Well, it’s been about five weeks since I sent out my 200 piece mailing. Since my last update (two weeks ago) I have not received anymore dollar bills in the mail. What does this mean? Well, first of all, it indicates to me that the person that originally wrote this letter dramatically exaggerated that he got a 9-19% response from his letter. I got a 1% response so far. I have heard from some of you that a 1% response is considered average in the direct mail business. A 1% response sending out just 200 letters like the letter in our experiment suggests will NOT get you your money back. At this rate, I will be surprised if I get enough money back to take my wife to TACO BELL much less OUTBACK for dinner…
It has just been a little over a month, so to call this a legitimate experiment, we should wait another 6-8 weeks before making serious judgement calls. It has been brought to my attention that there MAY be more than two people from my mailing list that are participating; they just did not send the one-dollar bills to the people on the list like they were supposed to. I must admit that this concept intrigues me, though. Call me a sucker, but I know the math works if you can find a way to make sure the system is cheat proof. I am investigating something else that shows some promise. I will report more later after my investigation.
Happy Hunting!
Why Is This Not A Chain Letter? (The Experiment) 