For dentists and other professionals, nothing adds to a letter campaign more than a nice, personalized note in the author’s actual handwriting. Now imagine adding the personalized note using high-speed, low-cost mailing equipment.
Dental marketing with a personal touch
Dental professionals using direct mail understand the power of predesigned fonts that simulate handwriting and make it appear that letters have been personally addressed. Research shows mailers designed to appear handwritten are 300% more likely to be opened compared to standard printed envelopes.1 These are popular with businesses eager to demonstrate a more personal and direct touch, such as dental and health-care practices, as well as legal, financial, insurance, religious, political, and nonprofit organizations.
A new twist on traditional handwritten fonts
Traditionally these fonts are selected from a handful of predesigned or custom cursive or hand-printed options. While the fonts may be custom, each individual character used to remain unchanged from the last. Now, there is a new twist on this option: dynamic, customized and unique fonts created by the user combined with randomization that emulates natural variations in handwriting. This approach provides the extra level of personalization to catch the eye of mailing recipients.
For years, when campaigns used traditional handwritten-style fonts, recipients would tend to perceive the mail as more authentic and personal. Studies suggest that incorporating such elements can increase response rates by up to 50%, as people feel more valued and are more likely to act on personalized mail.1 Still, some companies employ pen-plotters and even actual hand-writers with ballpoint pens to reach the next level of realism and attain the highest response rates.
The challenge is that traditional mass mailings essentially use static handwriting fonts that lack the authenticity of actual handwriting. The consistent uniformity of any predesigned font indicates that it is computer-generated. Customized and more realistic-looking handwriting fonts for addressing can attract attention, increasing both open and response rates.
A font as unique as your dental practice
There are reasons to generate your own dynamic font that stands out from every generic font. These new dynamic fonts provide the authentic look of real handwriting but can be printed at full speed and low cost of high-speed production presses.
Now, at least one industry supplier provides the software to process dynamic randomized handwriting and cursive fonts for addressing mailers. All the supplier’s products can drive multiple print heads, even if they use different technologies like piezo and thermal ink jets, that can deliver a variety of water-based dye pigment, polymer pigment, and UV inks. The font technology allows organizations to use the actual handwriting or cursive style of anyone, including the sender. After capturing a representative writing sample, a unique font is generated (figure 1). During the print process, the technology goes a step further by making the font dynamic and randomizing the characters by slightly altering one of four to create a more “natural” look while printing at extremely high speeds.
Printing addresses in ballpoint blue ink can further increase direct mail response rates (figure 2). Alternatively, dental professionals can shorten the production run and save substantial postage costs by running the font technology in color ink simultaneously while printing an Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB) in black ink.
Hyper-personalization will make your practice stand out
In the competitive dental field, as well as the high-stakes world of mass mail manufacturing, the inclusion of dynamic personalization of handwriting fonts, inks, and mail features is part of a broader trend to increase response rates. Now, with the industry increasingly adopting a hyper-personalized approach, matching the various component parts of a mail piece—addressing, envelope, messaging, attached cards, etc.—is even more critical.
Hyper-personalization in direct mail is a strategic approach where marketers leverage past purchase records, browsing habits, demographic details, and other available data to customize messages and offers for individual recipients.
For dentists, a hyper-personalized strategy that includes the fonts and addressing can significantly improve the efficacy of their marketing endeavors by increasing open rates, click-through rates, and ultimately sales.
Editor's note: This article originally appeared in DE Weekend, the newsletter that will elevate your Sunday mornings with practical and innovative practice management and clinical content from experts across the field. Subscribe here.
Reference
- Research: Handwritten envelopes receive more responses compared to printed labels. LetterFriend. October 8, 2015. https://letterfriend.com/blog/research-handwritten-envelopes-get-more-responses-than-printed-labels/
