I-T'pfl 



June S, 11>22 



The Florists^ Review 



19 



CUSTOMERS AT $1.50 EACH 





COST OF ADVERTISING. 



Told by Head of Pittsburgh House. 



Our business is built upon the funda- 

 mental idea that advertising is buying 

 customers at so much apiece, and keep- 

 ing them long enough to make a profit 

 from them. That was the definition 

 used by the founder of our business. 

 And this concern is based entirely on ad- 

 vertising, if ever a concern was. 



Of course, we watch all the basic 

 needs of sound business. But if we 

 did not advertise in the way we do, all 

 our pains would probably not have 

 given us a business large enough to 

 support an individual. As it is, I be- 

 lieve I am telling an indisputable fact 

 when I say that we now do a larger 

 business in bulbs than any other retail 

 concern in the world. And, in addition, 

 we sell large quantities of nursery stock 

 — trees and slirubs — growing plants, and 

 seeds. 



Ours is entirely a mail-order business. 

 We advertise for sales and inquiries, 

 key the advertisements, keep careful 

 records of the results; the whole busi- 

 ness is geared to our advertising. And 

 our advertising divides itself logically 

 into two parts — the magazine advertise- 

 ments, which start up the business con- 

 tact between the customer and us, and 

 the direct mail follow-up, upon which 

 we most depend to close the inquiry 

 into a profitable sale and to keep the 

 customer reordering. Some customers 

 are reminded of us by the magazine 

 advertising, t)f course, and reorder be- 

 cause of it. But in general our period- 

 ical space brings us inquiries, and our 

 direct mail work brings in the orders. 

 If, in fact, we can make our first sales 

 at the rate, for magazine space, of $1.50 

 for each $1 of sales traceable to a maga- 

 zine inquiry, we are well satisfied. 

 Since from seventy-five to eighty per 

 cent of our customers stay with us more 

 than one year, and since we have over 

 10,000 nanu's on our live list on plates 

 of an obsolete addressing machine which 

 we ceased using more tlian five years 

 ago, you can see how this $1.50 figure 

 is reasonable for us. Our sales average 

 about $14 apiece. 



Large Space in Few Magazines. 



One ]>rinciple that wo have .iust re- 

 cently decided applies to our business 

 is that it brings us more profits to ad- 

 vertise in larger sjiace in comparatively 

 few ])ublications than in smaller space 

 and less frequently in a larger num- 

 l)cr. Tliis year we have increased our 

 advertising ajipropriation seventy-fi\ c 

 per cent; we have decreased the number 

 of mediums from the sixteen we used 

 last year to seven this year. It is simply 

 a question of cost. The advertising 

 dollar that brings us the largest volume 

 of sales Ijrings us twice the iiuinber of 

 sales when we double it. And in view 

 of our ex])erience, we cannot afford to 

 spend our appropriation in any except 

 the most profitable places. 



Exactly the same principle apjilies in 

 our mailings. We keep our lists in such 

 a way that we can tell who is ordering 



and who is not. We have adopted 

 rather arbitrary rules — they are based 

 on a combination of experience and 

 common sense — as to just how long we 

 will send certain kinds of ''literature" 

 to certain kinds of customers. And by 

 holding closely to these rules, we keep 

 down our selling expense; our idea is 

 that it is more profitable to spend our 

 money to bring in new, live customers 

 than to spend our money bull-headedly 

 to extract the last possible order from 

 a list that has gone pretty thoroughly 

 dead. 



Answering Seedsmen's Ads. 



Did you ever answer a seedsman's 

 advertisement along late in the winter, 

 when the urge to plant seems to spring 

 up in almost everyone's breast? Of 

 course you did; I don't believe there 

 is a normal individual who has not, at 

 some time or other, filled his name in on 



Seldom have the costs of 

 doing a mail order business 

 in horticultural products 

 been so carefully and def- 

 initely determined as they 

 have been by Rhea F. Elliott, 

 president of the Elliott Nur- 

 sery Co., Pittsburgh, in an 

 article entitled, ''Buying 

 Customers for $1.50 Each/' 

 recently published in Print- 

 ers' Ink Monthly, by the 

 courtesy of whose editor it 

 it reprinted in part here. 

 There is much of value in it 

 to the heads of those firms 

 who deal, either by mail or 

 direct, with the public. 



tlie dotted line of the triangular coupon 

 iind received within a week or so a 

 large hook, l)eautifully garnished in 

 beets iind Golden Bantam sweet corn, 

 in dahlias and zinnias and ludlyhocks. 



But if you are not an inveterate 

 jiardi'uor, perhaps after the first year 

 or so your ardor cooled a little. Or 

 l)erhaps you decided to move into town 

 iind get rid of that daily round-trip in 

 from Westcliester; or anyhow, one of 

 the thousand and one tilings happened 

 that made you no longer a live customer 

 iij- prospect for garden seeds. Yet I am 

 willing to wager that, year after year, 

 you Imvo been receiving each spring — 

 ;ind i)orhaps again in the fall — a cata- 

 logue which cost the advertiser any- 

 where from 10 to 40 cents. And the 

 chances are good that the catalogue 

 goes into the waste basket. 



Xow, the scedsiuon know, no doubt, 



exactly what they are doing. If it did 

 not ])ay them to keep on sending ex- 

 l)ensive literature to every name on 

 their lists, they would doubtless dis- 

 continue tlie practice. But there is 

 enough difference, I suppose, between 

 the seed business and the bulb business 

 so that we cannot afford to do this with 

 our customers. As I have said, it pays 

 us better to keep the new names flow- 

 ing in. 



I do not want to give the impression 

 that we chuck away, regardless, the 

 names of people who do not buy for a 

 season, names that cost us at least $1 

 to get. But we have a well defined 

 method of handling our lists. And it 

 is, I believe, sufficiently different from 

 the ordinary way of handling so that it 

 may be worth describing here. 



Customers on Live List. 



When some one sends in an inquiry — 

 which means, usually, writes for a 

 catalogue — we send him what he re- 

 quests and put him on our live list. 

 We carry him on that list all that year 

 and all of the next year, even though 

 he does not buy. For example, if we 

 receive an inquiry in June, 1920 (or in 

 January, 1920, or November, 1920), we 

 carry the inquirer's name during 1920 

 and 1921. If, by January, 1922, he 

 has not bought, off the live list he goes. 

 That means that no longer does he re- 

 ceive our big catalogues, which cost us 

 anywhere from 10 cents to 30 cents 

 apiece. 



Instead, however, of discarding him 

 as worthless, we continue to solicit his 

 business. But we do not use expensive 

 30-cent catalogues; we use folders that 

 cost us only one-half to one and one- 

 half cents apiece. And these we do 

 not regard as active mail solicitations; 

 rather we consider them as the equiv- 

 alent of a judicious use of oxygen to 

 revive a moribund prospect. 



This folder has a double mission; if 

 it performs either job, we count it sue 

 cessful. What we prefer, of course, is 

 that it will induce the customer to buy. 

 So we devote most of the space to de- 

 scribing the ])roduct and giving prices 

 of a few good values. But then, also, 

 we ])rint a coupon on the folder. This 

 coupon requests a bulb catalogue. And 

 if the customer either buys or asks for 

 a catalogue, his i)late goes back into 

 the live list for two more years. The 

 sjiecial value of these revived names is, 

 of course, that the inquirer is not likely 

 to jiersist in inquiring year after year 

 unless he is in the market and buying 

 liulhs somewhere. As long as he is a 

 buyer of bulbs, it ]»ays us to keep after 

 him. 



Keeping Statistics. 



When office heli> became difficult to 

 (d)taiii, we were forced to discontinue 

 a great many activities that we had re- 

 garded as indispensable. There was no 

 other way to keep our office expense 

 down to a reasonal)le figure. And when 

 we came to this pruning off of a few 

 dollars here and a few dollars there, we 

 had to thiuk all the way down to the 

 bottom of a great many office habits 



