WE’VE ENTERED AN ERA in which sending 5 million e-mails isn’t a major novelty. Thus, a new significance appears, to haunt us creative types:
Word massaging, which might result in a one-tenth of one percent improvement in response, never achieved much attention when the typical direct marketer mailed 10,000 or even 100,000 packages. But lifting one of those bulk e-mails from 2% to 2.002% can mean an extra thousand responses, or more.
So a simple technique I call word expansion makes more of a difference today than it did a couple of years ago. (Understand, please: It always has made a difference, but the visibility of the difference has increased.)
Open All the Stops
One example of word expansion is equally valuable as word contraction. Suppose you offer a special discount on weekdays only. You may have written,
