How To Dramatically Boost Customer Loyalty With Automated Handwritten Notes

Jeffro (00:01.209)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Today, we’re diving into a topic that might surprise you. How handwritten notes can drive customer engagement and retention in a world dominated by digital marketing. So my guest is Ariane Rodman, CEO of Ignitepost, a company that blends software, robotics, and real pen and ink handwriting to help businesses create magic moments for their customers. Before Ignitepost, Ariane co-founded CoachUp, raised $15 million in venture capital, partnered with NBA MVP, Steph Curry, right? And landed a spot on the Forbes 30 under 30. So today we’re going to talk about how to amplify your digital marketing with physical marketing and how you can boost retention with personal touch points and how it’s really how human connection plays a role in brand loyalty. So welcome to the show, Arian.

Arian (00:32.526)
That’s right.

Arian (00:44.394)
Awesome, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and dive in.

Jeffro (00:48.346)
Yeah, me too. You know, I actually requested one of your postcards, but I don’t think I did early enough. It was like Tuesday night, so it’s not here yet. you know, I know I’m looking forward to seeing it, but you know, we’re surrounded by digital marketing, email, ads, media and everything, but sometimes it all kind of blends together and companies can struggle to stand out. Now you talk a lot about the relationship centric era. So I’m curious to hear you break that down. You what does that mean and why businesses should care about it?

Arian (00:55.968)
Okay, yeah, it’s on the way, it’s on the way.

Arian (01:16.396)
Yeah, so it’s something that we harp on a lot at Ignite Post, especially when we’re working with a lot of our brands and our clients. But essentially, it’s kind of how business has evolved and how businesses’ relationships with customers have evolved over time. And so the way I break it down is kind of three main kind of eras, if you will. So first, had kind of in the 2000s what I like to call the product-centric era where people and companies would tout like, we have 10 million lines of code that go into this and look at all the bells and whistles and features that our product has on it. And then what they realized is people don’t actually care about all these bells and whistles. It’s not about cramming as many things as you possibly can into a product. It’s really about what does the product do? kind of value does it bring to the customer? And so we saw this shift in kind of the 2010s to what I like to call the customer centric era which is the whole adage of you have to be in front of your customer 10 times before they actually realize that they’ve seen your product. And so people started creating all these different touch points to get in front of their customers as much as humanly possible. And I think that’s kind of led us to where we are today. You spoke about it a little bit in the intro here, but today with digital marketing, people are really saturated. We’re subjected to about 120 emails every single day into our inbox.

On average, the average user will see about 5,000 digital ads over the course of their day. And we’re getting bombarded on every device that we own, right? So that’s on, you know, not just our computers and tablets, but now we have SMS and push notifications that come to us on our watches and everything, God forbid. So it’s very, very saturated. And so what we like to say at Ignitepost is we’re kind of moving out of that type of era where it just is all about how many touch points can I have and maximizing that. And it’s really about quality over quantity. And so that’s kind of where the relationship centric era that we talk about comes in. And instead of it being about quantity of just getting in front of people as much as you can, it’s really about how do you increase the quality of those touch points so that one, you cut through all of this, you know, digital noise that’s out there. And two, when you actually reach your customer or when you reach your intended recipient, you make an impact and it feels like you are actually building a relationship with

Arian (03:35.148)
that customer between the customer and the brand instead of just bombarding people with more communication that none of it seems personal.

Jeffro (03:45.081)
Yeah, no, that’s a pretty good backdrop. And I was going to say while you’re talking about that, I think some of that product focus marketing probably stems from the earlier days of just products in general. know, when we had the refrigerator was new, our TV was new, and you didn’t have a ton of options. So of course you just talk about the features like, wow, it can make ice cubes? Cool. Like the features, yeah, that was what sold it. But now we have so many options and there’s so much competition that we can’t even go through it all.

Arian (04:04.738)
Right, it gets cold, yeah.

Jeffro (04:14.392)
especially with that in parallel with the rise of social media and how video is everywhere, everything gets filtered through now a person or a relationship. So it’s much easier for me to say, oh, well, this guy on this channel I follow, he recommended it. So that shortcuts all the product listing and review and comparison that I would have had to do from all these 12 different competitors. I’m just going to do that one. so that, to your point, it’s relationship centric. So if as a business, you can build that with me directly.

Arian (04:36.62)
Exactly.

Jeffro (04:43.709)
Awesome. Cut out the middleman.

Arian (04:45.614)
Yep, totally, 100%. And you hit the nail on the head too, right? Because whenever you hear about a new service or product, what’s the first thing you do is you don’t go and say, well, let me read more of their marketing collateral and see what they say. You say, are the reviews? What do other people say? Do I know anybody that’s used this before? What’s their opinion, right? So you’re basically trusting everything except the communication coming from that actual brand.

Jeffro (05:09.046)
Yeah. You’re like, well, this sounds good, but is it true? I don’t know. I got to ask somebody else. Somebody who’s not biased. Now, we hear all the time that digital marketing is getting more expensive. And obviously, the competition is fierce. another thing you’ve mentioned is that businesses are focusing too much on acquisition and not enough on retention. So obviously, is in continuation of the relationship approach, right? But why is it a mistake to focus too much on acquisition?

Arian (05:12.686)
Right.

Right.

Arian (05:37.26)
Yeah, I mean, it’s not a mistake, I’d say, to focus on acquisition, but a lot of our customers that we really work with, put too much focus on acquisition to the detriment of everything else, right? It’s a system that kind of all works together. But the thing is, for the most part, when we work with clients, and I hear this all the time, they’re very concerned about how do we get new customers in the door? How do we optimize our customer acquisition? But then if you actually take a look at their business, it’s like they have this leaky funnel.

out the back, right? And so they’re getting all these customers through the door, but they’re not doing anything in terms of the customer journey to really nurture the customers that they have, to make sure that the customers that they do get through the door stay and they actually can maximize that value. And so a lot of times what we see is if you spend more time focusing on kind of the back half of the funnel, there’s bigger advantages to be had there than to focus more on acquisition.

So, there’s the whole thing like, conceptually, and it sounds a little bit crazy, but if you are a subscription service and you are able to increase your, or decrease your churn rate by about 5 % per month, you could see your profits go grow by about 95%. And that’s not something that’s coming for me. That’s, think, ProfitWell, they did a lot of data, looked at a bunch of different companies and subscription services. And so, the information’s out there, but a lot of people just kind of don’t think of that.

If you get really good at a customer acquisition and you improve your acquisition by 5%, you’ll see a 5 % bump. But if you decrease your churn rate and kind of do better with retention, then on the back end, you’re going to see a much bigger, almost exponential lift. So a lot of times that’s kind of where that sentiment comes from the brands we work with, put too much effort into, how do we shave off small percentages of our customer acquisition cost, but then they put not nearly as much effort into keeping and retaining customers and cross-selling and upselling. And there’s just kind of so many opportunities there that they just miss. And so that’s what we see a lot. I’m curious if you also have that same experience.

Jeffro (07:56.276)
Yeah, well, and I was going to say, let’s talk about the acquisition part for just a minute because I’ve seen recently more business owners are hiring a dedicated person to just pick up the phone, call a lead as quick as absolutely possible once it comes into their system. So whether that someone lands on the website, out a form or whatever, they’ve got a person that calls them within a minute or however quick. And the quicker you can get to them, the more likely you are to end up with them as a customer because you’re initiating an actual relationship.

And people just aren’t used to that. They’re like, wait, what? I’m not now in your automation sequence? Like, you’re talking to me? Huh? And that kind of plays into what you guys offer, the handwritten notes, because that’s just another physical touch point, which can get out there quickly if you do it right, and you tie those triggers to sending this postcard out. So can you talk about that, kind of how that works?

Arian (08:28.31)
Right. Yeah.

Arian (08:38.347)
yeah.

Arian (08:52.022)
Yeah, so you hit the nail on the head there. so automation is the name of our game, right? We tried to take this kind of old-school method of sending an actual pen to note and make it as easy as people are used to sending emails. So that’s kind of our our our motto our method. So at ignite post it’s kind of a two-part platform. So let’s start on the back end. So on the back end to actually produce these handwritten notes, we actually do this at scale with robotics. So we do we use robot robots that hold real

Bic ballpoint pens to actually put an indent in the paper. So it’s a real pen and ink actual note. It’s not printed, doesn’t come out of a printer. It’s an actual penned note. So that’s kind of on the back end. We have a fleet of handwriting robots that will write all these notes out in an actual human being’s handwriting style. So again, it’s not a font. No two notes are exactly alike.

And by the way, we can recreate someone’s handwriting if you really wish. So if you want to give us a handwriting example, we can have your notes come from you and your handwriting. So that’s kind of how we make the product on the back end. But then what we do is we actually provide a really nice software integration layer that plugs in and kind of meets our customer exactly where they are. So depending on what marketing automation tool you use or what CRM system or sales tool you use, there’s a number of different integration options that we provide.

so that you can trigger these kind of perfectly timed and crafted moments to your point, which is what drives people to action. So, you it’s not just about using this handwritten note and just kind of blasting things out, although the platform does let you send campaigns in bulk if you wish. But the best results typically come when you send, you know, when you say the right thing at the right time to the right person. So that’s how the system is designed. It’s designed to be able to integrate into your existing marketing flows because nothing operates in a silo.

especially nowadays. So I’m not out here advocating that you should only use handwritten notes and forget about emails and SMS and phone calls and don’t do any of that. Our platform is designed to work in conjunction with all of those things. And so that’s why on the software side and on the integration side, we provide a number of integrations and APIs that allow you to trigger our handwritten notes right from within your existing marketing flows. So if you have a nurture flow,

Arian (11:12.034)
that includes different touch points like emails and SMS and phone calls. Now you can drop a handwritten note touch point in and really craft that customer journey and make it as custom as you need it to be. And that’s where we see the really good results when you kind of interleave things and when everything works together in conjunction.

Jeffro (11:30.387)
Yeah. Well, and I think the first thing people would think about when you think of sending a handwritten note is a thank you card, right? So after someone buys something, you send a thank you. But obviously, as you’ve alluded to, there are plenty of other opportunities to use that. So can you give us some creative ways that a service business can use handwritten outreach to increase loyalty and referrals and all of that stuff?

Arian (11:49.932)
Yeah, absolutely. And actually, one of the most fun things that I like about this business is one, the types of unique businesses that we get to work with, and two, the different use cases that those businesses come up with. And so the fun thing is you can really use Ignitepost through the full customer journey from acquisition to activation to retention, referral, and even to win back. So we’ve had businesses that really use it for everything across the gamut.

And it works well. It just kind of depends, like I said, on how you want to instrument it and how you want things to work. On the acquisition side, so if I start at the front, we have a lot of businesses that will basically use us as an acquisition tool. if they are, I’ll give some examples, right? So gyms or service-based businesses that operate in a particular area, geographic area.

they use our tool a lot because if I’m a gym, then basically my target area is maybe a five mile square radius around my gym. so, especially when somebody moves in for the first time, or just to do a general geographic blast to a particular zip code is a super popular thing that we see for businesses like that. Especially when you’re talking about comparing us to something like direct mail, where a handwritten note that… ends up on your doorstep in an envelope is going to get opened and it’s going to be perceived as a little bit a lot more warm and people are going to respond to it much better. So we have a lot of businesses that use us in that capacity for customer acquisition. Moving down the funnel in terms of kind of keeping customers coming back for more, we see people that use our cards for upsells and cross-sells a lot example, we work with lot of insurance agencies that I would put in this boat. So when policy renewals come up or even kind of prior to that, they’ll get a nice handwritten note to kind of reach out to their agent to talk about what some of the other options are. So if people are using you for home insurance, maybe you have a second home that you’ve purchased or a boat or a new car, et cetera. So it’s kind of staying top of mind when significant events are coming up and happening.

Arian (14:07.906)
So those are super common things that we see. And then on the back end as well, so we have, you you mentioned a little bit, like loyalty, referral, things like that, that’s super common as well. So as an example, if we have a lot of companies that are, like I said, home service providers, so if they do a job at a particular address, they’ll do kind of a radius bomb around a particular address where they’ve done work.

So if you’re a plumbing company, you’ve gone out and done a plumbing job at a particular address, same thing. You can take that address, get a geographic area around that address, and then send a really nice personalized note of, I just worked on your neighbor’s home on Main Street. If you have any needs, here’s my card. Same thing if you’re a landscaper or a roofing company. So that’s super common as well. So it’s really cool because people use us throughout the entire customer journey.

And there’s a lot of different ways that you can kind of slice it and dice it.

Jeffro (15:07.666)
And what goes on the other side of the note? Is this a postcard or is it a physical letter that goes into an envelope? Do you have options?

Arian (15:15.884)
You do have options. That’s an excellent question. So basically our default offering is basically a 5×7 folded card that looks like this in an A7 envelope. So would arrive like this on your doorstep. And then our card is a 5×7 folded card that you get to put whatever image you want on the front. So in our dashboard and our portal, you can upload any image you want on the front, full color printing. And then on the inside is where the actual penned note goes.

So that’s kind of, you in general, that’s our default offering. This is the type of card stock and envelopes that we hold in stock. Now you can use anything you want. So we have customers that, you know, are very particular and want their own stationary and envelopes and you can totally do that. You just have to, you know, buy them and send them to us so that we can hold it in our warehouse and then we can, we can use it. There’s an infinite amount of stationary and envelopes out there. So we can typically work with pretty much anything, but this is what we hold by default in stock.

Jeffro (16:15.314)
I like it. Now another question, as you’re talking about integrating this into your workflows and all of that, a lot of businesses have trouble tracking ROI on their retention efforts. How can they measure the impact of something like these handwritten notes?

Arian (16:30.786)
That’s a great question. And it’s something that at Ignite Post, we have built our platform to be more than just a handwritten note provider. So as part of the Ignite Post service suite, there’s several different components. So obviously, that’s our handwritten notes that I just kind of held up and showed and went through. In addition to that, we offer a couple of other things as well. So one, we offer the ability to put dynamic QR codes on our cards. So if you noticed, like this one has a QR code here. So what we can actually do using our service platform, it’s an option. Not everybody needs to use it, but you can put dynamic QR codes on. So I know the moment somebody picks up my card and scans it and visits a landing page, it’ll literally, the system will send you a notification that says, Bob Smith scanned this QR code at 2.49 on Thursday. And so that’s one thing that you can do to kind of track attribution.

The second thing that folks typically do is they will set up a tracking number, which Ignite Post can also help you do. And so you give us a number that you want to call. could be your main number or any specific number that you have. And what we do is we will create a tracking number for you so that we can give you the data of people who have called or texted that number. And it will actually route to whatever number it is that you want. So a couple different ways that you can track.

who’s actually opening and scanning things or who’s actually picking up the phone and calling. As you know, despite our best efforts, when you send things, people don’t always take the call to action that you want. And so the other component in Ignite Post Service Suite is a service that we call AVID, which is an acronym as short for Anonymous Visitor Identification. And basically, that’s one thing that we then also use to kind of complete that full picture.

And what Avid does is it is a snippet of code that we drop on your site or on your landing page that allows us to identify about 40 % of anonymous web traffic to your page. And we get information like a person’s name, their postal address, their email address, and about 40 different attributes about that person. So this way, it kind of gives you the best chance of getting a full, complete picture and really understanding what your ROI is, because you can send your campaigns out

Arian (18:47.01)
You can measure the impact down to the person level with our dynamic QR codes and understand who’s actually scanning the QR codes and visiting the landing page. You can track the numbers that people are calling or texting that you put in the actual cards. And then if they do nothing and if they just visit your website, you can also get the information as to who appeared on your website that allows you to then go back and kind of cross reference and see what the actual true impact of your cards are. So.

To answer your question, there’s a lot of different ways that we can do, and there’s a lot of different pieces that play into it that allow us to get that full picture of what kind of ROI you’re getting.

Jeffro (19:23.524)
Right, and I imagine you can use that avid as a trigger as well. So someone comes to your site, and they’re one of the 40 % you’re able to identify, you just automatically send them off a postcard. It says, hey, thanks for visiting, blah, blah. Right.

Arian (19:36.5)
Exactly. Yep, totally. And that’s something that we do ourselves as well, because we’re practitioners of our own products. So we use our own product a lot. So that’s exactly how we use it. So we have certain specific landing pages that we consider somebody would be more of an ideal customer if they are on and visiting different pages or looking at different things along our site. And so yes, we have those types of triggers set up so that if somebody exhibits behavior that they kind of get popped up and say,

this person looks like they’re an ideal customer and they’re interested in the things that we deem to be of higher value, they will automatically get a card triggered. And then in some cases, they’ll actually get just a phone call from one of our team members, depending on how much interest they show and kind of what kind of behavior they exhibit.

Jeffro (20:22.701)
Is there like a starting point in terms of volume that, you business should think about before they consider having you guys do it just versus having some interns write the notes?

Arian (20:32.078)
So on our side, it doesn’t matter. So we have folks that send five to 10 handwritten notes a month through our platform. And then we have folks that send hundreds of thousands of notes per month and kind of everywhere in between. So on our side, it doesn’t matter. It really comes down to the execution, right? When we have this conversation a lot with our customers as well, when someone says, well, I’m only looking to send maybe 10, 20 handwritten cards per month.

But the other side of the coin is there’s probably a lot of other better things that you can do with your time than to sit down and write these handwritten cards. Like we talked about earlier, it’s about a combination of saying the right thing at the right time to the right person. And so a lot of people miss that middle component, which is the time component. So if you are… interleaving this communication with other communication. As humans, things come up. People get sick, people can’t take vacation, a fire comes up at work, you gotta put it out. So there’s a hundred different reasons why even at a small volume, things can not go as planned or you miss. I hear it all the time. There’s a thousand other things that come up that are more important than me taking an hour and a half and sitting down and writing out these 10 handwritten notes.

To answer your question, there’s no maximum or minimum that I kind of recommend, but even at the small amount, we have plenty of people that are sending five to 10 handwritten notes a month with our platform, specifically because of the time saving that’s involved. So yeah, and we don’t have the minimum either. You can kind of start with wherever you want, and then we can grow with you.

Jeffro (22:07.022)
Yeah, that makes sense.

Jeffro (22:13.656)
Well, that’s awesome. And that makes it accessible for a lot of people who really just want to improve the process and the customer journey. kind of, you know, with all this in mind that we’ve been talking about, one thing I wanted to ask you before we wrap up is the peak end rule. You know, people remember the most intense moment and the end of an experience. So for businesses, how do they kind of apply this concept to improve that customer journey?

Arian (22:36.364)
Yeah, that’s something that we use a lot with our customers as well. So when you think about a customer journey and no two, you know, no two businesses are the same. That’s a rule that we like to apply and kind of overlay that onto the customer journey. And it’s pretty fun too. Like if you’ve ever been to a concert or gone to a festival or something like that, it’s super evident that that’s what’s happening. Like there’s a reason why the headliner act always comes at the very end of the concert or at least the end of every day, because that’s what you remember. And so using that theory, basically what it says is, that people remember one intensely positive moment along a journey. And then they also remember the last thing that happens, like the last thing in that journey. So those are the two areas that we typically try to maximize. And so what we do is we work with a business and we say, all right, let’s take a look at your customer journey. And where is one area along this journey that if we absolutely maximize, you would see amazing results? Like I mentioned, it’s different for every business.

So like your mileage might vary, but that’s kind of conceptually how we think about it. As an example, so we worked with a cat litter brand and this actually came to play because when you first sign up as a user and get a new cat litter, cats are very, very picky and kind of finicky. And so a crucial moment is basically about a month or so after they actually start, they get the cat litter for the first time and start using it there’s a couple of very specific instructions that you need to follow. Otherwise, most cats will not adopt this new litter. And so after they get this litter for the first time delivered, we actually have one of our notes that arrives kind of harping on and driving home the point that, hey, this is something very important for you to do. And so because it’s an unexpected thing that arrives after the product, but it’s a very, personalized way, but it’s kind of like the founder saying, hey, I need you to like really zone in and pay attention to this and really follow these instructions. That’s kind of one of those intensely positive areas that you can impact, but the impact has huge impacts for the business because if they follow those steps, the cat will adopt the new litter and you’ll have a customer for life. And if they don’t, they will basically immediately churn and they will never reorder. So, you know,

Arian (24:56.078)
That might be an extreme example, but those are the kind of things that we try to instill and that we try to use that peak end theory with our customers.

Jeffro (25:06.04)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s a great example. And I think this is kind of a good point for us to wrap up our conversation because I mean, these are a lot of great ideas for how you can make impactful real world business touch points. So thank you for joining me today, Arien. For those of you listening, you can get a free sample postcard sent to your door. Go to ignitepost.com slash sample, fill out your info and you’ll see what it looks like. I filled mine out a couple of days ago, like I said, so I’m looking forward to getting mine. But Arien, do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to leave us with?

Arian (25:31.725)
Nice.

Arian (25:35.404)
No, mean, I think that’s we covered a lot of stuff here. So I guess one of the things is if you’re interested at all, definitely, like you said, go hit our site, request a free sample, because we can talk until I’m blue in the face here. until you actually get it and feel it and pick it up and kind of hold it, I think it kind of loses something. But when you see it in person, you’ll see the impact that it can actually have. So I suggest everybody go request a free sample. We’ll have one of the robots write and send you a sample right to your door.

And then if you have any questions, reach out to us. We’ve got a whole team standing by to help you out.

Jeffro (26:10.965)
Awesome. Well, thanks again, Arran for being here. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. Remember business is all about relationships. So take care and we’ll see you next time.