We recently joined the Seattle Direct Marketing Association (SDMA) and have been very impressed with the organization and events.

It’s really great to see the local energy and interest in Direct Marketing. If you’re in the area and interested in Direct Marketing I encourage you to attend one of the monthly meetings.

Just don’t ask them if they are a part of the national Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

In a letter about handwriting personal notes in the Kansas City Star, Jeanne Phillips of Dear Abby fame hits on the key emotional aspects of handwritten mail.

Although e-mail is here to stay, handwritten correspondence still has an important place in people’s lives.

Each method of communication fills a need. E-mail is fast, cheap and easy. However, it can often also be terse and impersonal. Handwritten messages can be an art form, an elegant skill that expresses emotions.

Here’s a tip for you direct marketers out there when your clients say, “Handwritten marketing? Really?” The more people email, IM, SMS, and now “Facebook” with each other the more an old-fashioned handwritten letter stands out and gets results. It’s so true!

I’ve had a few people recently ask me variations of, “Well, with all this technology today don’t you think handwritten letters are a little old-fashioned for marketing?” My answer is absolutely. That’s the point!

We welcome the growth of online marketing because our approach contrasts so well with what is frequently considered “cheap and annoying.” Online, people now have to wade through spam, ad-blockers, spoofing, viruses, phishing, and new threats every day. There is a lot of clutter and fear out there precisely because it’s so cheap to produce this type of “marketing.”

On the other hand, our handwritten notes convey the comfortable old-fashioned qualities of caring and a personal touch. This human emotional connection between our clients and their customers simply creates better results and it stands in stark contrast to the alternatives today.

So, while everyone else tries optimized email marketing campaigns, targeted search ads, Facebook ads, and whatever comes next, handwritten marketing will only increase its effectiveness. We firmly believe this and think you and your clients should as well.

Handwritten marketing works wonders for political candidates, but this article points to the longevity of personal handwritten notes in politics. The longevity that can come back to bite you.

Silly us. We thought it was technology – the frantic e-this and cyber-that – that would kill the slow and intimate delight that is the handwritten letter. But wrong again. It’s politics, it seems, that might do the foul deed.

There is some good insight throughout this article:

There’s no denying that such personal, handwritten missives possess power. More than emails, handwritten versions suggest intimacy and honesty and revelation.

“How very human were letters,” Cathleen Schine wrote in her novel The Love Letter. “Only we write letters.” Beasts may grunt or gesture. “But they don’t write love letters.”

It’s not for nothing, so rife are they with meaning, that stacks of them can be bound in elastic and saved, in chest or shoebox, for years, for lifetimes.

An email is quickly scanned, a letter studied. Is the paper an expensive bond carefully folded, or a scrap torn from a notebook? Does the chosen ink colour set a tone, the handwriting reveal mood or temperament? And does that scent of perfume, should a recipient be so lucky, hint at intent?

More:

There seems a yearning afoot for the age of letter writing as a means of communication at depth.

Almost 20 years ago, G. Kingsley Ward had an unlikely bestseller with his Letters of a Businessman to His Son. Modelled, perhaps, on Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, it sparked any number of copycat collections of missives to young women, young Christians or “to the next generation from people who know a thing or two.”

They’re popular, perhaps, because letters suggest investment of time and thought and heart.

Now, we’d be the first to talk at length about the innate value of handwriting, particularly handwritten marketing, but here is a new angle. Steve Graham at Vanderbilt University, in a new study to be published this month claims that “a majority of primary-school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produced written assignments that were superior in quantity and quality and resulted in higher grades.” There is more in this Newsweek article on how Good Penmanship is more than a Quaint Skill.

Handwriting is important because research shows that when children are taught how to do it, they are also being taught how to learn and how to express themselves …

All this matters, educators say, because evidence is growing that handwriting fluency is a fundamental building block of learning. Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting Without Tears, believes that “when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these kids to learn if handwriting was an automatic process.” That concern, in part, prompted the addition of a written essay to the SAT, which is graded for content, though not legibility. “If you put something like a writing test on the SAT, children’s skill level will begin to be addressed,” says Ed Hardin, a senior content specialist at the College Board. The trickle-down effect to middle schools should eventually reach third grade, where the trouble so often begins.

While obviously everyone’s handwriting is inherently different, Eileen a “dedicated elementary teacher in the Middle East” has a teacher’s view on the difference between British and American handwriting.

Years ago, one of the British teachers at our school shared with me that she couldn’t understand why all the American teachers’ handwriting looked the same. She told me that she later discovered that we actually have handwriting class in America, where we are all taught the American cursive (extremely different from modern British “joined-together” writing). Apparently in Britain, they let each child evolve their own system of writing, forming, and joining letters. Of course, Americans do see much variation when they look at other Americans’ writing. But these variations are not apparent to British who are not used to looking at American writing.

According to Bob Rosner and Sherrie Campbell over at Workmash AKA the Working Wounded, Ikea has been using handwritten marketing in some interesting and creative ways:

Ikea recently tested an innovative approach for finding great employees. They put hand-written job announcements on bathroom walls at upscale restaurants in Malmo, Sweden. According to the company, the bathroom ads generated four times the response they get from classifieds.