Interview with David Wachs About Handwritten Notes in Marketing

Laryssa Wirstiuk 0:00
Hi, I’m your host Laryssa Wirstiuk. Through this podcast, I aim to empower and inspire jewelry entrepreneurs and innovators so they can thrive by doing what they love. I’m passionate about digital marketing for jewelry brands, and I’m excited to share my passion with you.

This is Episode 135. And today I’m going to share my interview with David Wachs, the founder of Handwrytten, which is a service that allows product based businesses like jewelry brands, to leverage the lost art of letter writing through scalable, robot-based solutions that actually write the notes in pen. Used by major meal box companies, e commerce giants, nonprofit organizations, and professionals, Handwrytten is changing the way that brands and people connect.

Nowadays most brand communications and marketing are done digitally. So a personal touch like a handwritten note can really set a brand apart from others in the industry. David is super passionate about discussing why personalization is so important for marketing. And I’m excited to have him on the podcast to share his insights about the power of the handwritten note and more.

But before we get to today’s episode, I want to share some marketing related news and insights from the past week that caught my attention.

So I saw one really great article from the New York Times all about how luxury jewelry brands today are creating a high end sales experience by leveraging technology. The digital age is pushing industries to reinvent luxurious online experiences, and consumers are longing for experiences to complement significant luxury purchases. Entrepreneurs are eager to reinvent the experience of buying luxury jewelry for the digital age.

One example is with the luxury fashion retail platform Farfetch, which organized a three way virtual jewelry appointment for a Parisian high jeweler, a client, and a stylist based in California. The video presentation that they set up actually featured models who were at the jewelry brand’s flagship boutique in Paris, and they were wearing a selection of jewels customized to the client’s preferences. This video presentation was successful and actually led to the client purchasing an eight carat diamond necklace.

Over the next five years, according to a Business of Fashion and McKinsey and Company report, online sales of fine jewelry are actually expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of nine to 12%. So luxury jewelry brands are definitely going all in on technology to provide an elevated and personalized customer experience and keeping customers engaged and inspired.

Another article I saw from JCK and also in a number of other places was all about Instagram’s latest big announcement that’s kind of disrupting the social media marketing world. And a lot of people are freaking out about this recent announcement. If you haven’t heard about it, well, you’re hearing about it now.

So TikTok is definitely a main competitor for Instagram today. And as a result, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared that Instagram will soon start showing recommended full screen videos on user feeds, along with photos and video from people they know. This potentially means that on Instagram, you’ll have less control over what you see in your own feed with video content coming from accounts you may not even follow.

As you probably already know, Instagram has been the destination for photo sharing for years. And individuals and jewelry brands and other brands have worked super hard to cultivate their Instagram forward presence. A lot of people are kind of disappointed and feeling uncertain. Photos on Instagram are not going to go away completely. But the algorithms are most likely going to continue to change rapidly. With this change to Instagram, it’s possible that the app could lose its identity and maybe forget what brought people to it in the first place, which was pictures. The main takeaway from this is that social media apps are always changing. And as a jewelry brand, you can’t rely on any one of them to be your customer relationship management platform. So you need to look for more proprietary ways to manage your customer information, whether that’s through an email list or something else that you have more ownership over.

And then finally, there are some really interesting stats out about the users on Pinterest. The social media platform’s fastest growth actually came from two emerging audiences in 2020, Gen Z and men. Both audiences were actually up 40% year over year. 60% of Pinterest global audience is women. As the reach that Pinterest has continues to diversify, new audiences are really broadening how the platform and app are being used.

There’s definitely more engagement for topics like entertainment, gaming and financial planning. And there are inspiring new Pinterest trends that that you can research and be aware of that may be relevant to your jewelry brand. The newest Pinners are really redefining it for the future. For example, Gen Z is using Pinterest to dream about their future, create life goals and invest in yourself boards. They’re focusing on career development, financial planning and personal growth. Whereas men are confident and creative. They’re using Pinterest to transform themselves and their passions. They’re creating boards like business skills, fun things, I would like it my home and amazing recipes I need to try. Pinners of all ages are as engaged as ever. You can be the brand that really shows them how to make their ideas and dreams a reality and help them create their own future.

If you want to get the links to the articles I share in this segment of the podcast, you can sign up for my email newsletter by visiting joyjoya.com/signup, and you’ll get a digest with the links whenever a new episode drops. Okay, let’s get to my interview with David.

Thanks so much, David, for coming on the podcast. I’m really excited to have you as my guest today.

David Wachs 6:44
Thank you Laryssa. It’s great to be here.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 6:46
Yeah. So tell our listeners a little bit more about Handwrytten and your journey to founding this company.

David Wachs 6:54
Sure. So I’ll start with the journey because it kind of talks about why I’m doing what I’m doing. Um, prior to Handwrytten, I had a company called Sell It, we were a text messaging company. And we’d send literally millions of texts a day for brands like Abercrombie and Fitch and Sam’s Club Toys R Us. And what I realized from that was yes, it worked, at least at the time. But it was all opt in, so it wasn’t spamming anybody’s phone. But I realized that people are getting inundated with text messages, and emails and tweets, while at the time tweets, not so much but emails. And since then tweets and Facebook and slack and Twitter, and Instagram and telegram and all these other forms of communication, where text messaging and electronic forms of email became noise.

And when I sold that company, I wanted to send something to my employees and my customers that they would actually remember. And I knew that if I walked into my employees’ offices or my own office, I’d see the handwritten notes that I’d received not only read, but they would be on display. So I thought, okay, I’ll send handwritten notes to all my employees and my customers and thank them all individually for everything they’ve done. And I sat down, and I got through like five or 10 of them. And I’m like, I don’t have the time to do this, my pen’s running out, I don’t have stamps, I ran out of stationery, all those problems. So I wanted to figure out another solution to do this. And that’s where Handwrytten came from.

And what Handwrytten is, is it’s the largest platform in the world for sending handwritten notes at scale. And we try to make sending handwritten notes easier than sending an email. And I’ll say easier because we try to help you automate it. And in many ways, whether that’s through Shopify stores, or whatever you’re using, we try to automate your handwritten notes. But we’re really a platform for helping you connect to your customers and your prospects via old-fashioned handwritten notes. The way we do that, is it software like a plugin for Salesforce or Shopify or whatever, but then it’s also robotics.

So we actually now have about 120 robots. Each robot holds a real pen, it’s just a Pilot G2 ballpoint gel pen. You can buy them at Staples, and they write out these notes longhand in the handwriting style of your choice. So if you like fancy or cursive or block or all caps, we have handwriting styles for each of those. And then we’ll write out the envelope and then stuff and stamp that for you with a real stamp. So that’s kind of what we are and I have all sorts of case studies on on how effective it is. But in this day and age where everybody is inundated with electronic communication, anytime you do something physical and real, it really stands out. And I can talk about them more if you like.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 10:08
Sure. So just a random question out of curiosity, why that pen?

David Wachs 10:14
Why that pen? I wanted a kind of bolder pen. And the Pilot G2 you can get in one millimeter thickness. So it’s it’s a little bit of a thicker ink we do blue, because we’ve done studies, especially with our old robots, which weren’t as great as our new ones. If you put it in black, it just didn’t pass the sniff test. But for whatever reason, if you put it in blue ink, it really, I mean, it’s indecipherable, or indistinguishable, I should say from actual handwritten notes, there’s just something about blue ink, so we do blue, and then the Pilot G2. I mean, we just test a bunch of pens that one wrote, well, I mean, personally, there’s some other pens I like out there now, but I’m not about to go change the system we have in place. I mean, we buy 1000s of pen inserts, you know, the little thing that you can buy at Staples, where they you know, the replacement insert, we buy 1000s of those, and I don’t want to go change in what we do, just because I like the new, you know, ballpoint pen out there. But there are other pens out there that we could certainly use. Yeah, just, it was just at the time, that was the, you know, the best one we found.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 11:27
That’s interesting. You brought up kind of an unpleasant memory. For me when you were talking about writing notes. Like way back in the day, I was a marketing assistant somewhere. And one of my jobs was to write handwritten notes to certain clients. And it was like, my least favorite thing to do, I would dread it so much. So I feel like I could have benefited from Handwrytten at that point in my life.

David Wachs 11:49
Yeah, I mean, I am the worst offender, I don’t even you know, I need to use my own system, or I use it to some degree. But it’s the reason is because a lot of what I’m doing is not automatable. I guess after podcasts, I can have it, you know, go out to everybody that I’ve spoken to. But for businesses where you can automate it, like ever, well, for my company, we automate it. So if you visit our website, and you get in our CRM drip campaign will send you handwritten notes that way. But if you’re a store owner and online store with an Etsy store or a Shopify store, WooCommerce, whatever, we can absolutely automate it, because then you just set up a trigger of after purchase, or after they spend so much money or after the third purchase or after registration, you can send all these touch points. So it takes that out of the equation. I personally, unless it’s fully automated, I won’t do it. So that’s why we try to fully automate everything around here.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 12:49
Yeah. So how is Handwrytten different from other letter writing and sending services? I know there are a few different offerings out there.

David Wachs 12:58
Well, I kind of break it down into those notes that are actually handwritten, versus those notes that are laser printed to look handwritten, versus those that are actually written by rote or those that are written by robots and pen to mimic a hand, an actual handwritten note. And there are some really cool, actual handwritten note companies out there where they have people doing it for you.

There’s two things to consider. Their cost. If you want a good result, the cost could be substantially more than what we what we charge. And then two is risk. And what I mean by that is, if you have 1,000 people sitting in a room writing out handwritten notes, what if their handwriting style gets sloppy, or they mess it up, or it’s smashed all over the place? Or even worse, what if one of those handwriting people goes rogue and starts writing nasty stuff in the notes and then you know, you’re up the creek without a paddle.

In that case with us, we will absolutely write what you want in the handwriting style that you want. We’ll put variation in it. So we’ll, you know, it’ll not every note will look the same because we randomized characters, and we randomize line difference, spacing and left margin and all that to make it look really real. But at least it will be in the style you want with the verbiage you want and it will be cost effective.

So that’s what separates us from the other, you know, the artistry, handwritten notes from the electric from the mechanically written handwritten notes. There’s only a couple companies that use robots. We’re by far the largest and then there’s some real small guys. I think, you know, and I asked, you know, tell people to try for themselves, which one passes the sniff test. Our solution, you know, a lot of the other companies out there are using the robots we use seven years ago. And what happened is, is we realized those robots that off the shelf don’t, it just doesn’t look great. So then we went down this path of designing our own robot, and it is heads, you know, 1000 times better than other things out there. And I’m confident that if you take our notes and you take the competition’s (you could go on our website and compare there’s under the about tab), you can see how we compare against everybody, but I think our handwriting quality is way better.

And then our throughput because we have, you know, we’re the biggest. So we have a lot of people doing a lot of robots doing this, a lot of people stuff and, and then we also allow you to generate your own cardstock. And stationery, we have a full digital press here. So it’s like working with a big print shop. If you’re doing any quantity of notes, we can have a beautiful folded full-bleed, a two-card design for you that we first laser print it, and then we write in it. So it’s coming off the same digital press, you’d see like a print shop. So that’s kind of a point of difference. And then also just the integration touchpoints. I don’t want this to be a sales advertisement. But we integrate with all these platforms real easily. So we have articles on it on the website. But yeah, I’m confident the quality. And then if you also compare it against the laser-printed offerings, well, you know, they don’t pass the smudge test, so you can’t lick your finger and smudge the ink. And then most of them look very unrealistic. So you know, that’s kind of how we break down.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 16:42
That was funny to me what you were saying about if people write the notes, I wish I could remember the company. But I was listening to the “How I Built This” podcast. And that happened to someone on there that one of their employees just like decided to be snarky, and like started writing crazy things in notes to customers. Yeah, I can’t remember who it was. But I thought it was a really funny story.

David Wachs 17:09
Yeah, I mean, you’re not gonna pay note writers $25 an hour to sit down and write notes. So you’re not going to, you know, you’re not going to get the most motivated employees to stay on track. So there’s that there’s also, we work with a high end perfume and cologne brand. And we work with their online sales. So if you buy the cologne online, direct from them, you’ll get a handwritten note, you know, thank you for your purchase. If you buy the same perfume or cologne in a department store, they tell their store reps, you must send these handwritten notes to customers, what are the odds, they actually send it like 5% because those those store reps are so busy selling the product, stocking the shelves, merchandising, making everything look nice doing their books, you know, like all this other stuff, that the compliance goes out the window. So it’s, you know, what we always want to see happen is have those people bring those notes back in house, to or back to Handwrytten, so that we can automate it fully, even the in-store stuff.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 18:19
So let’s talk a little bit about personalization. And why it’s so important in marketing today. Because obviously Handwrytten helps brands enable or implement personalization. So tell me your thoughts about this as someone who is firsthand on the ground with it?

David Wachs 18:35
Well, I think there’s kind of two ways to think about personalization. Number one is it’s personal. And I would say for the most part, any handwritten note is personal because it creates that personal connection between you and the brand. Regardless you in the customer, regardless of what it says, Then is it personalized, and that could be something as simple as Dear Laryssa.

But with that, you know, we like to take it a lot further and include a name, a product name and a recommendation. So for instance, we work with a handbag company. If you were to buy an expensive purse, you know, let’s say it’s called the weather travel purse, black style, you know, on the SKU, what we will do is we will say Dear Laryssa, thank you so much for your purchase of the and then we’ll go up to the category level. So won’t say the product level, it’ll say thank you so much for your purchase of the purse period, and then down, you know, we hope you enjoy it, please contact us. And then ideally we’ll include a cross recommendation. So we’ll say we think based on that you’d really enjoy our black leather wallet or whatever and then you include that cross reference. So the note even seems more personal.

And I know you can do this for jewelry too. And then you close it with an actual person. So for this handbag company, we know the store rep that helped you. So put their name, their phone number, and their address or location, like, you know, the whatever store in the Biltmore Mall or whatever that is. And we do all that. Now, that’s an extreme, that’s a perfect case. You know, that’s if we can if the client can provide us all that information. Worst case, we’ll just do dear Laryssa. You know,and that still really stands out.

But I think the most, the most important part is just being personal by sending handwritten notes. 99.9% of people won’t realize that a handwritten note can be automated versus every email, you know, can be automated. So I think there’s real benefit in that.

Just a quick story. And I know this isn’t jewelry related. But we have a piano tuner that uses us, you only need a piano tuned once a year. So he’s in your house once a year, he tunes your piano. And then he’s automated to send a handwritten note after he tunes your piano. When he’s in your house a year later. That handwritten note is standing up on the piano. So not only is it read, not only is it kept, but it’s kept on the clients most prized possession: their piano in the fanciest room in their house. Right? So to get that level of connection, and wow, you know, this person sent me a handwritten note. I think it’s very powerful.

We have other brands, especially during COVID. So this is kind of maybe you know, something that won’t happen moving forward. But we have an online furniture brand. There, they have clients calling in crying because they received handwritten notes. And I yeah, I think that’s really because it COVID. I mean, you what’s happening is you have all these people so isolated, feeling so alone, that if anybody takes the time out to do anything, it’s very impactful. So and I’m not saying take advantage of that. I’m saying, be respectful of that, and cater to that and understand that people crave connections, and they’re feeling so unconnected right now. This is one way to really do that.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 22:36
Yeah. So you mentioned the personalized product recommendations, which I definitely can think can be applied to jewelry brands. I’m wondering with jewelry specifically, are there other ways that these brands could kind of take handwritten notes to another level or kind of utilize them very specifically for jewelry?

David Wachs 22:59
For jewelry, we’ve done, I mean, I think the best use case for what we do is, is not specific to jewelry. That is just saying thank you. And when I say thank you, I mean Thank you period, full stop the end, I’m not saying thank you, here’s a coupon for you know another thing where you’re trying to generate ROI and measure ROI from a purchase, I really do think just saying thank you is very powerful these days, because while they have the option to buy your jewelry, they have the option to buy a trillion other jewelers or whatever, and they took the time to choose you. And we should always be thankful for that. I think I think that goes a long way. So I think thankfulness birthday anniversary. You know, oftentimes people might purchase a piece of jewelry for a special occasion to follow up prior to the anniversary of that occasion. And remind them is very powerful too.

For jewelry stores in particular, we’ve worked with jewelry store openings. I don’t necessarily remind recommend this. But this is something we’ve done for jewelry stores, which is pull a list together of everybody in a certain radius of the jewelry store and send those residential addresses that meet certain zip code, you know, average household income levels, invitations to the jewelry store, we’ve done that, in the past. You can include handwritten notes with the product. And in that case, maybe it’s not personalized. It’s just a replication of an actual handwritten note. So usually the way our process works is you type in your note on a website are we you know, integrate with the system and then we generate the handwriting. But if it’s not personalized, if it’s the same note replicated over and over, we can actually replicate the person’s handwriting exactly. So this can actually be kind of cool.

For a mattress company, when you open up the mattress box, you’d get a handwritten note that was a doodle of somebody, you know, sleeping in the bed with little moon and stars, or, you know, dreaming of a cat or adoption or whatever. So we can include those notes. And those actually get Instagrammed a lot and Tweeted a lot. So they’re, they’re really cool. Because they can be fully organic with scrawling scrub scratch outs, you know, weird, weird characters, all that type of stuff. So we do have customers doing note insertion. In fact, the jewelry the perfume brand is doing that. But I would say the biggest thing is maybe just a follow up. Thank you, hope your purchase went well. If there’s anything you need, just let us know and again, that’s not unique to jewelry. But it’s still unique, because nobody’s doing it these days.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 26:03
You mentioned something that I didn’t even think about, but it’s so obvious and kind of leads into my next question is the shareability aspect of the cards like taking the pictures, putting it on Instagram or Twitter or wherever. So how would you say, the handwritten aspect of the like, like old school way of connecting of marketing compliments digital marketing. How can they like work hand in hand for a brand?

David Wachs 26:31
Yeah, so with, with jewelry, I don’t have an exact example. But I have a really cool example for pets. We work with one pet company that sends I believe it’s pet food. And they’ll send they’ll know the date of your your dog’s birthday. And they’ll send a handwritten birthday card to the dog. And they’ll include a hat, a birthday hat, like, you know, with a little elastic band below. It’s so cute. Yeah. And then people are taking pictures of the birthday card with the dog with the hat on it and throwing it all over Instagram and stuff like that. So that we have an arm. Even if you don’t ask people to post pictures of these notes, people still post them.

Two examples. One is a final, it’s a record subscription company where you can actually get physical vinyl records. And there we supply physical handwritten notes to go with those records. Those get a lot of posts on Twitter and Facebook or Instagram, just because nobody’s getting handwritten notes, the average person only gets like two or three notes a month. So any brand that does that, it’s really cool.

And then the other example is a YouTube morning show we work with, where if you join their loyalty fan club, you’d get a handwritten note from the two hosts of the morning show. And what’s so crazy is they didn’t ask us to randomize the note at all, it’s always the exact same note, same note every single time. And if you search Twitter, there were like, hundreds of them. Everybody’s like, oh, I got my note, next person, I got my note, but they didn’t take the lot. You know, if I were to do it, I would have said let’s mix it up a bit and have every note be a little different. That’s no extra cost. Maybe a little extra creative time on their end, but there was no extra cost. But you know, it still worked.

So I think just naturally digital and analog work together really well. We’ve also done coupon codes. If you want to include a QR code, you can. We’ve done a few QR codes. So you can tie back to the website or something that way, I tend to think it can be a little gimmicky. But now after COVID, and everybody getting QR code menus, we’re all a lot more used to that. Those are kind of the big ways we have one client, it’s a bespoke suit company out of Canada. And by the way, we don’t typically I mean, there’s a few clients, I can mention vinyl and others. But for the most part, I don’t mention client names because nobody wants us to give away the secret. But we have a bespoke suit coming out of Canada that once a year. And they’re online. So you send in your measurements, they’ll make a beautiful suit for you. Once a year, they send a handwritten note to their best customers with a coupon code in it. And that coupon code has a five times greater redemption than any other emailed coupon code. So if you do have a coupon code, you want to do it you could do it like that. I just, you know, I just think at the very least you should just send a base “thank you”. But this is, you know, an additional collateral piece that goes out with a coupon code and has five times to redemption because it’s handwritten.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 30:00
Wow, that’s crazy. So I want to talk a little bit about customer lifetime value. Some of my listeners may know, because I’ve talked about this before, it is less expensive to retain your current customers than to keep acquiring new customers. So I’m curious, like, what results have you seen with the handwritten notes for customer retention? What role does this play in helping companies retain their customers?

David Wachs 30:27
It’s huge. I think there’s a couple of aspects to it. Number one is just staying top of mind. And it’s great, like the piano tuner, right? Like, how more top of mind can you be if you see the handwritten note sitting on top of the piano every time you go play it. So that’s number one, because when it’s time to renew or read, retune the piano, they’re gonna call you. So you can do that through a cadence of handwritten notes throughout the year. I’m not saying 12 or even six, I’m saying like, two to four, you know, you want to send a thank you after the purchase, maybe a birthday card, maybe a Christmas card, and maybe one more occasion.

For auto dealerships we have this thing fully automated. So you buy a car, you get a handwritten note, you get an oil change reminder, you get a birthday and Christmas, next year, you get a thank you for your purchase of the of the car, you know, or anniversary of purchase. And then the same three things. So it’s this kind of cadence to keep people engaged, just like you would an email campaign, but it’s a much slower cadence or much less frequent cadence, there’s that. And we, you know, unfortunately, it’s not as trackable as an email, at least not for us. Because we’d send the notes that were out of the equation. It’s not like we’re including links that we can kind of intercept and try and find kind of get behind the scenes on our clients.

Most of our clients just keep using us. And they say we’re doing great, but they don’t share the data. But I do have an example. Again, it’s not jewelry, but it’s retention. It’s interesting. It’s an office snack box. So for this, if you have an office of 20 people, and you want to provide them snacks all the time, you subscribe to the snack box, they send you the snacks twice a month. I’m giggling because we’re a part of it. And we cannot stop the avalanche of snacks. There’s so many snacks out here. I don’t know what’s going on there right now. But anyway. So if they screw up with a account, maybe they forget to send the snacks or they send the wrong snacks or the boxes later, whatever. They would send a handwritten note and an additional box of snacks. You know, the handwritten note apology. And what they would find is that those customers that had a bad experience that were followed up with a handwritten note had a higher lifetime value. They stuck around longer, they spent more than those customers that never had that bad experience that was rectified.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 33:10
Oh, wow. Interesting.

David Wachs 33:11
So what did they do? They then screw up with everybody. Send everybody a handwritten note, apologize to everybody and raise all boats. Right? Like that was their strategy, which is very interesting. But I think, you know, I talked a lot about thankfulness. Personally, if you find me on Medium, I’m talking a lot about the art of screwing up. And I’m not saying disrupt intentionally, what I’m saying is if you screw up, own it, and that has real value, and that’s what this this snack box did was they decided, oh, wait, we owned it. And these people are more loyal now than ever before. So let’s just screw up with everybody. So that’s one thing that really drives lifetime value. But I think really just being in that cadence and sending one piece that might really stick out. I mean, everybody gets 10,000 emails from every Stitch Fix and whatever brand but if you actually get a handwritten note from these brands, it stands out, and it creates that retention.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 34:17
I was gonna ask you too: it probably varies from brand to brand and the goals and the strategy but like what are some typical key performance indicators or KPIs that people are using to like track the effectiveness of these notes?

David Wachs 34:32
It usually over the place. Yeah, and we are out of the out of the loop, you know, on like an email provider or something like that. But a lot of them use meeting close or meeting bookings if you’re having an appointment or something like that, repeat purchases, and total lifetime value of account. So total purchases, total number of purchases, or total value of purchase times total number of purchases, those are kind of the big ones. Retention, you know, we work with dog grooming locations, and it’s like, how many bookings have they done? Do they continue to book that type of thing? For jewelry stores, it’s repeat, you know, repeat, purchase, they bought the ring now to the buy the earrings, that type of thing too. And then the kind of less than the ones that are harder to find are kind of the Instagram postings and Twitter unless you have a campaign really built towards that, like the dog hat, you know, the Happy Birthday hat, which I’m sure you could come up with something for a jewelry store, you know, take a picture, you know, maybe when you deliver the or ship the earrings, you put a handwritten note in there saying we’d love it if you post something to Instagram for us and tag us and then see if that raises the number of Instagram postings you have.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 36:02
Definitely. So we’ve sort of touched upon customer experience throughout this whole conversation. But I would love to know specifically what that means to you and how the handwritten note elevates the customer experience.

David Wachs 36:16
Yeah, I think cx most people think of as how does the website work? You know? Are the buttons in the right places? Are they the right colors? Do I notice on is my name shown on the websites are feel personalized? For me customer experience is the unboxing of the product. It’s how long it took to get the product? It’s if I had a customer service request, how long did it take for that person to get back to me? You know, if I sent in a I email customer support or account support or whatever, how long do they get back was the person that got back to me? Upbeat you know, I don’t know if you use Zapier, this cool system to connect all your other systems. But if you ever email customer support, they get back with like, you know, moonbeams and angel toots? Or it’s just, that’s a great question, exclamation point. And that’s the right way to do it.

So I think, I think really kind of thinking holistically about customer experience, not user interface and user design, you have to think about every aspect from how do the emails look? How does the website look? How does customer support interaction look? Do you have a phone an IVR system for your phone? Where when they call up? How does that sound? Does that reflect the brand? I mean, every interaction touchpoint good or bad? You have to review? And then you know, it’s kind of like it’s the brand, you know, there’s a customer experience cannot be separated from the brand. So I think that’s I don’t know if I answered your question. But yeah, it’s really all those touch points, not just how does your website look, which I think so many, so many cx designers or UX designers, you know, they’re not, they’re not thinking holistically. And CX is more of a brand discussion than anything else.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 38:30
Yeah, I 100% agree with that. I love the connection you made between customer experience and the brand, because they’re all tied together. Like your brand could be the way you answer the phone, just like that. So definitely. Yeah. Well, thanks, David. This has been such a great conversation. I’m wondering if you had anything else. Any final thoughts you’d like to share with the listeners today?

David Wachs 38:52
No, I mean, well, yes. When when you consider your brand, and you consider how you outreach to your customers, jewelry is typically not the cheapest thing. And whether you use handwritten my company, or use one of the other companies out there or even just send a laser printed card or write them yourself or whatever, I don’t think you I think you should truly consider the mailbox. And because unlike the email inbox, which you’re competing against 140 other emails every day, the inbox these days, you’re competing against junk mail, which people typically throw away, and then they save handwritten notes, all three of them a month as dessert. And they look forward to that. And you should consider that experience as an unboxing experience. You know, oh, why did this jewelry store, email me or send me a handwritten note and then they take the time to open it, flip it over, look at both sides, read it, consider it that type of thing. So it’s another opportunity To create a touch point with a client that most brands don’t do, and it can really, I cannot stress how how much it can really set your brand, whether large or small apart and create loyalty in a way that is hard to duplicate. So yeah, and then if you want to use us, please check us out, handwrytten.com. And if you sign up, use discount code PODCAST. And you’ll get $5 to try it out.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 40:32
I love that.

David Wachs 40:33
Yeah, where you could go to the business page and fill in the samples request. We’ll send you a whole bunch of samples too. So yeah, please give it a shot.

Laryssa Wirstiuk 40:42
That’s amazing. I mean, just listening to you talk right now. I’m like, dang, I wish someone would send me a handwritten note. Well, I’ll get your address after the call and Yeah, well, thank you, David. It was such a pleasure to have you today.

David Wachs 41:00
Thank you, Laryssa it was a pleasure meeting you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai