In this week’s episode of the Creating Superfans podcast, I’m joined by David Wachs, the founder and CEO of Handwrytten.
Handwrytten is bringing back the lost art of letter-writing through scalable, robot-based solutions that write your notes in pen – directly from your CRM.
Used by major meal boxes, eCommerce giants, nonprofits and professionals, Handwrytten is changing the way brands and people connect. Prior to Handwrytten, David founded Cellit, a mobile marketing platform and agency that pioneered the concept of mobile customer relationship management.
David and I chat about the creative ways your brand can stand out in today’s AI-powered landscape, the do’s and don’ts of sending personalized notes, and the power of automation and repetition in creating superfan customers.
listen to the podcast
show notes
2:00 – David tells us about Handwrytten and it problem it solves for its customers
3:36 – How Handwrytten got started and how some of their customers are using the platform
7:05 – The automated birthday campaign feature
7:38 – Why it’s much harder to stand out through email these days
10:27 – the intent behind the technology and why it’s important
13:10 – A mistake a real estate agent has made with handwritten notes
14:00 – Why you need to send a “full stop thank you”
16:02 – More ideas for when to send personalized notes to your customers
17:18 – The prospecting feature within Handwrytten that helps you generate leads through personalized notes
18:37 – A genius way a solar panel company utilizes Handwrytten
19:20 – How to use personal or contextual information in handwritten notes in an appropriate way
20:46 – Brittany shares ideas for more ways to follow-up with customers with handwritten notes
23:10 – How Handwrytten can help entrepreneurs who sell products off Amazon or other third-party sites that want to implement a level of personalization
26:18 – How Chewy excels at handwritten notes and surprise and delight
27:40 – David share an odd customer story
29:15 – What’s the most personal form of communication?
30:13 – If you’re asking what the ROI is on handwritten communication, you’re asking the wrong question.
33:20 – Another way some people ruin their thank you notes
33:50 – Visit handwrytten.com and click the business tab to request a free sample kit
transcription
Brittany Hodak
Hello and welcome to the Creating Superfans podcast, where you learn how to turn your customers and employees into Superfans. I’m your host, Brittany Hodak, and I’m a speaker, author, and entrepreneur obsessed with all things customer experience. Here’s the thing. We’re living in an experienced economy right now, and regardless of the size or age of your company or even the products or services you’re selling, one thing’s for sure if your customers aren’t telling their friends about you, you’re in trouble. If you want to create Superfans, being great is no longer good enough. You’ve got to be super. This is the show that teaches you how you.
In this week’s episode of the Creating Superfans podcast, I’m joined by David Wachs, the founder and CEO of Handwrytten. Handwrytten is bringing back the lost art of letter-writing through scalable, robot-based solutions that write your notes in pen – directly from your CRM.
Used by subscription service brands, eCommerce giants, nonprofits and professionals, Handwrytten is changing the way brands and people connect. Prior to Handwrytten, David founded Cellit, a mobile marketing platform and agency that pioneered the concept of mobile customer relationship management. David and I chat about the creative ways your brand can stand out in today’s AI-powered landscape, the do’s and don’ts of sending personalized notes, and the power of automation and repetition in creating superfan customers.
Brittany Hodak:
All right, David, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on.
David Wachs:
Thank you for having me. Brittany. This is awesome.
Brittany Hodak:
Now, I was so excited when you reached out because I have known about Handwritten for a while, and it’s one of those things that’s been on my list to sign up and try the product. So why don’t you tell anybody who hasn’t heard of Handwritten what you guys do and what you’re all about?
David Wachs:
Yeah, absolutely. So in today’s age of emails and texts and Twitter and Facebook and everything else, it’s my belief, and I actually came from the text messaging space, but it’s my belief that people are overwhelmed with all this digital noise, and none of it really matters anymore. But what people really crave are old fashioned handwritten notes because they show a devotion to time and attention and personalization. So what we’ve done here at Handwrytten over the last nine years is we’ve built the largest, and I think, best provider of automated handwritten notes in the world so we can help you and your companies use handwritten notes at scale where it otherwise wouldn’t be possible. So we’ve got 175 robots in our facility in Phoenix, or Tempe. Now, each robot holds a real ballpoint pen. It’s a pilot g, two ballpoint pen. And we write out notes in your handwriting style by the thousands a day. We can sign them. It’s on your own cardstock. You can design that greeting card online. And then we put it in an envelope, write it, write the envelope, put a real stamp on it, and mail it. So that’s kind of us.
Brittany Hodak:
And I love it because I hear from so many people, I want to send handwritten notes. I know I should send handwritten notes. I get such great feedback when I do, but I just don’t have the time. So this is a really great solution for people who want that impact, but need to have it at a level that it can easily scale.
David Wachs:
Yeah, I mean, when I started this, the whole reason was I had a company that did text messaging. We were actually one of the biggest in the world doing that, sold that company. And I wanted to thank my clients and customers in a personal way. My clients, customers, employees in a personal way. And I sat down with a pen and paper and tried writing them all handwritten notes. And my intention was there, but I got distracted. My handwriting stunk. I ran out of stamps, I ran out of stationery. So that’s where Handwrytten was really born. You know, it’s really a passion project in many ways. I wanted to include gift cards. I thought it would be cool to send Amazon cards in the mail with the Handwritten notes. So we started doing that, and then that became its own thing. So it’s funny how these things kind of spiral, but yeah, that’s exactly what we do. It really works we have clients from small to big that explain how magical the results are of sending a handwrytten note. Now obviously it’s even more magical if you send it in your own handwriting or as I say, with an I, not a Y. Our company is spelled H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N. So if you send a real handwritten note, it’s obviously even better. But if you don’t have the time to do that, using us is just a great way to do it. We have a piano tuner in Pennsylvania that sends these after every tuning call and he only needs to tune your piano once a year and then when he comes back to your house a year later, that handwritten note is often standing up on the piano. So not only is it open, not only is it red, but it’s on display on the person’s most prized possession in their fanciest room of the house. So it’s pretty cool to see that. And then we have large luxury brands use it and they have their clients calling them up, crying, especially during COVID when all that was going on and people felt so alone. But their customer service reps have to field calls of their clients thanking them or crying, saying thanks so much for thinking of me, that type of thing. So this type of communication really does work. I wouldn’t say use it everywhere, but knowing when to send the right handwrytten note, it makes a tremendous impact.
Brittany Hodak:
Yeah. And I think it’s one of those things that as people think about the changes that are happening in the world and the technology and the automation and the tools that are now available, sometimes people make this false assumption that it’s got to be 100%, one thing or the other, and they have a little bit of hesitation of, oh, well, I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to move away from handwritten notes when in reality, as you said, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It doesn’t have to be you’re never going to pick up a pen again because you’re automating some of your notes. It’s a really great way to supplement. If you’ve already got a hand with a handwrytten with an eye practice of sending to your clients or saying, I’m going to choose certain occasions where I will send an actual note from me. But the rest of the time it’s not a question of should I send handwrytten with a Y or with an I, it’s is getting something from me going to make a better experience than getting nothing from me? Like is being in front of customers a win? And I would argue almost 100% of the time the answer is yes, it is.
David Wachs:
Yeah. One of our most asked for features and we finally got it out. About six months ago was a birthday card automation campaign where people could just upload their clients birthdays and their addresses and then every year they hit them with a birthday card and they can include a gift card to one of their favorite brands, that type of thing. And the reason is, it’s one more touch point a year where they can get in front of that person in a surprise and delight sort of way. I think these days, and again, email is super powerful and so is text, but these days something’s changed in email where everybody is using these send an email from their personal email, but on automate it’s no longer a MailChimp or anything like that. Now, all these emails, I don’t know about you, but I get 50 a day now where it seems like it comes from somebody, but it’s fully automated. And because of that, the good emails are having a lot harder time standing out. When I started this company nine years ago, the average person was getting 125 emails a day. The average office worker, that is. And they’re spending like a quarter of their time, according to one survey, which take it for what it is, a quarter of their time managing their inbox. And now I know in the last two years it’s gotten way worse.
Brittany Hodak:
I was going to say that sounds like a dream. Now to the average office worker, I’m sure. Oh, I only have to spend a quarter of my day managing my inbox. Sign me up.
David Wachs:
It’s just crazy the amount of email and then with check GPT getting involved. Now I get emails that say, hi David, I love what you’re doing at handwritten, but it’s like the same snippet I’ve seen in like ten emails now, so I can recognize it. So everything’s getting smarter in ways to trick you. And is what we do a little bit of trickery? Yes, it is. But at least you’re doing something different and you’re standing out and you are trying to make an impression in a way that kind of cuts through the din. And I guarantee you this cuts through the din. I mean, the handwriting looks 100% real. We have sports stars, we have celebrities, we’ve got high end luxury brands all using us because our handwriting looks 100% real. The ink smears, when you try to smear it, we actually have heard clients have their customers call up and say they couldn’t believe the ink smeared, that you took the time to write us a handwritten note, that type of thing. But the closest thing I can liken it to is when the president sends you a Christmas card and you take that card and you put it up on the mantle or on the refrigerator. If you ask that person, did the president really send you a Christmas card that he handwrote or she handwrote? Of course they didn’t, but at least it’s something different and it really stands out and they recognize that, but they still appreciate that somebody took the time to send them that card. This, I think, looks much more realistic. And unless you’re really hard pressed to find out if it’s written by a robot or not, you’ll never know. But even if you do know, at least you took the time to do something different and really stand out. And that’s kind of our message to our buyers.
Brittany Hodak:
Yeah. And what I would say, you use the word trickery. I think that anytime you’re talking about using new technology or using new tools, you have to consider the intent. And if this is something that you have ill intent behind, if you’re trying to trick people, that’s one thing. But I think probably 99.99% of your clients are doing this to deepen their personal connections and personal relationships at scale, not with any sort of ill intent. Yeah. And again, going back to the like, is it better to get this than get nothing at all? I send out cards several times a year, and for the longest time, I was so hesitant to automate anything. And now the automated cards that we send out are typed because I didn’t want people to know, oh, Brittany’s trying to trick me. But in preparation for this podcast and spending time on your website and reading some of the thought leadership pieces that you’ve written, I’ll admit I completely changed my point of view, and I’m very excited. Anybody listening that’s on my list of my funny, silly, irreverent cards that I like to send out multiple times a year, they’re going to be from handwritten the next time you get them. And it’s not because I think there’s trickery behind it, but it’s because, as you said, I think it makes an even deeper impact. And I think in a digital world, it’s like, not even a thing that people are going to look at and say, like, was this written by a robot or was this written by Brittany? Because I know from the past couple of years of hearing from people sending me feedback when they get my cards in the mail that it doesn’t mean anything less because they’re typed, because I still had the intention behind whatever funny message that I wrote and the picture that I chose for the front. And I always like to make them really sort of silly and funny, and I send them out for holidays, like National Hot Dog Day or May the Fourth Be With You or other silly things. I just did one for the first day of summer, and it was like a summer playlist of songs for the solstice. So I think that I know I have had a shift in my thoughts and opinions of, like, is it a trick or is it okay? And I would encourage anyone who feels that hesitation to really think about putting yourself in the shoes of the person receiving it and saying, is this going to make your day better by getting this card? And if so, then you’re in a position in your business to improve as many of your customers or prospects days as possible, I would highly encourage you to do so.
David Wachs:
100% one of the things and you touch upon a really good point, it’s the content of the card that’s what matters. So I bought my first condo, I don’t know, it was like 25 years ago in Chicago. It was a nothing of a condo and the real estate agent was part of Brian Buffini which really practices they’re one of these real estate groups that really tries to practice outreach, nurturing clients, that type of thing. But I think she took it to an extreme and I would receive these actual handwritten notes. Handwritten didn’t exist then so she couldn’t use us. But I’d receive these actual handwritten notes from her and every single note was oh by the way, please refer me, please refer me, please refer me. And it was the opposite of what one thing we really try to do and I try to do is really spread the idea of the full stop thank you. Which is somebody hires you or pays you to do something or pays for your product, thank them full stop. Don’t try to get them to refer you. Don’t try to get them to come back to your website for another offer. Yeah, you could do all that stuff later on. But the most important thing to do in the first communication is just thank them because there’s a million other companies doing what everybody does now, right? And the fact that they chose you to use you for their service or their product needs is really important and you need to just thank them full stop. And she completely missed that point and it was all about her, not about them. So it’s so important the content you put in your message and really trying to seem thankful and have gratitude and be appreciative and that’s what builds bonds, right? Not sending all these marketing mumbo jumbos one after the next. So I completely agree with you. And you can get that across in a printed greeting card. You can get it across in a well written email or a handwrytten note.
Brittany Hodak:
Absolutely. And I think one of the really cool applications that you kind of touched on before, you said people were asking for the automation around birthdays. If you have your customer’s birthday, you have their half birthday too. Send them a half birthday card, there’s going to be so much less competition, it’s going to stand out. They may not even realize it’s their half birthday or come up with a really fun series that’s going to be played out over multiple months where they’re getting a different card or a postcard every single month and at the end of the year, the end of a few months, it turns into something really cool. There are a lot of creative things that you can do even if it’s not a direct tie to your business to remind people that you’re grateful to know them and have them in your sphere of people that you know 100%.
David Wachs:
Yeah. I mean, right now you can do birthdays. There’s a separate thing for anniversaries. It’s the same thing just based off a different date field. So that could be half birthdays, that could be anniversary of engagement or purchase from you, whatever. But you’re 100% right. You want to stay in front of that person. We recommend four times a year with handwritten notes, but it can certainly be every month. You just have to be creative and know what you’re sending us something useful or funny and certainly not marketing over and over again because nobody likes that.
Brittany Hodak:
Yeah, nobody wants to feel like they’re being marketed to. It’s like when you read an article that you landed on from Organic Search and you get like 75% of the way through it and you realize it’s like a spot post that wasn’t identified as that, and it feels a little icky. So you mentioned the importance of personalization to not fall into that trap. What tips do you have for someone who maybe doesn’t know their prospect or customer all that well, yet very top of funnel? How can they make something feel more personal or infuse what seems like a bit more personalization into that handwritten note before they have a long term relationship with this person who hopefully becomes a client?
David Wachs:
Yeah, so another thing we do is prospecting, and we have a whole system around prospecting, both built in, and then you can obviously upload huge lists and just we’ll send it for you. But built in for realtors mortgage brokers, whatever, you can actually draw an area on a map and then pick criteria to filter that down. So if you did a zip code and then it came out to 10,000 addresses and you don’t want to send all of them a handwrytten note, you can filter it down. But then, based on those filters, you’d be able to personalize the note and say, let’s say you filter for families that have at least one child or households with one child in them, or households with one child that are flagged as renters. You could then write that handwritten note, hopefully not in a creepy way, but say, I’m the realtor in the neighborhood that specializes in getting families with children into their perfect home as opposed to renting. You can kind of tailor that message a little bit so that people understand that you’re right for them. Or you could point to other homes in the area you’ve sold. So we work with solar panel installers, and what they do is they’ll go in, and if they have a rooftop in a certain neighborhood, they’ll send out handwrytten notes to everybody else in the neighborhood saying, we’re so sorry, we might be causing a little bit of disturbance on your street as we install this solar panel. But come on, stop by and see how we do it, and we’ll show you how we can save you a bunch of money. So there’s ways of peppering in little personalized bits like I’m in your neighborhood or I help clients with children or I help renters that might appeal to them for upsells or resells. We do a lot of very broad product recommendations. So for instance, if you just sold somebody a leather wallet, maybe in the automated handwritten note, it could say we hope you love the wallet you bought, not the brown travel wallet that you bought. Because that sounds way too specific and that’s the skew, not the category. So we often ask people to bring it up a level to the category and just say we hope you love the wallet you bought. We find that people that love this product also like and just name a product, right? Theoretically it doesn’t have to match, but they love the brown travel bag. So we have clients that do that type of thing too. Another thing, and this isn’t really for did that kind of answer that question?
Brittany Hodak:
It totally did. And I think that’s such a great point about not getting to the creepy level of personalization. I love helping families with children find their forever home. So reach out if you need this rather than hey, I know Ryan’s about to start fourth grade, you’re in a really terrible school district, so why don’t you call me and I’ll try to get you to the other one. So I 100% think you’re right with using contextual information but not making it too creepy. And then I love the idea too of after a purchase follow up for a retailer. And I would say going back to the example you gave of the person who was always like, refer me, refer me, refer me, you could probably be really creative, not just saying if you loved this product, you’ll love this other product, but hey, hope you’re loving this product. Wanted to let you know you can extend its life by XYZ whatever, like giving them tips, giving them advice, helping them feel even better about the purchase that they made with useful information that’s going to help them either see a whole new way to use things or giving them other contextual information. I’m in a season right now where everything is crazy and chaotic because I’m traveling so much to speak. But I also realized that I’ve been in my house for almost seven years and I was like, there’s probably so much maintenance stuff that I just don’t know. So in the past couple of weeks I had somebody come clean out all the HVACs and put whatever disinfectant in them and do a deep clean of all the carpets and pressure, wash the sidewalk and the outside of my house. Like all of these things. And I was thinking for anyone, especially in real estate or mortgage or even title. You could create ongoing campaigns letting people know about these things that will either increase or retain the value of their home and turn it into a referral system for vendors that you know and love in the neighborhood. Which, of course, then makes them even more excited to send people your way when they need a realtor but to say, like, hey, it’s October. Don’t forget you need to be like, winterizing all of your pipes if you haven’t yet, and turning off all your sprinkler systems. And if you need a recommendation, call me. Or, I wanted to let you know that I’ve been working with Joe for 18 years and he’s fantastic, so give him a call. So doing things like that to where you’re showing up in the right place, which is the mailbox at the right time, with the right information for that customer or prospect.
David Wachs:
I should hire you right now to help us with our clients and come up with campaigns. That’s an amazing idea, and I’m sure we have clients doing some of that, but certainly not enough. The hardest thing for us to and one of the things that we kind of excel at and it’s kind of hard to do, is and I don’t know if you have a lot of clients or listeners that do this is sell physical goods through Amazon or through a third party logistics facility or something like that. They often want to include something to drive good reviews or referrals or just make it feel like a more personal purchase because they’re buying through A.com or whatever, and they don’t have that direct connection. So what we do there because well, we do two things. One, we can put these robots in those facilities. We do do that, but that’s kind of a bigger lift. The other thing we can do is write up notes that aren’t personal. They don’t say Dear Brittany on them, but they’re very cute and they include doodles. So what I mean by this is it’s not personalized, but it’s personal. For instance, for an online mattress company, they send out 10,000 mattresses a day or whatever they do, in every mattress box, when you open up that box, there’s a handwritten card from our company, and the note doesn’t say Dear Brittany because they’ve just got all these boxes stacked up. But it says, we hope you enjoy your first night on this mattress. And it’s in a very organic handwriting because it’s literally a replication of a scrawl across the page. And then below that is a picture of somebody a hand drawn picture of somebody sleeping in beddreaming, of cats. And then we have a whole series of these. So the next box, if somebody opens it, let’s say they’re doing their entire house with new mattresses, the next box might have the moon and the stars and a different message, and then the next one would have a different one. So you can actually create something that seems very personal but isn’t personalized and do that at scale too. And we see these types of handwritten notes not only get kept and that type of thing, but they get shared on social media. And we had a morning show, a YouTube morning show for a while and I don’t know why they stopped using us because people were posting their handwritten notes that they received from the two morning show guys on the Internet. And these two guys never upped the message. It was always the same message over and over, but people were so thrilled to get the same message from these two guys and the note was personal in that regard because we’d get the feed of who joined their loyalty club and we’d automate the handwritten note out to them. But it was just really interesting to see how an old fashioned handwritten note now goes viral.
Brittany Hodak:
Yeah, no, and you see that happen all the time with notes that are going viral. And one of the things that I always say is I talk a lot about Chewy and they do a great job with personalization and notes. And I was lucky enough to be a recipient of hand painted portraits of my dogs. And I said, I know they do this like tens of thousands of times a month, but that doesn’t make it any less special when they do it for me because it’s still to me and it’s still about my dogs. And I think that’s the one thing to keep in mind know I love the quote from Elizabeth Arden. This is a quote that I have in my book and that I use a lot when I’m on stage. She said, Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers. And we’re living in a day and age where you almost have to have automation for that repetition to be a reality. And so using personalization using some of the things that you mentioned are so key and so critical, and it doesn’t take away from the fact that the fact that you’ve done it 10,000 times doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s still going to feel special and still has the potential to go viral when somebody opens it up and has that little moment of, wow, I wasn’t expecting this. This has exceeded my expectations in some way 100%.
David Wachs:
I couldn’t agree more. And I’m going to have to use that quote because that’s an incredible quote.
Brittany Hodak:
It’s such a good thing.
David Wachs:
Yeah. What’s so funny and so infuriating is this mattress company grew quite big and they stopped using us. So I reached out to their head of marketing and I asked Why? And they said, oh, we used you when we were a small mattress company, but now we’re big and we don’t need to make that same impression. And I didn’t know how to respond to that because I found it to be so myopic, so short sighted and stupid. Why wouldn’t you want to make a good impression? Why wouldn’t you want people to fill that connection? People buy from brands they trust and love and they just decided, oh, we’re big now. We don’t need to be trusted and loved. So it was just kind of a very strange solution.
Brittany Hodak:
Yeah. I wish I could tell you that is something I’ve never heard before, but that is so many brands make. Yes, we’re going to have a commitment and even an obsession to customer centricity when we’re small, but then once we start to grow, we’re going to look at that as a cost center rather than an opportunity or a profit center. So, yes, very short sighted and however large or small your company is listener right now, know that you’ve got to be obsessed about your customers forever if you want to future proof your business and continue to be successful.
David Wachs:
Yeah, it’s funny. If you go to our website, there’s a million stats and there’s actually a really good I don’t know if you saw it. If you click resources, the bottom menu item is this consumer outreach survey which talks I’d recommend you guys that your listeners download it because it has all these great stats on the most personal form of communication. So, trick question. What do you think the most personal form of communication from a brand is?
Brittany Hodak:
Oh, gosh. Is it a handwritten note?
David Wachs:
It is not.
Brittany Hodak:
Is it a phone call?
David Wachs:
It is a phone call.
Brittany Hodak:
Okay, I wanted it to be handwrytten note.
David Wachs:
Yeah, no, but guess what has the highest risk of being annoying?
Brittany Hodak:
Is it also a phone call?
David Wachs:
It’s also a phone call.
Brittany Hodak:
17 in a row from exactly robot program.
David Wachs:
But a handwrytten note is highly personal, but zero risk of being annoying. And there’s a whole bunch of other stats in that deck. And I don’t recall where my train of thought took me here because you mentioned something that made me think of ROI. Everybody’s wondering, what’s the ROI on sending a handwritten thank you. And maybe I’m of just a different generation now, everybody thinks and I grew up with email marketing and I ran a text messaging campaign and all that, everybody thinks everything should be measurable 100%. I think if you’re asking for the ROI of sending a thank you note, you’re asking the wrong question. You just don’t understand the value of long term relationships or the fact of just doing what’s right. Just doing what’s right? If somebody buys a house from you, the cost of sending a $3 thank you note, do you really need to measure the ROI on that? And there’s so many aspects in the everyday marketing of a company or a person where they don’t ask these questions. For example, I was writing, I went to meet with a major cosmetic brand in New York for my last company, and we were talking about the cost of running a big. Text messaging campaign. And it was pretty minor, actually. It was pretty low cost program. And then I got in the elevator with all of the executives, and on the ride down, they were talking about these amazing mugs they were going to send out to their top thousand influencers and the cost per mug and everything. And they had no questions about ROI for that, but for outbound communication campaigns, what’s the ROI? What’s the ROI? What’s the ROI? And so it’s really interesting where people kind of put this focus, and I think people need to have a mindset change and just understand sending the handwritten note, sending a thank you note, whether by us or by yourself or another company or whatever, it’s just so critical these days. And that’s how you build superfans, by showing appreciation.
Brittany Hodak:
I think you nailed it. If you’re asking about the ROI instead of the ROR or Return on relationship, it is the wrong question. And you need to be thinking about your customers as relational relationships. That’s very repetitive, but relational relationships rather than transactional relationships. And a quote that comes to mind that I know has been attributed to Albert Einstein. I don’t know if he’s the one who first said it or not, but not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. And I think he was probably talking about TikTok when he said that, but it’s, like, more broadly applicable, I think. And when you start to talk about ROI and the things that you’re doing, it’s like, I always feel a little icky when people talk about that. It makes me think of the creepy dudes that are like, but I bought you dinner, so I have to be able to come upstairs. You shouldn’t be showing appreciation or gratitude with an expectation of getting something in return. It goes back to that hard stop thank you you were talking about before. Sometimes it’s just thank you, and then there are no expectations.
David Wachs:
Right? As soon as you start trying to measure ROI, like, if you have a thank you note and it says, now just click this, scan this QR code, or visit this website or call this the thank you part is gone, and then it’s just icky again. So, yeah, 100% agree.
Brittany Hodak:
Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversations. I know everyone listening has enjoyed it as well. Before we go, is there anything else that we didn’t talk about that you want to share with our listeners today?
David Wachs:
Please visit handwrytten.com that’s handwritten with yhandwrytten and if you’re curious about the quality of the writing or anything like that, you can click the business tab at the top and request a free sample kit, and we’ll send you a whole folder full of samples at no charge. If you’re in the real estate space or mortgage space, we integrate with a lot of those platforms via Zapier. And integration is the best way for follow through, I feel, because then it’s completely out of sight, out of mind, and, you know, it’s taken care of. We also have that prospecting tool and birthdays and a bunch of other ways to kind of put your outreach on automatic. And so please feel free to visit Handwritten and check out the writing and kind of what we’re doing and give us a call if you have any questions.
Brittany Hodak:
A question that I get a lot from people who are running, particularly mortgage companies, but also sometimes real estate is how much they should do for their employees, for their Los. Oh, we know we want a thank you note, but at what point is it okay for us to step in and do it? Or the thing with their real estate. And so I would say for anyone who’s questioning that, setting up those automations is a great way to do it. And rather than making it an opt in for those agents, make it an opt out to where two weeks after closing or whatever the trigger date or event is that you set, it’s going to go out unless that employee goes into the CRM and turns it off because they’ve done something themselves. And that’s a great way to make sure you’re not duplicating to where they get one handwritten note from Joe and another one from handwrytten with a Y on behalf of Joe, but also a really great way to make sure it doesn’t fall through the cracks, because you want to create customers for life and relationships that last forever. And having those automated personalized touches are an incredible, fantastic way to do it. And David has built an army of robots that does it better than anyone.
David Wachs:
Yeah, thank you so much. And I totally agree. I mean, our clients and me, I’m guilty of it too. Unless I have it on fully automated, it doesn’t happen. I mean, we work with these car dealerships and the owner of the car dealership walks around with pads of handwritten notes and hands them out to people, but they still don’t do it. I mean, they do it for a few days and then everybody reverts to not doing it. So if you want something to kind of get ingrained in the brand and the communication from your brand automating, it is really unless you’ve got a company full of absolute 100% superstars, it’s just not going to happen. So you have to plan or that expectation and figure out a way to make it happen.
Brittany Hodak:
Yes. Or if you have a little bit of ADHD. I am so good at buying and writing handwritten notes. I am so bad at addressing and sending handwritten notes. I’ve got a stack right over here of probably 15 cards that I picked out, and most of them are written and they just need to be addressed. I actually last week was going through a travel backpack and found like a box of ten that I had written out and stamped and put the names on an airplane. Probably thinking, oh, when I land I’ll fill the addresses in and I just opened them all and texted pictures because it was so funny, because it was like, why? And I’d written them in January and so I was like, hey Dave, thanks again for coffee six months ago and made a joke out of it. But if you’re somebody like me, who has every intention of sending the handwritten notes, even buys them and writes them and sometimes stamps them, but doesn’t get it out of the red zone over.
David Wachs:
The it yeah, I can’t. Tell you how many banged up greeting or birthday cards to my mother I had in my laptop bag before starting handwritten. Because I’d go to Walgreens, I’d pick up the birthday card, I’d come home, fill it out and I’d never get in the it. And it was like multiple years of this. So, yeah, I’m there with you.
Brittany Hodak:
Well, David, thank you for solving this problem for you, for me and for so many others out there. I appreciate you coming on the show. We’ll put all of the links in the show note and I know that I for 01:00 a.m. Very excited to be the next customer for Handwrytten.
David Wachs:
Thank you. And I can’t wait to read your book, so I’m going to order it right now. I promise to leave a review so you can follow up on that.
Brittany Hodak:
Thank you. Oh, I will talk to you soon.
David Wachs:
Bye bye.
Brittany Hodak:
Bye.
