Anatomy of a Forward

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JOB NO. FW-0012 / INTERNAL / DO NOT MAIL
Anatomy of a Forward
One chain letter, taken apart line by line.

CLIENT	Everybody's aunt
MEDIA	E-mail, forwarded
BUDGET	$0.00
DEADLINE	Seven minutes ago
COPY	A. Ratcliff
STATUS	Killed

At work, before anything goes in the mail, we take it apart. Every line in a direct-mail letter has a job to do, and if nobody in the room can say what the job is, the line comes out. It's my favorite part of the week.

Here's something they don't teach you: chain letters are the most successful direct mail ever written, and nobody got paid for a word of them. Millions of people have tested them for free. The lines that didn't work got dropped somewhere along the way, and the lines that did got copied. What's left is lean, mean copy.

So here is my letter again, line by line, with the family each trick comes from and the reason it works. Every line I quote is mine. I didn't borrow from any real chain letter, and I won't pass one along here either. The tricks are old. The words aren't.

The five families

LUCK CHAINS	The oldest. Keep it moving and good things happen. Stop it and they don't.
MONEY CHAINS	Send a little to the top of a list. Wait for a lot to come back.
PETITIONS	Add your name, and the list will be delivered somewhere important.
VIRUS WARNINGS	An alarm about a dangerous e-mail, which travels by e-mail.
SICK-CHILD PLEAS	A child needs help, and passing the message on will somehow give it.

For where they all came from, go see Please Do Not Break the Chain by Frances Kimball, a retired history teacher in New Hampshire. She has a timeline that runs from the Middle Ages to e-mail, and a shoebox of chain letters she's been keeping since 1947. I've been in this business a year and a half. She has me beat by a few centuries.

FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW:

FAMILY: All five.
The envelope. In direct mail, the outside of the envelope has exactly one job, and that's to get opened. Every "FW:" is a tiny testimonial before you've read a word: somebody opened this, and somebody thought it was worth passing on. Twelve of them is twelve somebodies. We would give anything for an envelope like that.

I don't usually send these. You know me.

FAMILY: All five. This isn't in the letter. It's what the person forwarding it adds on top.
The lift note. Some mailings have a second, smaller note folded in with the letter, usually signed by somebody other than the main writer, telling you why you ought to read it. That's a lift note. The friend's line on top of a forward is the best lift note ever written, because it comes from somebody you actually know. The letter borrows her good name, and she never notices she lent it.

THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE CHAIN LETTERS!!!!!

FAMILY: Luck chains.
Answer the objection first. Every salesman learns this one in his first week. Say the thing the customer is about to think before he can think it, and it's oddly hard for him to think it afterward. Five exclamation points is a lot. I counted the real ones in my inbox for a week, and five was low.

This message was started in 1954 by a lighthouse keeper in Nova Scotia ... By last count it has circled the globe nine times.

FAMILY: Luck chains. The oldest trick in the oldest family.
Where it's from. Old things seem true. A specific beginning (a lighthouse! Nova Scotia!) sounds like the kind of detail somebody must have checked. And "circled the globe" makes you the next link in something enormous. Nobody wants to be the link that broke.

forward it to TEN (10) people within SEVEN (7) MINUTES of reading this sentence.

FAMILY: Luck chains.
The deadline. Our letters say "Offer ends Friday" for the same reason: a reader with time to think is a reader who doesn't act. The paper chain letters used to give you days. On e-mail they can give you minutes, so they do. Notice the numbers are written twice, as a word and as a numeral. That's from contracts and checks, and it makes a silly deadline look official.

Before you go one line further, MAKE A WISH. ... The computer can tell.

FAMILY: Luck chains.
The involvement device. That's our name for the stickers, the scratch-off spots, and the little YES token you peel off and stick in the other box. Anything that gets your hands moving before your head catches up. Once you've made the wish, you've joined. It's your wish riding on it now, not theirs.

Harriet Cochran of Tulsa, Oklahoma, forwarded it to twelve people.

FAMILY: Luck chains, and money chains, which list the people who got rich.
Testimonials. Every one has a name, a town and a number. Being specific is the cheapest way there is to sound true. "A woman" is a rumor. "Harriet Cochran of Tulsa" is a person. And nobody calls Tulsa to check.

A man in Duluth ignored it. Three days later his toaster unionized.

FAMILY: Luck chains.
Fear of losing. People will work harder not to lose a dollar than to find one. Every coupon that says "Don't miss out!" is betting on it. The old letters' dooms were serious, and I'm not going to repeat them. Mine is a toaster. It's the one part of my letter I'd call an improvement.

It has been CONFIRMED by: The National Institute of Electronic Mail (Duluth office). A man at the phone company.

FAMILY: Virus warnings, mostly.
Borrowed authority. An official-sounding name that nobody can look up, and a man who is never named. Real warnings about real viruses come from the person who looks after the computers where you work, or from whoever makes your virus program, and they never ask you to send them to everybody you know.

a large company (they asked us not to say which one) will donate ONE CENT to help Dylan, age 7

FAMILY: Sick-child pleas.
The strongest family there is, because it asks you to help a child, and you'd feel terrible not to. I swapped the sick child for a toothpick tower on purpose. I'm not going to make a joke out of a sick kid. Two plain facts: there's no way for a company to count how many times an e-mail gets forwarded, and no company pays for forwards. If you want to help a sick child, send a check to a children's hospital. It gets there.

If you get an e-mail called "A Little Something For You," DO NOT OPEN IT!!!

FAMILY: Virus warnings.
Fear, plus a good deed. Passing on a warning feels like helping, which is why careful, sensible people send these. The joke is that the warning is the thing filling up everybody's mailbox. Look at the last line, too: warning people "counts toward your ten." One letter, two families. That's what we call efficient.

Send ONE (1) NICKEL to the name at number 1. ... In six weeks you will get 15,625 nickels.

FAMILY: Money chains.
Greed, made small. A nickel doesn't feel like a risk, and the arithmetic does the selling: 5, 25, 125, 625, 3,125, 15,625. What it doesn't mention is that by the sixth round, 15,625 brand-new people have to join just to keep your name moving, and eight rounds after that the list needs more people than there are on Earth. Frances Kimball does the arithmetic on her page better than I can. Also: a money chain sent through the mail is against the law. The Postal Inspection Service treats it as an illegal lottery. My nickels are a joke. Please don't mail anybody a nickel.

When this reaches 1,000 names, somebody will print it out and take it to CONGRESS

FAMILY: Petitions.
Belonging. Signing makes you part of something, and it feels like doing your civic duty in four seconds. But the "somebody" never turns up, and nobody in Washington is waiting for a list of names that ends in "ok, ok, keep it going!!!!" If you care about something, write your congressman one letter with your own name and address on it. One real letter beats a thousand forwarded names.

Now SCROLL DOWN to see if your wish will come true. . . . keep going

FAMILY: Luck chains.
The teaser. It's the "Important information inside!" on the envelope, stretched out over twenty lines. Every "keep going" promises the payoff is just one more line away. It works on me too. I wrote it, and I still scrolled.

FORWARD THIS TO NO ONE.

FAMILY: None.
The P.S. In a sales letter the P.S. is the part that gets read when nothing else does, so it's where we always put the offer one more time. I put the truth there instead.

One last thing, from the inside.

When my firm sends you a letter, there's a company name on it, an address and a phone number, and you can say no. You can throw it out, call and ask to be taken off the list, or write back and complain, and somebody will have to read it. A chain letter has no return address and nobody you can say no to. That's how you can tell them apart. Anything that won't tell you who sent it is asking you for something it doesn't want to get caught asking for.

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Adam Ratcliff / Milwaukee, Wisconsin / [email protected]
Last updated Saturday, September 25, 1999