8 ms·
Handwritten thank you notes increase sales
- SaarRyan 4y ago
- JAA1337 4y agoLegacy Kansas State football coach agrees: https://www.staugustine.com/story/sports/2014/12/26/snyders-handwritten-notes-important-even-computer-era/16090713007/ https://www.staugustine.com/story/sports/2014/12/26/snyders-...
- eternalban 4y agoI'm pretty sure I know who is sponsoring this. I've seen those bullet points before ;) And if that is indeed the case, then this is a very masterful piece of marketing.
- mcculley 4y agoI get enormous value out of having a box of thank you cards, envelopes, and stamps in easy reach. I keep a box on my desk and in my travel bag. When someone does something for me (e.g., an introduction, buys lunch), I have little friction to sending them a note. They are often delighted to receive them, as it is so rare now.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- layer8 4y ago> Give customers a high-quality copy of a handwritten note So, not actually handwritten. Even it were actually handwritten, as a customer I’d still assume it to be a mass copy.
- christophilus 4y agoSeems like a decent use case for Postpilot’s handwritten notes. I wonder if those would be as effective? [0] https://www.postpilot.com/ https://www.postpilot.com/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PaywallBuster 4y agomore like "Do things that don't scale"
- capableweb 4y ago> Our all-new handwritten cards are created by our proprietary robots. We use real pens with real ink to write your cards with all the personality of a human hand. Good idea, until everyone starts using it and starts recognising the writing by the robot, then it becomes creepy instead.
- b4je7d7wb 4y agoNot only that, but actual cards written by humans will be mislabeled as cheap robot spam.
- MrDunham 4y agoI really wonder what font they are using. The big challenge is not finding a handwritten style font but finding a font with multiple different variants of each letter. It becomes painfully obvious if you have two of the same letter in a row that are exactly the same. I’ve only found a couple of fonts that have that variability within a single letter and it’s pretty stunning how big of a difference it makes
- Semaphor 4y agoThere’s the famous "random" font Beowulf [0], and also a list of such fonts [1]. [0] https://letterror.com/fonts/beowolf.html https://letterror.com/fonts/beowolf.html [1] http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html
- YurgenJurgensen 4y agoI do wonder if every marketing study actually has the conclusion "almost anything you do will increase sales as long as it's something the customer hasn't seen before". The Novelty Effect is real.
- samwillis 4y agoThere was a brilliant Twitter thread last year showing a project to "hand write" with cnc robots thousands of personalised letters for a mailout. They initially started off with off the shelf hand writing robots, but ended up building their own massive ones to increase speed and efficiency. https://mobile.twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074 https://mobile.twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/143888821947...
- olliecornelia 4y ago
- MrDunham 4y agoI really wish they had opened sourced this. Was just thinking of exactly that post, thanks for finding it. It really makes a difference to have hand written with a pen as long as you have a font with multiple letter variants/subtly differences between the same letter used repeatedly.
- seydor 4y agoyes ,because what we need is airplane-loads of machine-produced paper notes to travel around the world
- bombcar 4y agoAnyone who owns real estate in certain markets is already familiar with the mountains of “handwritten” notes offering to buy far under market value. This’ll just make it harder to detect.
- aarondf 4y agoOpen sourced the hardware or the software part? (Note: I'm the author of that twitter thread.) The hardest part was probably the handwriting "generation." I put "generation" in quotes because it was mostly selecting one of the characters from the library of characters that we captured and putting it together with other characters. The hardware had a lot of hard spots, but I think they were mostly hard because that was my first real foray into hardware.
- sweetheart 4y agoBeing kind is fine and all, but my one gripe with it is that it doesn’t make me any money. Glad to see the dark days of being nice without any ROI are ending.
- nvahalik 4y agoThose handwritten notes take people. People who want a job and will work hard. At 1st Phorm everyone* writes notes that go with orders. Many people start as note writers and then move to other departments as they work alongside people and form relationships. Those people see the hard work that goes on and really get to the mission and purpose each and every day. Sure, you can’t charge for the note. But hiring and building up a company who cares for your customers in small ways means hiring for other positions is easy: you’ve got the people right here. Edit: everyone* who can. Obviously remote folks can’t do this…
- Silverback_VII 4y agoBeing kind only has some ROI if you use it as a machiavellian tool.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago> Being kind is fine and all, Being kind is not always necessary, but being respectful goes a long way. People (especially the type who participate in this forum) frequently equate kindness with weakness. I really get sick of that attitude. It's not an "either/or" thing. It's entirely possible to be kind, and also to have strong boundaries, and real mettle. Respect is something that is usually (not always) appreciated; even by our enemies. Cops are often quite respectful to you, as they slap on the bracelets. > but my one gripe with it is that it doesn’t make me any money. I wouldn't be so sure about that. These are exactly the types of things that are almost impossible to measure, except in a rather vague way (i.e. "Six months after we started our personalized letter campaign, our sales increased by 30%").
- ekianjo 4y agoBeing kind is a cultural trait that we have been selected for, over generations, to increase our chances of survival and also ROI. There is nothing gratuitous about it once you understand where humans come from.
- seydor 4y agoThis comment is handwritten, in a way
- iLoveOncall 4y agoSponsored paragraphs that are indistinguishable from your main content and are inserted everywhere in your article increase the likelihood I will never come back to your website.
- reaperducer 4y agoThere's a reason that high-end* retailers require their sales people to send hand-written thank you notes: it works. My wife works in this space, and says it's an incredibly important part of the customer retention process. Tech people always ridicule written communication, but then idolize Japanese culture, where written communication is so massively important. Funny how that mental disconnect works. * By "high end" I mean the sort of place where customers routinely spend $90,000 in a single purchase, and several million per year at a single store.
- Kon-Peki 4y agoWhat does “half-written” mean, in this context?
- bombcar 4y agoI assume that meant hand written. “Dearest Kon-Peki, thank you for purchasing the hydraulic wall crusher 9000. I think you will find this one will last slightly longer than the 8000, but as always, I am ready to sell you the newest model of this one were to suffer the ignominy so many do.” (It’s probably jewelry but it often amuses me that small businesses will spend millions on equipment with a phone call and some grunting but other purchases for half the money require so much hand holding.)
- reaperducer 4y agoYes. Foiled by autocorrect.
- Kon-Peki 4y agoThanks :) I wasn't sure if there was a term of art that I was missing :)
- themaninthedark 4y agoEquipment and tools are productivity multipliers and good ones can be resold for same value - wear. Think of it like dual monitors, do tech companies often balk at getting someone a second monitor or is it a no brainer?
- noisy_boy 4y agoReminded me of the protagonist's profession in Her[0]. At that time, I wasn't entirely convinced that that would be a viable profession but here we are. Already. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)
- 2-718-281-828 4y agodon't we know that since dale carnegie?
- Silverback_VII 4y agopeople like to feel important. Even more so if they are not.
- marban 4y agoHere's the one that I got from my fave wine shop. No surprise they went out of business after putting all the effort into their schwag. https://imgur.com/bNUtLtV https://imgur.com/bNUtLtV (Handwritten, not a print)
- Bayart 4y agoNow what you hear is not a test: I'm rappin' to the beat God, it's stuck in my head again.
- waselighis 4y agoFucking marketers just want to destroy all sincerity in the world.
- gchamonlive 4y agoIt is a matter of semiotics. At one point you need to scale, and you realise you can just manipulate symbols easier. They might at one point have come from sincerity, but industrial scale trumples all.
- kingkawn 4y agoOnly when empowered by the minds of the unimaginative
- gchamonlive 4y agoWhich is...the entire industry? I think this is a very simplistic view. Scale is pervasive in capitalism and not restricted to marketing. It is not being unimaginative, it is just a byproduct of the industry (isonomy and reproducibility over personalisation and personality).
- nicbou 4y ago> At one point you need to scale Do you? Is growth so imperative that any end justifies it?
- gchamonlive 4y agoSure not, but when was it the case in capitalism? It is an illusion to think this kind of thing is reserved to marketing
- banannaise 4y agoAnd thus the simulation of sincerity leads us even deeper into the simulation. Baudrillard strikes again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
- kgran 4y agoLet's monetize and scale all forms of humanity. For sure, this will not decrease trust between people in the vein of what happened to the "salesman smile".
- wikitopian 4y agoUltimately, culture will be defined by a strange sort of radical authenticity defined by ever more subtle and specific signals of genuine humanity. Sophisticated cants will emerge that are structurally challenging for computers to emulate. And because there's a lot of work going into preventing AI from computing anything racist, sexist, or offensive to HR, the new ways of communicating will likely gravitate towards those spaces -- but ironically.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoInteresting idea. Reflecting on it, people already use what would otherwise be unacceptable slurs with their closest friends (at least IME in the UK). Using this as a human-computer differentiator is intriguing. Kinda like if non-humans were really incapable of purposeful harm to humans you could get someone to pinch you to show they're not a bot... CAPTCHA of the future!
- WalterBright 4y ago> people already use what would otherwise be unacceptable slurs with their closest friends I suspect this happens everywhere. For a hilarious send up of this, see "Gran Torino".
- Balgair 4y agoI'm no historian or linguist, but there has to be a historical parallel here, right? Some empire somewhere banning some words or disparagement of the queen and so the rabble makes up some words or phrase to mean the same things. A cycle of banning then kicks off and suddenly sausages over 4 fingers long mean that the king is a doofus or some other such strange thing.
- chasd00 4y agoI drop a post it saying “thank you” and the song I was listening to while making each part at oakclifflaser.com but my orders are in teh single digits per month haha /it’s just a hobby thing I run for my rocket buddies
- jmyeet 4y agoIt says "experiments show" but I'd need to know the methodology. There is a real risk of selection bias here in that you only send handwritten thank you notes to your biggest, most loyal or most important clients. There is a line in this about it's only effective with clients who have some brand loyalty. So did the experiment account for this? I'm reminded of of the "we value your opinion" or (worse) "you've been selected" for a survey. Surveys are zero cost of the Internet so I haven't been carefully chosen. That survey has simply been sent to everyone. It feels inauthentic. If I buy a lime juicer and get a hand written thank you note it would similarly feel inauthentic. High value clients tend to be high touch. It's why big ad spenders have account managers. High touch can take many forms. I'd be wary of simply trusting handwritten thank you notes in a vaccum.
- xyst 4y agoso you are saying my startup wouldn't have failed if I had simply handwritten a note to my customers
- boringg 4y agoI will counter that i get those hand written notes to buy my house (clearly a marketing effort) which turns me off so fast. Does anyone reach out to those fake hand written offers? Only real hand written note i got in the mail was from jehovas witness outreach campaign on lined paper that couldn't have been faked. To be fair, it caught my attention but was swiftly dismissed.
- b112 4y agoHah! In Quebec, Canada. The Witness folk did this here, last summer. I think it was because they couldn't go door to door, due to pandemic. To be fair, I guess it is legit, as each person is writing notes, instead of going to door to door. Was this last summer for you? Am curious, where is your approx location?
- Ftuuky 4y agoThis is standard procedure in high-end fashion studios.
- sfmike 4y agoand CPMs of snail mail can be less then PPC
- DelaneyM 4y agoIndividualized insights and personal attention increases sales.
- jasonsync 4y agoWe used this tactic as a growth hack in our early days (2016), and it worked great! It also inspires sharing on Twitter, which helps drive the recommendation flywheel: https://twitter.com/tdnvl/status/722882182759452675 https://twitter.com/tdnvl/status/722882182759452675 The trouble is that it isn't easily scalable in-house at high volume. It was great until we realized that we were managing a large scale mailroom. But by then the flywheel was spinning ...
- nico 4y agoThank you for sharing your experience. I was wondering if it would work for saas businesses, as the article talks mostly about e-commerce and hospitality.
- userbinator 4y agoI got what looked like one while ordering some cheap parts from China, then realised it was just a font. It was memorable but did not increase my chances of ordering from the seller due to other issues with the product. I suspect once everyone starts doing it, it will no longer be memorable nor have any other effect.
- m12k 4y agoThat bar chart looks like something out of "How to Lie with Statistics". Going from $26 to $52 - doubling is a nice and significant result, there's no reason to fiddle with the Y axis to make it look like a 6x instead.
- fortran77 4y agoWell, if this is provable and significant, here's an idea for a YC startup -- handwritten than you notes as as service (HTYNAAS)! Perhaps a pen plotter can write them, and some AI net can give it the human touch.
- the_af 4y agoFor the love of all that is human and sacred, please no!
- netsharc 4y agoIf this piece of wisdom becomes well-known and every shop does it, then it won't be special anymore and customers will ignore those pieces of fluff. Then again maybe shop owners will feel rude if they don't join the "common courtesy" of putting in thank you notes, and so your HTYNAAS might have a chance after all. You just need to guilt-trip them into buying it. I say this tongue-in-cheek, it'd be awful if we wasted money, time and paper because "thank you for shopping" notes became obligatory.
- propogandist 4y agothis is all based on a South Korean study, and this the claim assumes western consumers have the same values and behaviors as East Asian consumers. The blog owner for this openly injects adz right before the main content, and after, so I wouldn’t take anything they say with any seriousness.
- causi 4y agoThese days if I get a thank-you note that looks handwritten I hold it up to the light and check for pen indentations.
- WalterBright 4y agoUsually just run your finger over it. If the letters are raised or flat, they are printed. If they are indented, they're (usually) handwritten, especially if the indentation is inconsistent.
- csours 4y agoI get "handwritten" letters asking to buy my house. I've looked at quite a few with a magnifying glass. All of them have been printed so far, except one was signed with a ballpoint pen! I was actually quite excited to find that someone had gone to the trouble of setting up a robosigner, but I didn't think anyone else would find it as exciting as me.
- stoeckley 4y agoWe order a lot of meals for delivery and one of the restaurants always includes a handwritten note thanking us and wishing us a nice meal. It's such a simple thing to do and really makes a nice touch, I'll have to admit.
- omwow 4y agoI totally believe this. I often get coffee delivered, and some baristas write a little "Thanks!" Or "Have a great day, Om!" or "Enjoy your coffee, Om!" on the paper bag, and it always makes me feel like 'Oh nice, they care!'.
- the_af 4y agoI like handwritten thank you notes. Especially when they are from a small shop, include some message like "enjoy!", often from one of the owners, and they don't offer me anything else. No promo, no discount, just a thank you. It feels human. I like it. So of course there's now some kind of marketing scheme trying to deprive it of its soul and see if it can be automated and optimized for.
- whalesalad 4y agoI used to live across the street from a guy who ran a drop ship style handwritten note business. Has a big warehouse full of people writing notes. He was absolutely loaded.
- telecuda 4y agoWe did this a lot in our early days, and while we didn't correlate it with spending, customers occasionally would acknowledge the note in future conversations. To me, it falls in the category of "do things that don't scale" as you try to grow your business. An over-emphasis on customer service is rarely a bad idea.
- Theodores 4y agoThe premise of the story is nonsense. If you are selling someone a coffee then some doodle is going to please some, however, the important interactions are in customer service and YOU DO NOT WANT ANY HAND WRITTEN NOTES. I automate customer service emails, starting with the stats to see what the problems are. If all the time is taken up on mysteriously cancelled orders that are not communicated, I slice that off from 'manual intervention' to a well written, considerate and concise email that pulls through pertinent customer order details. It will take me hours to develop, test and deploy that template, however, once done, it will be well received by the customer. There is a 'from the customer service team' rather than a fake name. The customer service team doesn't even have to press a button for this one to go out, it will be automated. In time I will go for the other time taking parts of customer service, the goal really being to eliminate as much as possible. What remains can then be given the personal touch, with hand written notes and calls, if need be. Once this is achieved, customer service can be pro-active rather than reactive. Getting to this stage takes work. Initially it can be one calamity after another with a random roster of temporary staff of a low literacy level, possibly outsourced having to write what are essentially hand written notes. None of those notes are any good. It is at the txt spk level of communication.
- AlwaysRock 4y agoReminds me of the start of Her where Joaquin Phoenix writes love letters for couples in the near future world of the movie.
- cecilpl2 4y agoI had an original piece of art framed by a local art gallery a few years ago. This year, they sent me a $50 off coupon in the mail, along with a card and a hand-written and personalized note referencing the specific piece of art I had had them frame. Instant customer for life.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- malikNF 4y agoRecently bought a espresso machine, the company that sold it included a hand written thank you and a few candies in the packaging. I found it really interesting, and felt good about it and so I found myself using them to buy a few other items for brewing coffee. Then they signed me up for a newsletter, blocked their domain and stopped using them ever-since.
- Bakary 4y agoThe idea of looking at a handwritten note and concluding that the company cares about me specifically or that it was an actual social interaction of any significance is just so bizarre. Maybe it's a coconut vs. peach culture thing?
- xeromal 4y agoIt's an indicator. If someone writes me a note along with my purchase, my confidence that they care about their product is higher than receiving a mass-produced receipt. Of course, this article is specifically about people that game it, but I appreciate a personal touch.
- anotherevan 4y ago“The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made.” ― George Burns