E48 – Maximizing Client Retention With Handwritten Notes with David Wachs
In this episode, Gary chats with David Wachs, founder and CEO of Handwrytten, the world’s largest provider of automated handwritten notes. David shares his journey from running a text messaging company to establishing Handwrytten, which sends out 15,000 to 30,000 handwritten notes daily for various businesses. They discuss the unique impact of handwritten notes on client retention and ROI, drawing comparisons to digital methods like emails and text messages. David explains the technology behind Handwrytten’s robots and provides practical advice on leveraging handwritten notes for building client loyalty. They explore real-world success stories, the spillover effect, and methods to test handwritten notes’ effectiveness, emphasizing the value of personal touch in modern marketing.
Discover:
00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:24 David Wachs’ Background and Handwrytten Overview
01:46 The Unique Value of Handwritten Notes
05:25 Handwritten Notes as a Retention Tool
05:33 Outreach Strategies with Handwritten Notes
09:27 Case Studies and ROI of Handwritten Notes
15:53 The Technology Behind Handwrytten
18:27 The Spillover Effect in Customer Experience
20:21 Getting Started with Handwritten Notes
23:31 Conclusion and Farewell
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Gary Ruplinger: Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of the Pipelineology podcast. Today I am excited to be joined by a very special guest. Today I’ve got David Wachs with me. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Handwrytten. David, welcome to the show.
[00:00:17] David Wachs: Thank you, Gary. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:19] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I’m excited for, for this one. This definitely one I want to geek out to a little bit. But before we jump into all of that, can you just, for anybody who’s not familiar with you or your company, can you just give us the little bit about, you know, how, how you got here and what you used to do.
[00:00:34] David Wachs: Yeah, so I am the founder and CEO of a company called Handwrytten. I’ve been doing this for 12 years now. And I can kind of get into what Handwrytten is, but prior to Handwrytten, I ran a text messaging company, also in the broadly defined messaging space. And I started that in 2004, so I’ve really been in outbound messaging and outbound communication for 22 years now. Handwrytten, what I’ve been doing for the last 12, is the largest provider of automated handwritten notes in the world. And I can talk about how we do it, but basically we do anywhere between 15 and 30,000 handwritten notes a day for brands ranging from small businesses to luxury brands. Car dealerships, nonprofits, realtors and everything, e-com brands, everything. Anything and everything where they feel a handwritten note could make a lasting impression. So, so yeah, that’s what we do here.
Well,
[00:01:37] Gary Ruplinger: very cool. Well yeah I, on my notes here I’ve got down, you know, improving ROI and client retention with personalized handwritten notes. So, if you’re cool with it, I’d love to just kind of jump in with how, how, how does a, what does, what makes a handwritten note special compared to, you know, an email follow up, a, a message I might have sent, even a text message.
Kind of, can you kind of walk through that with me?
[00:02:02] David Wachs: Yeah, I mean, I think the level of effort, the, the level of perceived effort is one thing that makes a handwritten note really stand out. Additionally, it’s, you know, we were kind of talking before the call and, and up came the Von Restorff effect. But the Von Restorff effect is the belief that, that what is different stands out, which is kind of an obvious one. And when everybody is digital and you’re analog, that really stands out. Not only does it stand out emotionally or perception wise, but it physically stands out or stands up. You know, when you send somebody a handwritten note, it’s cluttering up their desk, standing on their desk, or stuck to their, their refrigerator or bookcase or whatever it may be. Versus an email which gets read and, and is ephemeral.
It, it gets read and, and quickly deleted. Or in my old case of text messaging, it gets read and then absolutely quickly deleted and forgotten. So we like to say, you know, if, if anybody’s considering sending handwritten notes, send a few and then call those prospects or contacts a few days later and say hey, did you get my handwritten note?
And the answer’s gonna be yes, it’s sitting right here. Versus, hey, did I get that email? And their response is maybe, let me check my inbox of, you know, 200 emails a day. So, you know, in a world where all of us get 200 emails a day, we’re only getting two to four handwritten notes a month. So which pile do you want to be in?
Is kind of the way we ask our clients, and we feel the least used inbox is really the one at the end of the driveway.
[00:03:44] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I know when I’m doing my LinkedIn events, I’ve got, I’ve got a, what a running bit at this point called My Mailbox is Empty. Because here at the office, everything’s really kind of auto paid. So,
you know, like nothing shows up in my, my mailbox. Every once in a while, a bulk, you know, mail or something like that.
But any good advertisement? Almost, almost never. And I think the the last time I got a handwritten something was probably 2024 from somebody. Like, it’s just
[00:04:15] David Wachs: Yeah.
[00:04:15] Gary Ruplinger: nothing.
[00:04:16] David Wachs: And you know what’s interesting is it really, it’s kind of a secret weapon in that it, you know, if you’re going after high value individuals such as lawyers or doctors or something like that, somebody that might have an interceptor, you know, a secretary that might filter through the mail. Emails are certainly not gonna get there because the admin will clear out the email inbox and send on the important ones.
Junk mail won’t get there because it’ll just be tossed out at the front desk of the office, but handwritten notes will be shepherded directly to the person you’re trying to contact. We went to a trade show last year for, for lawyers and people would come up, you know, we’d send every attendee a handwritten note prior to the show. And people would come up to us and say it was the only marketing material that made it to their desk because everything else was intercepted. And so it is really a secret weapon that people need to understand. You know, it, it’s one more tool in their toolbox to, to leverage. I don’t, you know, I was in the text messaging game, I’m not one to say one thing is better than the other.
I just think you need all tools available to you and, and know when to use what. So, handwritten notes are really a way to build that ongoing loyalty and customer retention
[00:05:33] Gary Ruplinger: Could you talk a little bit about using handwritten notes as an outreach strategy? Like is it, is it effective? How, how would you structure a campaign like that to make it effective?
[00:05:46] David Wachs: For outreach, if you’re just doing, are you talking about cold outreach to unknown cantacts, that type of thing?
[00:05:52] Gary Ruplinger: Let’s, let’s start there. If we, if you’ve got anything in mind.
[00:05:55] David Wachs: Yeah, so it is possible if you’re somebody selling something incredibly high margin, you know, such as a house and you wanna target everybody in a neighborhood. Or solar panel installation in a neighborhood, something like that where it’s very high value, you can do it.
But for, you know, we’ve done it for jewelry stores for that very reason. However, for the most part, it’s quite frankly, too expensive. We include, on all of our pieces, a first class stamp. So it’s a real sticker stamp in addition to the handwritten note. And that’s going to raise your price to about 78 cents just for the stamp. We are coming out with a presort option, and you can kind of decide if that’s better or worse for what you’re looking to do. But, it’ll save you 15 cents or so. But even then you’re still looking at 63 cents just for the stamp, and that’s quite expensive. So I would say quite frankly, the best use case is retaining customers or retaining your clientele. Not growing your clientele. And you know, today, in today’s day, everybody is so focused on growing their new clientele that they’re, they’re not noticing the leaky bucket where their clients are falling through, you know, falling through the bottom. They’re so busy looking at their, you know, new customer sales charts and all that, that they don’t look at the chart that shows their churn is through the roof.
And, and oftentimes just by closing that hole in the bucket, you can, you can grow much faster than trying to keep filling the bucket. So that’s, you know, I’m not saying it’s always the case. But, you know, in this day and age of, of, sell, sell, sell, people forget, you know, these great clients they already have and, and to treat them better. We’ll keep them, retain them and kind of grow their book of business from within, which is way more cost effective than trying to acquire another client. So I would say it’s more of a retention tool, a loyalty tool, than an outbound tool. Although we’ve certainly done both.
[00:07:55] Gary Ruplinger: Gotcha. I was just, just having this conversation with somebody earlier this morning, and I told her once I figured out the client retention part of the business, it was life changing really. We, you know, it was one of those every month, you know, the beginning of the month comes, you’re like, where, where’s business gonna come from?
To oh, well we’ve got, you know, eight people on retainer, or 10 people, or whatever that number is. You, you have a good idea what the revenue’s gonna look like. So like all of a sudden I was like, I, I’m thinking about this wrong. I, I, I need to keep the clients, put my resources there. And then, you know, the sales, it doesn’t become unimportant, but it, it’s not such a life or death.
Every, you know, every, all of this on the first of the month. Like, how are we gonna pay the our bills? So.
[00:08:40] David Wachs: You know, I think a lot of people have 20 to 40% revenue growth just sitting in their laps. If they were to build those relationships with their customers. I’m reading a book right now, or I read a book right now called, Alex, it, it’s called Outgrow by Alex Goldfayn, and he talks a lot about that. Which is selling to warm leads and just checking in on people to show you care. Because nobody’s doing that anymore.
You know, that simple call to check in and say hey, how are you? Not try to sell something. Nobody, nobody’s doing that. So if you can kind of improve your relationships with your existing contacts, that’s worth a lot more than trying to start from zero and get a new contact in the door.
[00:09:23] Gary Ruplinger: I love it. So are, do you have any data? I’m, I’m curious on the actual ROI and kind of the retention numbers, just from things, from something as simple as sending out a handwritten note.
[00:09:38] David Wachs: Yeah. Well, it’s all unfortunately a little bit, you know, ob-, subjective, not objective, just by the nature. We don’t get the data of open rates and stuff like that because of the campaigns. But what I could tell you is car dealers, when they replace printed letters to their existing customers with handwritten notes inviting them in for a for a drive, they see a 27 times greater response rate to that offer than the letter. Not 27%, but 2700%
better response rate to that offer. Now, granted, it’s much, much more expensive than a print piece. It, it just is. I mean, the very first step we do is we print a card and we print it on much nicer stock than any of these print pieces would go out. So when you adjust it for the additional cost, it’s still about a seven times greater ROI than the print piece. We work with a snack box company that their whole thing is retaining their clients to keep buying snacks over and over for their offices. And the way they use us is they found that when they screwed up on a box of snacks, they would follow up with another box of snacks and swag, and a handwritten note saying we’re very sorry for what happened. And they found that those customers that had the screw up event actually became higher lifetime value than those that were never screwed up with in the first place, because of how they dealt with them. So then they decided to actually screw up with everybody, and raise all ships, which is exactly what they did.
And there’s actually a term for that in marketing, which is the service recovery paradox. So they are the best examples of that. You know, we, we, so, so that, you know, they, they saw about a 20% lift in lifetime value of clients just by doing that. I’m not saying screw up with everybody, it’s kind of a interesting strategy, but it’s one they took. We have nonprofits that see outsized returns on re-donation rates. So the biggest issue with a, a nonprofit is getting the re-donation rates up above 50%. So that means for every donor less than half re-donate. And the reason is, is when donors are asked why they don’t re-donate, the, the number one reason is they don’t feel thanked. And there’s a big difference in being thanked and feeling thanked. So being thanked is receiving that automated email after you donate, right? But nobody considers that being thanked. They, they don’t feel thanked. So by using handwritten notes to thank their donors after that generous donation event, they’re able to dramatically raise the re-donation rate well above 50% to help their cause even further. So I don’t have one set of numbers, although actually on our website, which is Handwrytten.com, H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N.com, there’s a, if you go to resources, there’s a consumer outreach survey that we did of 2000 consumers. We went straight to consumers, not Handwrytten users, just consumers.
And we asked them if they feel appreciated by brands, and by and large they do not. And then we said, well, what would, what would you do if you did feel appreciated by brands? And it was all the stuff that a brand, or a professional, would like to see. Which is buy more, buy more frequently, rate and review more, and tell their friends. All the good stuff. And so we said, well, what would make you feel appreciated by the brand? And we said a text message, an email, a call, a print piece, or a handwritten note. And the number one, of course, was that handwritten note. So, you know, just kind of, you know, there’s no pure number saying, oh, you know, if I send a handwritten note, I’m gonna get 10% more sales. But there’s a lot of data swirling around that point to customers being hungry for this old school connection. So, and we find it universally applicable at anywhere from a piano tuner after tuning a piano to nonprofits, to car dealers, realtors, et cetera.
[00:14:05] Gary Ruplinger: It’s interesting you, you should mention car dealers because I, my corporate career was in that space and I ran the, the marketing for, for several stores. So I worked with a lot of the, the vendors and things like that.
[00:14:18] David Wachs: I am off to the National Association of Dealers tomorrow, actually.
[00:14:22] Gary Ruplinger: Oh, that’s right. It is, it is this month. Well, you have fun. Still in Vegas?
[00:14:27] David Wachs: In Vegas.
Yep. It, it kind of bounces between Vegas and another city every year, and this year it’s back.
[00:14:33] Gary Ruplinger: Well, very cool. That’s, that should be a fun time. I remember, I remember so many of the vendors, it’s right, they want you, you know, here’s, here’s how your stuff’s performing. Here’s how everything is doing. It all just blends together. But the one, the one guy who actually took the time to, you know, would actually thank me and tell stories and, you know, he’d bring in cookies once in a while.
I still, I’m still connected with him on LinkedIn. I know how he’s doing, you know, still talk to him from time to time. Like I, he actually took the time, not that it was that much extra effort, but just a little bit of extra effort.
[00:15:06] David Wachs: A hundred percent. That’s, that’s all it takes. Nobody’s doing anymore. Everybody’s, everybody’s afraid, or they’re too busy chasing the next inbound lead to focus on the, the, the deals they already have. And, you know, we around here preach the full stop thank you. Which could include a gift card or you know, a gift or whatever, but it’s really just saying thank you. Not saying thank you
plus here’s an offer code, or thank you plus I could refer, you know, please refer your friends. Just thank you, to kind of get in the same mindset of that contact with the cookies.
[00:15:40] Gary Ruplinger: So I’m, I’m curious, I think you mentioned you’re sending out about 20 to 30,000 of these, these cards?
[00:15:46] David Wachs: Yeah, every day.
[00:15:46] Gary Ruplinger: You just, do you just have an army of, of like college interns or something? Or how, how are you actually doing it?
[00:15:52] David Wachs: Yeah, so we started 12 years ago with a what’s called an auto pen, which is technology that’s been around since Thomas Jefferson. It’s a kind of a crude writing device, but it doesn’t really pass muster if you’re trying to do freeform text, which we are. So we’ve built our own robot, we’ve got about 200 of them. And even more so than a robot, we have a process.
So, you know, these are robots connected to industrial paper feeding. They, they feed the paper. They write the card. We then use computer vision systems. We built, we built ourselves to quickly, within a fraction of a second, QA that card, and then we insert it in a blank envelope that we’re able to track actually, and then write the handwritten address on the envelope too.
So there’s no chance of misstuffing because we’ve already stuffed that card in the right envelope before writing on the envelope. So, it’s a whole process. It’s been a quite the technical feat. You know, we’ve got multiple patents on the process and that type of thing, and it’s created a moat for us where nobody, to my knowledge, can really compete with us at our scale. Because we’ve made every mis- we have the benefit or, or whatever you’d call it, of 12 years of making every mistake under the sun.
So. now we’re in a place where we’ve solved all those problems. But it’s, it’s basically leveraging 200 robots that we built.
[00:17:24] Gary Ruplinger: And the, the robots are actually like taking a pen in their hand and scribbling out the, the, the text?
[00:17:30] David Wachs: Yeah. They all hold Pilot G2 ballpoint pens, so you can pick up the pens at, at Staples. We’ve got about 40,
[00:17:39] Gary Ruplinger: I think it’s one like this.
[00:17:39] David Wachs: Oh yeah, that’ll, that’ll be it. We’ve got About, 40 handwriting styles that you can choose from, or you could design your own if you want it. I don’t think you need to. It’s expensive, but if you want it, we can do it.
And then we also have signatures. So if you want to recreate your signature to sign off all your cards, we can do that. And then anything, you know, we operate our own three digital presses. So you go on our website, you design your beautiful card with your logo and your photos of your team or whatever, we’ll print that out on luxurious card stock. Thick, toothy stock.
We’ll write your card, you know, in real ballpoint pen. Stick a real stamp on it and mail it. So, we are very niche. That’s all we do is handwritten cards. So, yeah.
[00:18:26] Gary Ruplinger: Excellent. Could you talk a little bit about the spillover effect?
[00:18:31] David Wachs: Yeah, so the spillover effect. I, you know, I’ve been trying to, like everybody these days, I’m trying to get on Instagram and social media, so I’m trying to really speak about broader terms of customer experience and customer retention and loyalty, that type of thing. Than just talk about handwritten notes. The spillover effect is really, and so kind of my little gimmick these days is bringing up marketing terms and, you know, teaching people a marketing terms. The marketing term last week was the spillover effect. And what this is, is the belief that how you treat your employees spills over to how your customers are treated. So the classic examples are these super high end hotels like the Ritz Carlton. Hotels like that where they make their back of the house, their employee break rooms, exceptionally nice. So that their employees get the same Ritz Carlton experience that their clientele gets. And then that helps the employees feel the same values that they’re trying to pass on. And it also just has, it has the result of spilling over into their, into their experience. And, you know, you can’t understate the value of that. You know, Handwrytten here we have a lot of core values and we ensure, you know, one of them is play as a team and be the change you seek, open company, no BS, and focus on the customer.
Those are our four core values and we really try to, to live that. Focus on the customer means focus on the internal customer too. So, you know, the way you treat your clients is gonna be how your customers are treated. So, you know, make sure your, your good customer service spills over internally. Long answer to a short question.
[00:20:19] Gary Ruplinger: Very, very good. So one, one more question for you and then I’ll, I’ll let you go, but if somebody said this, this sounds really cool, I I want to try this, where would you recommend they start? Like, it, it sounds overwhelming. Like you say, oh, I, I 20,000, I don’t need to send 20,000. But what, what should, what should they do to do a good, a valid test on this to see if it’s gonna work for them?
[00:20:42] David Wachs: Yeah, honestly I’d say go to Staples, pick up a pilot G2 ballpoint pen or the pen of your choice, and a couple thank you cards, and sit down and write five to 10 of them and see what happens. And when that scales to a point where you can no longer do it, then reach out to a company like Handwrytten, or our competitors, and have us help you with it.
But I think you’ll find the investment in time is well worth it, and your customers will reach out to you and thank you for reaching out to them. And when else do your customers thank you to for marketing to them? And you know, it might not seem like marketing, but it’s keeping your brand your, whether that’s your personal brand or your company brand, top of mind. So it really is marketing. So what other form of marketing has your customers thanking you? And that’s kind of what happens here all the time. And then once you see that magical effect, then try to institutionalize it and automate it and all that. But, you can obviously come on Handwrytten.com and do one card and pay $3.75 if you want to use us. But you don’t have to. You could go get your own pen and stationary and just do it. That’s where the idea came from, is when I sold my last company I wanted to thank my clients for being with me on that journey, and I wanted to thank my employees. And I sat down and I wrote them. And then my hand quickly cramped and I ran out of pens and I ran out of paper and everything else, and stamps. And then I thought there has to be a better way, so that’s why I started the company. But it really comes from that belief like, you know, the best thing to do is an actual handwritten note with an i, but when you can’t do it with an I do it with a y and or, you know, whatever, one of our competitors and, and go from there.
[00:22:25] Gary Ruplinger: Very cool. Well, I, I’ll say anecdotally that when I started doing thank you cards to to prospects, after I met with them, right. You know, you do all the normal stuff. You send follow up proposals and emails and all that. It was when I started actually sending out, thank you cards myself, writing them out after meeting with somebody, that my close rate did in fact go up.
I know it’s anecdotal evidence, but it was enough for me to say, yep, this, this, unfortunately it’s gotta be, it’s gonna have to be a habit and I’m gonna have to make the time for it because, because it works, so.
[00:22:55] David Wachs: Well, you know, for you and just the soft sell, we do integrate with HubSpot and Salesforce. We have a amazing salesforce.com integration. So, or you could just use Zapier or Make, or N8N or one of these other automation platforms to tie us into your flow. So every time, whether you get a new customer, send them a handwritten note or close a deal, send them a handwritten note,
it’s super easy to automate the stuff, whether with us or one of our competitors out there.
[00:23:19] Gary Ruplinger: Oh, that’s a cool, that’s a cool idea. I hadn’t thought about that.
[00:23:22] David Wachs: Yeah.
[00:23:23] Gary Ruplinger: That would, that would, that would save, save some time. So may have to, to, put that in the, in the process a little bit.
[00:23:29] David Wachs: Sure.
[00:23:30] Gary Ruplinger: Very cool. Well David, thanks so much for coming on. So it’s Handwrytten with a y, so H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N.com.
[00:23:40] David Wachs: That’s right, that’s right
[00:23:42] Gary Ruplinger: Alright, so check out, check out, Handwrytten.com, with a y, David’s website if you’re curious about this stuff. David, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate your time today. This is some pretty cool tech and thanks for sharing with us.
[00:23:54] David Wachs: Thanks Gary. It’s been a pleasure.
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