In every massive creative breakthrough I’ve seen, the hero was a new letter.

Most of them were letters the clients hated. One guy threatened to fire me if I even thought about mailing an oddball letter but it had already gone out and the result was a lift of 1300%. For a B2B service that cost $2,000 a year! With renewals around 75%.

I’d discovered a platinum mine and he’s hated my guts for it ever since. (The letter didn’t meet corporate guidelines, meaning it wasn’t stilted, self-serving and snooze inducing.)

The 1300% letter started: “If you can send me a quick email with this code – XXXX – I’ll send you back …”

You can get nice lifts with offer changes, new premiums, new pricing, new terms, different timing.

And you can get nice but not massive lifts with creative tricks like printing the sender’s name in typewriter type or handwriting above the return address, a new format or, and I love this: putting the upsell first on the order form – it’ll get you slightly fewer responses but a lot more money.

But nothing will ever beat a great new letter, email or snail.

You have to test and 5 out of 6 will either fall short or just match your control. But when you strike gold, you’ll get your test costs back over and over again.

The first three or four paragraphs are crucial, especially the first paragraph. After that, if you’ve got their attention and sympathy and you sound like a real human being, they’ll stay with you as long as you stay on topic (them), keep adding benefits and urge response now.

You have to be talking about your readers and you need short but not staccato paragraphs with lots of air around them.

Devices like underlining, bold, italic, indenting and handwritten notes help, but only used sparingly.

It all has to ring true and it should be seamless from beginning to end. It helps if you avoid adverbs, reduce adjectives to a minimum, use short declarative sentences in the active voice, understand paragraph-to-paragraph linking and, when faced with a choice, pick the Anglo-Saxon rather than the Latin word. (e.g. job or work instead of employment.) You should get it right in twenty drafts.

Here’s one of my favorite first lines from a letter I wrote for a tourism organization a few years ago:

Dear Mr. Jackson,

I hope you don’t like fishing as much as I do, because it’s cost me two wives so far.

Got ‘em.