Handwritten mail on a standing schedule

What exists today, stated plainly

There is no CRM integration. No API, no webhook, no app in anyone’s marketplace. If you have landed here from a search for triggered or CRM-connected direct mail, that is the thing you most need to know, and you should know it in the first paragraph rather than after filling in a form.

What does run today is a scheduled batch:

1. You agree a cadence - monthly is usual - and a day of the month.
2. You export the segment from whatever system already holds it: your CRM, practice software, booking system, store admin or a spreadsheet.
3. You send it over, one row per recipient, merge fields in their own columns.
4. We write the batch against the message variants already agreed, so there is no new sign-off every month - only when the wording changes.
5. It goes out, back to you or lodged on your behalf.

Setting up the export as a saved report or a scheduled email from your own system takes an afternoon once, and then it is someone spending two minutes a month.

Why the batch is not the compromise it sounds like

The instinct is that a real-time trigger must be better. For physical mail it mostly is not, and the reason is arithmetic rather than opinion.

A letter has to be written, checked, packed, lodged and carried. Whatever the trigger does, the piece lands days later. A trigger that fires the instant someone lapses and a batch that runs on the first Tuesday of the month put the envelope in the same letterbox in the same week. You are paying for engineering that the postal system then absorbs entirely.

Where the difference is real - an abandoned basket, a same-day appointment confirmation, a password reset - mail is the wrong channel and no amount of automation fixes that. Send an email. Use the letter for the moments that are worth a letter.

There is one advantage to the batch that automation cannot give you: somebody looks at the list before it goes out. An automated pipeline will cheerfully write to a deceased customer, a duplicate record or a test account, because it has no opinion. A monthly file that a person glances at will not.

What people run as a standing programme

• Welcome and onboarding. Everyone who became a customer last month. The single most reliable use of a recurring batch, because the trigger is unambiguous and the moment matters.
• Anniversaries and renewals. Policy, membership, subscription or settlement dates falling next month - which is exactly the kind of thing a monthly export is good at and a human is bad at remembering.
• Going-quiet triggers. Everyone who crossed your dormancy threshold this month, caught early. Reactivation is what you do when that has already been left too long.
• Thank-yous above a threshold. Every order, donation or referral over whatever figure makes it worth a card. More on thank-you cards.
• Milestones. Tenth purchase, five years as a client, a birthday if you hold one honestly.

The retention page covers what to write for each of these in more detail.

What your data needs to look like

The thing that decides whether a programme survives past month three is not the writing - it is whether the export is clean enough that nobody has to fix it by hand every month.

• One row per recipient. Not one row per order.
• Address split into its own columns - line one, line two, suburb, state, postcode. A single blob field will need unpicking every month.
• Merge fields in their own columns too, already in the form they should be written in. If the letter should say “Sarah”, the column should hold “Sarah”, not “Ms Sarah J Whitfield”.
• A variant column if the batch carries more than one message, so the file itself says who gets which.
• A suppression flag you control, for anyone who should never be written to.

What it costs

No subscription, no platform fee, no minimum term. Each batch is priced at the published rates, so a programme costs what the same volume of one-off work would cost.

A minimum 100-piece batch with a short 60-word note and a handwritten envelope is about $4.00 a piece. The minimum applies per batch rather than per month, which is the main thing to plan around: if your monthly volume is below it, run the programme quarterly instead and it will cost less per piece as well. The calculator will price any batch size.

When this is the wrong answer

If you want something that fires off a webhook in seconds, we are not it today, and pretending otherwise would waste a call for both of us. If a genuine integration is a requirement rather than a preference, say so at the first email and we will tell you honestly where we are.

If your monthly qualifying volume is a dozen people, run it yourself. Twelve cards a month is fifteen minutes and it will be better for being genuinely personal.