Risky promotion package brings investment newsletter 764% more profit----and a Gold Award.

Cabot Market Letter, edited by Canton Lutts for 29 years, is one of a handful of successful investment newsletters that has managed to remain independent. Most investment advisories have been acquired by large publishers. The newsletter's marketing team, Creative Direct Marketing Group, faced the tough challenge of beating a low--cost self--mailer that had been steadily producing subscriptions for over a year and beating all other challenges.

"Beating a strong control--especially a low-cost control--is never easy," says CDMG president Craig Huey. He began with these marketing objectives:

* To successfully beat the control package. To not only produce far greater response but to do it at a far lower cost per subscription.

* To help separate Carlton Lutts and the Cabot Market Letter from the rest of the competition in the marketplace, a marketplace that includes over 1,200 investment newsletters.

* To get prospects excited about Cabot vs. all the other competitive packages that they receive promising high profits.

Huey, working with copywriter Paula Collins and designer Shelley Freeman, describes their creative solution: "In order to break through the clutter, the hook was the incredible and sensational story about a company that had developed a new pollution-free hydrogen-based energy source that would essentially eliminate the gasoline engine.

"The creative team decided to use a traditional #10 envelope with a very long 16-page informational sales letter to educate and inform the investor as to why this company's stock was going to be one of the most profitable stocks of the decade.

"Emphasizing Carlton Lutts's established credibility, we:

* highlighted the stock,

* explained the unique benefits of the newsletter, and

* created a powerful hook with six free bonuses--the lead one, Power Without Pollution, pertaining to the exciting stock named in the piece."

The premiums are promoted both in the sales letter and on an 8 1/2 x 14" glossy flyer which also carries photos and bio's of Lutts and his co-editor, son Timothy W. Lutts. The flyer also carries the order form, which is a copy-heavy Special Savings Certificate.

Stressing the informational nature of the promotion, it also includes a monarch-size flyer headlined 10 Crucial Checkpoint: What You Need to Know Before You Buy Stock.

Huey concludes: "We tested two creative approaches. Both beat the control package. However, this winning package not only beat the control by a wide margin, it also generated 764% more profit.

"The Cabot Market Letter does not command the capital to do the kind of marketing similar to his competitors with deep pockets. But, the results of the mailing package exceeded all expectations."

The judges in the 1999 Newsletter Promotion Awards Competition thought leading off by promoting one stock rather than the newsletter itself was a risky undertaking, but the heavy copy (note the wall-to-wall envelope teaser copy) proved compelling and informative enough to draw in record numbers of subscribers. The judges gave it a Gold Award in the investment newsletter category.