Questions about handwritten direct mail

An Australian direct-mail service that writes letters, cards and envelopes with a real pen held by a writing machine. You supply the message and the recipient list; we produce the pieces and either send the finished job to you or lodge the campaign with Australia Post on your behalf.

They are written with a real ballpoint or rollerball pen, on real paper, one stroke at a time. The hand holding the pen is a machine rather than a person. We are deliberate about that distinction because the alternative — calling it handwriting without qualification — is the sort of claim that falls apart the moment a customer looks closely.

Under casual inspection, generally no: the ink sits in the paper, the pen has pressure and drag, and the letterforms vary from piece to piece. Under deliberate inspection by someone who knows what to look for, often yes. We would rather you know that before you order than discover it afterwards.

A printed font is toner or inkjet on paper: flat, uniform, and identical on every piece. A pen leaves a physical indentation, ink pooling at direction changes, and slight variation in every character. Hold one of each to a light at an angle and the difference is immediate.

Letters, note cards, greeting cards, compliment slips, and the envelope itself. Anything that is text on paper at campaign volume. We do not sign documents where a signature carries legal effect.

A machine that holds a pen and moves it across paper to reproduce handwriting. The term comes from mid-twentieth-century devices used to sign correspondence on behalf of public figures. Modern machines are computer-controlled plotters that write arbitrary text in a defined hand.

Both are possible. Cursive generally reads as more personal; print is easier to read at small sizes and on envelopes. We will show you the options against your actual copy before anything is produced.

It suits any business where a single customer relationship is worth more than a few dollars — real estate, financial services, healthcare, automotive, charities, professional services and ecommerce are the obvious ones. If the margin on a customer is cents, handwritten mail will not pay for itself.

It depends on four things: how many pieces, how many words, whether the envelope is handwritten too, and whether we post it or send the finished job to you. The calculator on the pricing page gives you an indicative figure in a few seconds, and it does not ask for your email address to show you the number.

Because the pen has to travel the distance. A four-hundred-word letter takes roughly four times as long to write as a hundred-word note, and machine time is the main cost in the job.

Yes — $165 for a campaign, covering the handwriting setup, the merge configuration and the proof. It is waived at 5,000 pieces and above.

Yes, and they are applied automatically in the calculator rather than being something you have to negotiate. The rate steps down at intervals from 150 pieces up to 25,000 and above.

Only if you ask us to lodge the campaign. The calculator has two delivery options: we send the finished job to you and you post it yourself, or we lodge it for you and postage is included in the per-piece figure. Postage is charged at what it costs us.

$0.92 per piece at the standard rate, before volume discount. It is usually the highest-value option on the calculator, because the envelope is what decides whether the letter is opened at all.

The calculator shows the figure excluding GST and then adds it on the total line, so you can see both. Prices are in Australian dollars.

No. It is an indicative estimate, and it says so. A quote follows a conversation about your list, your deadline and your artwork, because those are the things that move a price in practice.

Terms are agreed with the quote. Tell us if you need a purchase order, a particular invoicing arrangement or payment in stages, and we will accommodate what we reasonably can.

A plotter holds a real pen and moves it in two axes across the page, lowering and lifting it exactly as a hand does. The letterforms come from a handwriting model rather than a typeface, and the machine varies spacing, slant, baseline and letter shapes so no two pieces are stroke-identical.

No, and that is the point of the variation. Identical letterforms repeating down a page is the single clearest tell that something was printed rather than written, so the model deliberately introduces the small inconsistencies a human hand produces.

Several, ranging from a fast informal scrawl to a careful upright hand. The right one depends on who is supposed to have written the letter — a note from a tradesperson and a note from a private client adviser should not be in the same hand.

It is possible to build a model from samples of a real person’s hand. It takes time and a decent quantity of source writing, so it is a project rather than an option you tick. Ask us if it matters to you.

Blue and black are standard, and blue tends to read as more obviously pen-written because it is not what printers produce. Other colours are possible; ask when you brief us.

Yes. A handwritten signature block is one of the calculator options, and it is written with the pen like everything else rather than reproduced as an image.

As far as your data goes. The simplest version merges a first name. Beyond that, any field in your list can appear anywhere in the copy — suburb, property address, renewal date, last purchase, adviser name. Every piece is written individually, so per-piece variation costs nothing extra in production.

Yes. Conditional copy — one paragraph for one segment, a different paragraph for another — is straightforward. Tell us the rule and the field it keys off.

Accented and non-Latin characters are usually fine, but tell us in advance so we can check the handwriting model covers them rather than discovering a gap at proof stage.

We use it to address and personalise your campaign, and for nothing else. We do not sell it, rent it, market to it, or add it to any list of our own.

Only as long as the campaign needs it, plus a short period in case of a reprint. Ask us to delete it sooner and we will.

Yes. The Spam Act covers electronic messages — email, SMS — and does not apply to physical mail. Addressed direct mail is lawful, and there is no equivalent of an unsubscribe requirement written into statute for it.

Not in the way you do for email. What does apply is the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, which govern how you collected the personal information in the first place and what you may use it for. If the addresses came from your own customers, you are usually on solid ground. If they came from somewhere else, get advice.

ADMA operates a Do Not Mail register. Honouring it is not a statutory obligation for most senders, but suppressing those addresses costs you nothing, saves postage on people who have said they do not want mail, and is the right thing to do.

Yes, even though you are not compelled to. A single line offering to take someone off the list costs you one sentence and buys goodwill from the people most likely to complain otherwise.

Yes, and it describes what we actually do rather than reserving every right a lawyer could think of. It is linked in the footer.

Yes. Autopen Australia operates in Australia and serves Australian businesses. Your data does not need to leave the country for us to run your campaign.

The mechanism is well established: a hand-addressed envelope gets opened more often than an obviously machine-produced one, because it does not look like advertising. What you should be sceptical of is any supplier quoting you a precise open rate or response multiple as though it were a property of the medium. Those numbers depend on your list, your offer and your timing far more than on the pen.

Because we cannot show you where the figure came from. Numbers like that circulate freely in this category with no traceable source, and repeating them would tell you nothing about what your campaign will do. We would rather give you an honest mechanism and let you measure your own result.

Not yet, and we will not invent any. When we have results a customer is happy to have published, they will appear here with the numbers attached and the customer named.

It is more expensive per contact by a wide margin and it reaches far fewer people. It is worth it when a single response is valuable enough to justify the cost, and it is a waste when it is not. Work out what one new customer is worth to you and the arithmetic answers itself.

It costs more and it gets opened more often. Whether that trade is worth taking depends on your margin. For a low-value, high-volume offer, printed mail is the rational choice.

The one with the warmest list and the clearest reason to be writing. Reactivating lapsed customers, following up appraisals that went quiet, thanking people after a purchase — these beat cold prospecting for a first test, because they tell you whether the medium works before you also ask whether your targeting works.