Industry
Handwritten mail for online retailers
Ecommerce has the worst economics of any industry on this site for handwritten mail, and one very good exception. Worth being upfront about both before you spend anything.
When it does not work
A handwritten card costs roughly $1.72 in the parcel and several dollars posted. If your average order contributes fifteen dollars of margin, a card on every order is a meaningful percentage of your profit spent on a gesture — and the same money in better packaging or faster shipping usually does more.
Blanket handwritten cards on every order are almost never the right call. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling handwriting.
When it works very well
- High-margin or considered purchases. Furniture, jewellery, instruments, equipment, anything above a few hundred dollars.
- Second orders, not first. A card when someone comes back is both cheaper (fewer of them) and more effective than one on acquisition.
- Your top decile by lifetime value. The customers you cannot afford to lose, who are currently getting exactly the same automated email as everyone else.
- Win-backs. A card to customers who have not ordered in a year, with no discount attached, tests whether the relationship is still there.
- Recovery. After something went wrong. The one place a written apology is worth almost any cost.
In the parcel, not in the post
Posting a card separately means addressing, envelopes and postage — often more than the card itself. Putting it in the parcel removes all three.
The practical model is batches: we write a run of cards and ship them to your warehouse or fulfilment partner, and they get packed with qualifying orders. You reorder when you are running low, the same way you reorder any other packaging consumable.
The trade-off is that in-parcel cards cannot be personalised to the individual order, because they are written before the order exists. In practice a warm, specific, generic card outperforms a personalised one that arrives a week after the parcel.
Card costs, no envelope
A 45-word card, shipped to you in batches for packing.
| Quantity | Per piece | Campaign total | Volume tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250 | $2.30 | $632 | 250+ pieces |
| 1,000 | $1.72 | $1,892 | 1,000+ pieces |
| 5,000 | $1.44 | $7,947 | 5,000+ pieces |
| 20,000 | $1.40 | $30,859 | 10,000+ pieces |
Indicative only, including GST, 45 words per piece, without a handwritten envelope, excluding postage. Full pricing and calculator.
Questions from online retailers
Can the card go in the parcel instead of the post?
Yes, and for most stores that is the right answer. We write the cards and ship them to your warehouse or 3PL in batches; they get packed with the order. No postage, no addressing, and the card arrives at the exact moment the customer is most receptive.
Can each card name the product they bought?
If the cards go in the parcel, no — those are written ahead of time and are generic by necessity. If the cards are posted separately after the order, then yes, the product and order date can be merged in.
What order value justifies a handwritten card?
As a rough guide, when contribution margin on the order is at least ten times the cost of the card. At roughly $1.72 a card in the parcel, that means orders with about $17 of margin. Below that, spend the money on the packaging instead.
Do handwritten cards actually reduce churn?
We are not going to give you a number, because ours would be borrowed from someone else’s store. What we would say is that it is trivially testable: hold out a random 20% of qualifying orders, run it for a quarter, and compare repeat rate. That is a real answer about your customers rather than a statistic about someone else’s.
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Test it on your top decile
Not every order — your best customers, or your second-order cohort. Tell us roughly how many that is per month and we will price a batch programme.