Ask the average direct marketer to name the industry’s pioneers, and they will probably say Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. But there’s an important omission in that list: National Cash Register Co., a B2B concern that was sending targeted mail way before the big catalog houses tried it.

The company was founded in 1880 by John H. Patterson, a store owner in Coalton, OH. He had bought one of the new-fangled machines, and was so impressed with it that he purchased the factory that made it.

But he had to persuade retailers that the contraptions were worth having, so he started advertising in magazines and by mail. His sales message? That “every merchant must account for cash, the cash register accounts for cash, therefore, every merchant needs a cash register,” said E.D. Gibbs, who joined the company as advertising manager in 1890.

By 1906, NCR had an advertising agency, an ad school and a print shop that printed 15 million booklets and magazines a year. Its envelope presses could handle 13,500 envelopes per hour, according to an article that year in Printers’ Ink. And Patterson maintained tight control.

“My time must be given to selling and advertising,” Patterson told Gibbs. “I can get all the people that I want, skilled mechanics, to make my product.”

In line with this, the firm kept an extensive library of advertising trade journals, and an ad clip file, featuring both copy and graphics. It borrowed one device, customer testimonials, from patent medicine advertisers. The only difference was that NCR’s were real.

In a typical direct mail campaign in the late 1800s, Patterson sent 18 pieces in 18 days to 5,000 merchants. Each one reported the number the person had already received. Typical copy in this series: “This is the seventeenth time you have heard from us, when are you going to write to us?”

Gibbs, speaking at a convention in 1924, described Patterson’s thinking about direct mail:

“A man can surround himself with all the brick and concentrate and masonry and wood and iron bars—even in a prison, But if his name is accessible to you, Uncle Sam will take your message to him.

“Don’t worry about what is going into the wastebasket. If your piece of printed matter has done its work, let the waste-basket get it. It has got to go somewhere. You don’t want the man to take it home and keep it as a souvenir, do you?

“We send printed matter in advance of the salesman. We send it during the interval that lapses between the call of the salesman and the securing of the order. We do it to help the salesman, but we don’t do it to sell the cash register.”

“Know your subject, use big ideas, say precisely what you mean, use short words, use short sentences, be brief, make paragraphs short, put only one thought in a sentence, tell the truth, avoid superlatives, write so a child can understand, be human, don’t imitate, know your prospect, write to impress the reader and not yourself.”

Good advice for those doing email marketing today.