Bill Jayme must be smiling somewhere.
His old letter for Utne magazine, the one that begins “Utne rhymes with chutney,” is back in the mail. And though much has changed since Jayme wrote it in 1984, it's once again the control.
“The outer envelope has changed several times, but not the core of the piece — an order card, a two-page letter and a two-page lift letter,” says circulation director Jeremy Wieland.
How does a letter whose author died three years ago regain the top slot?
Actually, it never lost it. The letter disappeared only because Utne “walked away, cold turkey,” from direct mail almost four years ago.
That vacation started in December 2000 when the progressive-culture digest canceled a 500,000-piece mailing. A 150,000-piece test the following autumn failed to perform, and in 2002 “we didn't mail anything, not a lick,” Wieland says.
Why turn away from mail when newsstand sales had also taken a hit?
“Direct mail is incredibly expensive and we're supposed to be an environmentally friendly magazine,” Wieland explains.
Yes, but how do you make a rate base of 225,000 without mailing?
Utne tried several things. For one, it exchanged insert cards with small-circulation magazines. But that, Wieland continues, was “a lot of logistical work for what ended up being very little payback.”
The result was predictable. “We plugged some holes where we could, and we decided at the end of 2003 that direct mail remained not only scalable, but one of the most efficient means of adding subscribers to our file.”
The magazine mailed 500,000 pieces in February (on post-consumer recycled paper), and another 500,000 last month. Prospects were once again informed by Jayme that Utne is “independent, unbiased, revealing, irreverent, comprehensive, authoritative, spirited, visionary, forthright, honest, and a blueprint for social betterment. It's also fun to read in the tub.”
But Wieland's team also tested some new creative. A team headed by former editor Jay Walljasper came up with a piece referred to in-house as the “Jay letter.”
“We're not owned by a media conglomerate — or one of the political think tanks or lobbying groups,” it says. “We're not a cookie-cutter publisher, assigning articles based on the latest focus group findings. We are a general interest magazine in an era of specialization.”
The results to date show that Jayme is still the champ — but barely. The new letter “has not beaten the Jayme letter yet, but it's also not lost to the Jayme letter yet,” Wieland says.
The magazine has increased its net response by 40% by dropping its price point from “our standard introductory offer of $14.97 to 12 bucks,” Wieland says. On that basis, the Jay letter and the Jayme letter are neck-and-neck.
So why is Jayme surviving?
“You're not going to bump a control with a new piece just for the sake of bumping it,” he says. “You really want to thump the control before you switch over.”
But Wieland acknowledges that the current test is “not a fair [one]. We're price testing on 10 bucks on the Jayme piece, and we're going to try that with the new creative as well.”
He also says the initial pay-up is slower for the Jayme letter. “Jayme lags for six or eight weeks, then it kicks in.”
Wieland describes the audience as “liberal and progressive, but not exclusively — we do have a fair number of readers who skew to the hard-core libertarian front.” The best lists tend to come from left-leaning political magazines and nonprofit groups.
Jayme, who died in 2001, wrote many classic direct mail letters, several of which were still being mailed long after they were written. For example, his 1951 “Cool Friday” letter for Life magazine, which began with “It was a cool Friday in November,” was still being sent well into the 1960s.
With his partner, designer Heikki Ratalahti, Jayme helped launch several magazines, including Mother Jones, Saveur and New York.
How did he write? “A lot of writers say they pick their Aunt Bessie to write a letter to, or a girl who they met on the bus, but I never picked out one person,” Jayme said in a 1997 interview. “I wrote for myself.”
