The technical target. Vivian Sudhalter, director of marketing for Macmillan Software Company of New York, faces a slightly different challenge than Sullivan and Schwartz selling expensive ($495 to $2,000 per product) scientific software to scientists, engineers, and researchers. According to Sudhalter, the two markets--technical vs. consumer--are quite different.
 
"Despite what tradition tells you, the engineering and scientific market does not respond to promise or benefit-oriented copy." says Sudhalter. "They respond to features. Your copy must tell them exactly what they are getting and what your product can do. Scientists and engineers are put off by copy that sounds like advertising jargon."
 
Sudhalter's lead-generating self-mailer for Macmillan's Asyst and Asystant software follows this mode. The copy has a scientist-to-scientist tone and talks about such arcane matters as Hermitian matrices, spectral slicing and QR factorization. Yet it is successful, having generated a four percent response with Macmillan's in-house prospect list.
 
Sudhalter's technical audience seems to respond well to visual treatments of complex concepts. "Scientists are excited when you show them something rather then tell them," she says.
 
What types of visuals are used to illustrate a mailing piece promoting software? "Show screens of your program if they are unusual or interesting," Sutter advises. "A diagram with call-outs is much more effective than volumes of prose. Scientists like tables and graphs. They will ignore copy but pour over a table of specifications and features. And they resent it if you talk down to them. When writing copy, don't try to be clever; just give information about the product."
 
Sudhalter says that finding good lists is a problem when using direct mail to sell high-tech. Because of poor results with outside lists, she mails primarily to Macmillan's in-house list--people who have previously inquired about Macmillan software through advertising or publicity. But she will use outside lists to announce a new product or product enhancement.
 
Sudhalter has experimented with a variety of formats in her career, but chose a self-mailer for the Asyst package because self-mailers are less costly than the standard direct-mail package (consisting of outer envelope, letter, brochure and reply form). She says that skyrocketing paper prices and production expenses have made it increasingly difficult to do cost-effective mailings.
 
"Today I find that there are two kinds of direct mail that work,"  she says. "For a cold mailing, you've got to go for glitz. You can't send out a two-color mailing and expect to generate much excitement. You need four-color, slick design, high-quality paper, slick copy and a larger typeface than the old-fashioned tiny type used in traditional direct mail packages.
 
"However," Suchalter says, "a cheapo mailing can work well with your in-house customer and prospect list." To prove the point, she recently mailed a one-page form letter to prospects who had telephoned in responses to ads and PR (no bingo-card inquiries were on the list). The response rate was more than 12 percent. Why so successful with such a simple package? "People who are already interested in your product just want the facts," she says.
 
High impact. Rochester, NY-based Xerox also is following Sudhalter's "go-for-the-glitz" formula. The company is investing heavily in "high impact" direct mail--expensive three-dimensional pieces designed to stand out among the clutter of direct marketing that deluges today's professional.
 
To launch its new Conference Copier--an electronic "blackboard" with a copier attachment that can make reproductions of anything written or drawn on the board--Xerox targeted several major business centers, starting with San Francisco.
 
In each city, Xerox compiled a list of approximately 500 key corporate decision-makers. The company sent each prospect on the list a series of four high-impact, three-dimensional mailers based on a theme showing how the communications process for meetings has evolved. The first mailing contained a miniature rosetta stone; the second, a quill pen and parchment; the third, a slate and chalk. The fourth mailing introduced the new Conference Copier, which sells for $3,295.
 
Although Xerox would not release response figures, test results are encouraging," according to Dick Martin, manager of Advertising and Sales Promotion for Direct Marketing.
 
The high-impact mailing was just part of the Conference Copier direct-mail campaign. Another mailing, an invitation to a product demonstration, was sent to 15,000 prospects in each target city. In San Francisco, approximately 150 of the people invited actually attended the demonstration.
 
Kam Shenai, product manager for the Conference Copier, points out that for mailings inviting people to a public seminar or demonstration, the mailing list must be carefully segmented by zip code. The reason The farther the prospect's office from the hotel where the demo is being held, the less likely he or she is to attend.
 
A third mailing piece in the program was a self-mailer sent bulk rate to approximately 200,000 prospects in each target city.
 
"The self-mailer is the most economical format," Martin says. "We tested the self-mailer vs. a standard package, and the self-mailer generated a better response."
 
In an unusual offer for a product as costly as the Conference Copier, the self-mailer asks for the order directly. By giving a credit card number or sending a check for 10 percent of the purchase price, prospects can try the copier free for 15 days.
 

So far, the self-mailer has generated many sales. Says Martin "We have learned that it is possible to sell high-priced equipment directly by mail and phone. And we do."
 
The critical list, "Regardless of whether you're about to do your first mailing or your one-thousandth, no factor is more critical to your success than choosing the right mailing list," says Steve Roberts, a senior account supervisor with Edith Roman Associates, a firm that specializes in high-tech mailing lists. "The best list can pull 10 times the response as the worst list for the identical mailing piece."
 
Roberts explains how his clients use both response and compiled lists.
 
"Response lists are generally better," says Roberts. "People who have previously responded to direct mail are twice as likely to respond to your offer as people who aren't proven direct-mail buyers. With compiled lists, you risk mailing to the one-third of Americans who don't read direct mail."
 
But Roberts does recommend compiled lists for total penetration of a particular market. "Let's say you want to reach every manufacturer in Kalamazoo, Mi," he says. "Only a compiled list can do that. A response list won't have all the names, because not every manufacturer in Kalamazoo has responded to direct mail."
 
The best high-tech lists around, says Roberts, are publishers' subscription lists for controlled-circulation publications. "You have a greater degree of selectivity with a controlled vs. paid circulation list, because people must give a lot of information about themselves to quality for the free subscription," he says.
 
An example of a "hot" high-tech mailing list, says Roberts, is the subscription list of NASA Tech Briefs, an official publication of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This list allows direct marketers to target recipients by job function, type of industry, number of engineers at the location and--importantly--type of products and components purchased.