How to send handwritten letters in bulk

Written by Autopen Australia · Updated 23 August 2026

1. Decide who is on the list before you write anything

The single biggest determinant of whether a bulk campaign works is who receives it, and that decision is usually made last and casually. Resist the instinct to mail everyone because the marginal per-piece cost feels small — at three or four dollars a piece, it is not small.

Good bulk lists have a shape:

• A shared reason for being written to, that the reader would recognise.
• A recent enough relationship that your name means something.
• A value per conversion that clears the cost per piece many times over.

A list of “everyone in the database” has none of those, and it is the most common brief we would talk someone out of.

2. Clean the file

At a few hundred records you can read the file. At twenty thousand you cannot, and the errors are certain rather than possible. What to fix before writing:

• Duplicates. Two handwritten letters to the same person is worse than none — it visibly reveals the machinery.
• Malformed addresses. Missing postcodes, unit numbers in the street field, state abbreviations in the suburb column.
• Business names in the first-name column. Extremely common in CRM exports and immediately visible in a personalised greeting.
• Opt-outs. Anyone who has asked not to be contacted must be removed, and the ADMA Do Not Mail service exists for people who have opted out of addressed marketing mail generally. What the rules require.
• The deceased and the departed. Ugly to say, but a letter to someone who has died is the worst outcome a campaign can produce.

3. Write a message that survives the whole list

Copy for a bulk handwritten campaign has one constraint that copy for a single letter does not: every sentence has to be true and sensible for every row. Test each sentence against the extremes in your data, not the median.

Keep it short. Length costs money per piece and readers per letter, and at bulk volumes both compound. How to write merged sentences that do not break.

4. Proof against the worst rows

A proof of the median letter tells you almost nothing. Ask for the letters produced by your longest field value, your shortest, your empty one, the one in all capitals and the one with an ampersand. If those five read correctly, the run will be fine.

5. Choose the delivery route deliberately

Above a few thousand pieces, postage becomes the largest line in the budget and Australia Post’s bulk options change the number materially — bulk lodgement from 300 letters, Promo Post from 4,000 barcoded letters, Charity Mail for endorsed DGRs.

There is a real trade-off here: the cheapest rates generally require barcoding and a machine-readable address block, which sits awkwardly with a fully handwritten envelope. Cost it both ways before committing to the format. The full breakdown.

6. Release in waves

Twenty thousand letters landing in one week produces a response spike your phones may not survive, and a campaign that generates calls nobody answers is worse than no campaign. Waves also give you an option you would otherwise not have: change the letter after seeing what the first wave did.

7. Set up measurement before it goes out

A unique phone number, a unique landing page, or a code the reader quotes. Without one of those you will finish the campaign knowing only that some things happened afterwards.

And measure contribution, not responses. How to structure the measurement.

8. Brief the people who answer the phone

The most commonly skipped step. Whoever picks up should know the letter went out, what it said, and who received it. A recipient who rings about a letter and reaches someone who has never heard of it has had a worse experience than if you had never written.

What we handle at bulk volumes, and what it costs.