The Copywriter - Getting Deeper

Here’s a chapter from my book The Accidental Copywriter.

Please bear in mind I used to be a hairdresser. The book reveals my slow accidental transition into a copywriter.

Here goes.

Getting Deeper into Marketing & Writing

I’d cut my teeth in my own hair salon business as far as creating ads goes. Although I had to create everything from scratch and create what was needed from flyers to vouchers, my biggest winners were always direct mail.

From as early as 1992 direct mail was the number one way for me to take my business into my marketplace. I never mailed blind and always mailed my existing salon databases.

This wasn’t that easy for a couple of reasons. First, computers in small businesses like mine just didn’t really exist. All of my client’s records were on paper cards. The letters had to be printed at the actual printers unlike how we can very easily do them in our homes or offices today. When computers arrived it was a slow and very laborious job but a job that still had me mailing a minimum of 500+ direct mail pieces every single Tuesday for well over a decade.

When I really got heavily into direct mail in the salon I started using a dot-matrix printer in the salon itself. It could take days to print off 500 letters. The paper also had to be torn from the side perforations and the main sheets also came in one long roll but had perforations. If you don't know the paper was almost like on one endless toilet roll. The noise from the printing was like a small machine gun in the salon!

But I did it because this was business building and it had to be done.

Mastery over direct mail completely exploded my salon business and frankly, I would mail for any reason if I thought it would increase my business – and it did.

Reminders, birthdays, anniversaries, sales, new staff, new products, missing clients, and more, I just never stopped. Each theme for each campaign needed its own copy. I wrote the copy. When I did stop mailing guess what happened? Business slowed. There were times now and then when I would fall out of the habit due to being busy and maybe not mailing for a month. Rare, but it did happen. The effect on the salon left gaping holes in the appointment book. Eventually, I simply made it a fixed rule that the mailings were printed and stamped on Monday and Tuesday. Then they went out into homes as always.

My letters always had a headline relevant to the reason for sending them.

For example, my reminder letters had one headline I never changed. It was this.

‘Do you realise it’s now just over 5-weeks since your last haircut? That means your hair is half an inch longer

Birthdays were simple ones also…

‘Happy birthday Susan, have a wonderful day

And the letter I would send to missing clients would say,

‘Missing. I noticed you are missing from our salon and we’d love you to come back’

This stuff sounds so basic as I write it here, but the letters worked and worked like crazy. Our missing campaigns always pulled an incredible 65% back into the salon and that was a ton of cash. Not bad when an average direct mail is around 0.5%!

And of course, I had to write them despite the fact I had no idea or had never been trained to write copy by anyone. I just did it on an intuitive thought of what the clients think and want.

My biggest response campaign was always

A letter that said… 

When’s The Last Time You Changed Your Hair,? as a headline at the top of the letter.

The letter then went into a short explanation of how we were the only and best redesign specialists for hair.

It gave a short story and a few bullets of why we specialise and then a simple call to action. This was the one letter and ad that I ran forever.

But honestly, there was never a format at all. I simply saw good ads and felt if they worked on me when I read them and knew like in my old punk days that I should copy them. 

The salon was buzzing!

From my book - The Accidental Copywriter

Alan Forrest Smith