Do you like receiving bills in the mail? When you see one does your heart miss a beat fearing the loss the envelope may contain? Do you enter a period of denial and leave the bills to one side and make a deal with yourself to open them later?
Do you have to send letters to others and suspect that this is their reaction to receiving the letter from you?
What is it about a bill or a formal letter that triggers this type of response? Is it the window in the envelope? Your logo? The generic typeface?
It appears that Danish mortgage bank BRF Kredit were sending letters to cash strapped home-owners to help them out of their situation but most were failing to respond. BRF believed the fear the recipient had of the envelope was contributing to the non-response.
So what did they do?
BRF replaced the standard fear inducing envelope complete with logo and replaced it with a normal plain envelope; one where the recipient’s name and address was handwritten onto it.
By using this approach across 1300 cases BRF state that it has been able to get 9 out of 10 home-owners back on their feet because they are engaging with the bank saving them and the bank between 100 and 150 million Danish kroner (18-27 million USD).
As the article doesn’t articulate whether any split testing was done (i.e. some envelopes sent with handwriting and the logo; handwritten with no logo; typed with no logo; and we know typed with logo resulted with no-response) we don’t know which attribute was more persuasive in having home-owners open the letter and subsequently read the offer of assistance provided by the bank.
While in the case of BRF we don’t know if it was the personalised address we do know that research conducted by Randy Garner in 2005 found that when a post-it note with a hand written request for the recipient to complete a survey was used, the response rate was significantly higher when the post-it note was attached and personalised.
The post-it note draws attention to the request and the personalisation triggers Reciprocity.
Fellow CMCT Brian Ahearn used this tactic to get $700,000 repaid after an accounting error and the UK Government used handwritten notes stating “This message is important” to boost tax compliance that they estimated for every dollar spent on handwriting returned $2000.
Don’t you think it worth a try!
So this week what will you handwrite? Write the card, the envelope, the post-it note. Show the effort and reap the rewards.
Sources:
http://politiken.dk/oekonomi/privatoekonomi/ECE1509255/haandskrevne-kuverter-faar-skyldnere-til-at-aabne-brevet/
Garner, R (2005) Post-It® Note Persuasion: A Sticky Influence. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15(3), 230-237.
Ahearn, B (2012) http://influence-people-brian.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/700000-great-reasons-to-use-yellow.html
Freakonomics: http://freakonomics.com/2013/04/03/the-tax-man-nudgeth-full-transcript/
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