 25kg. For higher weights than this you are obliged to use non-Post Office carriers. One way or another, the heavier your product, the more it will cost to despatch.

Whether you separately identify delivery cost in your advertising or embody it in a so-called delivery-free product price, it forms an important element in the mail order calculation, and it must be considered at a very early stage in your product search.

Ideally, delivery cost should be only a small addition to the product price — preferably not more than about 15 per cent — if it is not to put customers off. The higher the price of the product, the less you need to worry about weight; the lower the price, the more important it is.

Note that it is price/weight ratio that matters, not cost/weight ratio. It can well happen, especially if you are the manufacturer, that the cost to you of the product is lower than the cost of shipping it. That doesn’t matter. The figures that have to be weighed against each other are the price the customer pays for the product itself compared with the amount he has to pay to get the product delivered.

How is your profit margin? Are you profit earner?

Most people new to retailing experience a mild shock when they first learn the prices at which goods change hands within the trade compared to the prices at which they are sold to the public. It seems that traders must be making fortunes. Typically, for example, a book selling in the shops for £9 may be available within the trade for £6, or a TV set selling for £250 may have a trade price of no more than £180. With such profit margins, the beginner is tempted to believe he could make his first million in a year at most. It isn’t so, of course. The profit margins illustrated above, though fairly typical, are only gross profit margins. The trader’s real profit — his net profit — is not the simple difference between his selling price and his buying price, but between his selling price on the one hand and his buying price, advertising costs, rent, rates, wages bill, stationery, postage, insurance, heating, lighting, telephone, accountancy, bank charges, interest charges, equipment purchase and maintenance and other overhead costs on the other.

The 3:1 ratio

The new mail trader operating in a small way, and possibly running his business from home, may be spared some of these costs, but advertising and shipping costs alone can be heavy, and the gross profit margin must be large enough to cover these costs and still leave a net profit. The conventional wisdom is that about a third of the mail order selling price is needed to meet the cost of advertising the product. This means that just to break even on your advertising, you probably need a 50 per cent mark-up — that is, a selling price half as much again as your buying price. For example, buying for £6 and selling for £9 will at best allow you to cover your advertising costs but nothing more. Buy for £6 and sell for £8, and you can confidently expect to lose money.

This is, of course, a crude generalisation, and any actual set of results may contradict it. But in the absence of specific evidence with a particular product, earmark a third of your selling price to pay for your advertising.

What sort of gross profit margin, then, are you looking for? Again, the generalisation is crude, but something like a two- thirds gross profit margin is desirable if you are to have a realistic chance of making a net profit. One-third of the selling price, as already suggested, will hopefully cover your advertising cost, and another third will cover everything else and give you a chance of being left with a profit.

For example, if you’re buying for £6, you must consider selling for not less than £18. That may look like an enormous profit, but it isn’t. Most of the ‘profit‘ will go in paying for the promotion, processing the enquiries, and fulfilling the orders.

It comes to this: your selling price will probably need to be not less than three times your buying price if you are aiming to make an immediate net profit from your advertising. This is the 3:1 ratio to keep in mind as you assess likely products. If you’re thinking of dealing in Whatsits, and they are typically being retailed at £12, you can see at once that you can’t afford to pay more than £4 yourself. And again: if you manufacture something yourself for £10, you will probably need to sell it for £30 or more to have a chance of making a profit, and if £30 looks ridiculously high as a retail price — well, back to the drawing board.