Use cases
What people actually use this for
Handwritten mail is not worth sending for everything. It is worth sending when a single response is worth considerably more than the postage - which is a narrower set of situations than most suppliers will admit, and a genuinely valuable one.
The pages below are organised by what you are trying to achieve rather than by what gets written, because that is the decision that comes first. If you already know you want letters, cards or envelopes, the services pages cover the formats, and industries covers what tends to work in particular trades.
Customer reactivation
When: You have a list of people who used to buy and stopped.
Reach dormant and lapsed customers with a handwritten letter that gets opened. How a win-back campaign runs, what to write, what it costs and how to measure it.
Customer retention
When: You want to stop the next lot of customers drifting in the first place.
Welcome, onboarding, anniversary, renewal and referral mail run as a standing monthly programme rather than a one-off campaign. What to send and when.
Thank-you cards
When: Somebody did something worth acknowledging and the moment keeps getting missed.
Business thank-you cards written with a real pen - after a purchase, a referral, a donation or a sponsorship. What to write, when to send it, and what it costs.
Prospecting
When: You are writing to people who have never heard of you.
Prospecting letters and B2B outreach written with a real pen. Why cold mail lives or dies on the envelope, and what the economics have to look like first.
The test that applies to all of them
Before the creative, before the list, before ringing anyone: work out what one response is worth to you in gross margin, and divide the cost of the campaign by it. That gives you the number of responses you need to break even, and it is usually either obviously fine or obviously hopeless.
Handwritten mail earns its cost where a single response is worth hundreds - a listing, a policy, a returning patient, a lapsed donor, a commercial contract. If your contribution per conversion is fifteen dollars, no amount of good writing fixes the arithmetic, and we would rather say so before you spend anything.
The calculator gives you the cost side of that division for any combination, without asking for an email address.
Doing them in the wrong order is the common mistake
Most businesses arrive wanting the one at the bottom of that list. Prospecting is the campaign people picture when they think about direct mail, and it is the hardest of the four: you are writing to strangers, the response is the lowest of any list type, and you find out slowly.
If you have a customer file you have not written to, work it first. It costs the same per piece and the published benchmarks put a house list at roughly double the response of a cold one, with a wider gap again on return. More usefully, it tells you whether mail suits your business at all before you spend money finding out on people who have never heard of you. The order that works is: thank the people who just bought, win back the ones who stopped, keep the ones you have, and only then go looking for new ones.
What all four have in common
Whichever one you are doing, the same four things decide whether it works, and none of them is the writing.
- The list, above everything. Who you write to matters more than what you send them, by a margin the benchmarks are consistent about. An hour spent cleaning addresses is worth more than a day spent on the copy.
- The envelope. It decides whether any of the rest is read. A printed window envelope containing a beautifully written letter is money spent on something nobody opened.
- One next step. A number a person answers, or a short link. Not four options and a QR code.
- A response path you can count. Decided before anything is posted, not after the first reply arrives.
What we write, and what we do not
We write letters, cards and envelopes with a real ballpoint pen held by a machine, on stock you supply, from one hundred pieces upwards. Every piece can carry different merge content in the same hand as the rest of the sentence.
We do not write your copy, supply lists, print anything, or design stationery. There is no CRM integration and no API today. If any of those is what you actually need, we are the wrong supplier for that part and would rather say so at the first email than at the quote.
Running one of these as a standing programme
Most of these work better as something that happens every month than as a campaign that happens once. Welcome letters, anniversaries, renewals and going-quiet triggers all have a natural monthly rhythm, and the batch that goes out on the first Tuesday is the one that is still running a year later. How a recurring batch works, and what it does not do yet.
Keep reading
Customer reactivation
Reach dormant and lapsed customers with a handwritten letter that gets opened. How a win-back…
Prospecting
Prospecting letters and B2B outreach written with a real pen. Why cold mail lives or dies on …
Customer retention
Welcome, onboarding, anniversary, renewal and referral mail run as a standing monthly program…
Thank-you cards
Business thank-you cards written with a real pen - after a purchase, a referral, a donation o…
Not sure which one you are doing?
Describe the list and what you want out of it. We will tell you which of these it actually is, and whether it is worth doing at your volume.