Handwritten Notes

Specsavers turns over £4 billion each year, but the co-founder still spends time writing birthday cards for employees.

She says, "It's caring for the people that are at the sharp end, working really hard every day, to make sure that nobody falls through the net."

She does it every weekend without fail. It can be 500 cards each week.

“If anyone has a baby or someone’s relative dies, I will be writing a card."

But why bother?

Well, because paradoxically, a handwritten note, in a world of AI-generated digital content, can be remarkably persuasive.

Handwritten notes

In 2013¹, Irish Revenue sent a survey to 2,000 businesses.

300 of them, chosen at random, got the same survey with a personalised, handwritten Post-it note stuck on it.

After 15 working days, 36% of the Post-it group had responded, against 19.2% of the control group. The Post-it note roughly doubled responses, with most of the lift coming just after the letters arrived.

It built on a 2005 study by Randy Garner².

In that study, a handwritten Post-it on survey materials raised response rates from 36% to 76%, and also improved the quality and speed of the replies.

I think this effect is only amplified today, when digital messages are even more normalised.

It's why I love direct mail like this:

In a world where it's never been easier to write and send digital messages, the effort, time and cost a handwritten note requires can make you stand out, make your ads more memorable, and make a founder widely loved.

The Irish Revenue example is just one of the 600+ insights in the Nudge Vaults.

Here's a look inside: