Ask most people what goes into sending handwritten letters and they'll talk about the handwriting. It's the interesting bit, so fair enough. But the handwriting is the part that's already solved. What decides whether a campaign lands or quietly wastes your money is the spreadsheet that goes with it, and almost nobody wants to talk about that.
Pick your route first
There are three ways to work with us, and the one you choose changes everything after it.
Bulk handwriting. We write the letters and send them back to you. Your team stuffs, stamps and posts them. Worth it if you're adding something to the envelope yourself, or your post has to go out under your own postage.
Handwriting and fulfilment. We write, print, fold, stuff, stamp and post the lot through Royal Mail, straight to your recipients. You never touch it.
Transactional. One letter at a time, written on demand and triggered from your store or CRM through our API, Zapier or Make. An order comes in, a letter goes out.
The minimum for a manual campaign is ten pieces, which covers setup. There's no minimum at all when you send handwritten letters through the API, Zapier or Make, so a single letter is a perfectly sensible thing to send.
What you send us
Two things.
The copy, in a Word or Google Doc, with the merge fields marked wherever you want something personalised. Keep it to around 180 words for an A4 letter. That feels short if you're used to writing emails, and it's about right. Nobody handwrites three pages to someone they've never met, and a letter that looks like an essay reads as a mailshot before a word of it gets read.
Then the list, on our data template, one row per recipient, with a column for every merge field you've used. Send both to [email protected] and we'll confirm the artwork, the quantities and a send date before anything goes into production.
There's no bounce message for a wrong address
A dead email address bounces and you know about it in seconds. A wrong postal address doesn't. The letter still gets written, folded, stuffed, stamped and posted. It just never arrives, and nothing comes back to tell you. You've paid for all of it and you get silence, which looks identical to a campaign that didn't work.
We send our own prospecting letters as well as our clients', and checking addresses is far and away the biggest part of that job. The things that catch people out are nearly always the same ones:
- The whole address sitting in one cell. It needs splitting into separate lines with a country code, or it can't be laid out properly on the envelope.
- Missing or partial postcodes. Royal Mail will do its best without one. Don't rely on that.
- A company name and no person. A letter to "The Marketing Manager" gets sorted with the rest of the post. A named person gets handed to them.
- Records that have sat in the CRM for three years. People move, companies move, and a list that was clean in 2023 isn't now.
Clean the list before you send it, not after the campaign underperforms.
Letters that send themselves
You can also let the letters go out on their own, off the back of something happening in your business. That's the transactional route. Zapier reaches over 2,000 platforms, Make handles the fiddlier logic, and there's a REST API if you'd sooner build against it directly. A new Shopify order triggers a thank-you note. A contact reaching a particular stage in your CRM gets a prospecting letter. A Klaviyo flow can fire one the same way it fires an email.
Two things worth building in from the start.
First, a delay. A thank-you note that lands before the parcel does is strange, so give the order a few days' head start.
Then a check between the trigger and the send, so a refund, a cancelled subscription or a duplicate record doesn't turn into a letter. Email forgives that sort of thing. Paper, ink and a stamp don't.
What it costs, and how long it takes
Letters start at £2.05 each excluding VAT, with postage charged at cost, which comes to about £2.96 all in with second-class postage. That's an A4 letter on Conqueror 100gsm, with as many merge fields as you want in it.
On timing, we agree a send date with you before production rather than quoting a blanket turnaround. The writing is rarely what holds a campaign up. Sign-off on the copy, and getting the list clean, usually is.
If you want the detail on how a robot holds a real pen and writes in real ink, that's a separate read: how automated handwriting works. The full spec for letters, paper and word count included, is on the handwritten letters page.
Start smaller than you want to
If you're buying handwritten letters for the first time, don't lead with the whole database. Ask for a free sample first, so you can hold one, turn it over, and look for the pen impression on the back. Then run something small and real. A hundred lapsed customers rather than nine thousand, with a way of telling who came back.
Handwritten mail costs more than an email. The only honest way to find out what it's worth to your business is to send some and count what comes back.