Latest / The Copywriting Podcast with Fexingo: Sales Letters, Headlines, and Persuasive Writing / How a Handwritten P.S. Beat a Full Typed Sales Letter
Transcript
- Lucas: So the year is 1925. John Caples — the same guy who wrote the 'They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano' headline — runs a direct mail test that most people today would call a waste of time. Luna: I have a feeling it was not a waste of time. Lucas: Not even close. He sends out two versions of a sales letter — both say the exact same thing, word for word. The only difference is that one version has a handwritten postscript at the bottom. Ink on paper, in his own hand. Luna: And the handwritten P.S. beat the typed letter by how much? Lucas: Forty-eight percent more responses. Nearly half again. Same words, same offer, same everything — just a few lines of handwriting at the end. Luna: That's absurd. But also, it makes perfect sense. Lucas: Exactly. The reason is what copywriter Gary Halbert later called the 'ink cost' principle. When someone sees handwriting, their brain does a quick calculation: this person took time, used ink, made an effort. It signals that the writer is personally invested. You can't fake that with a typewriter. Luna: There's also a vulnerability to it. Handwriting is imperfect — your letters slant, your pressure varies. It's unmistakably human. Lucas: Right, and that imperfection is the whole point. A typed letter looks like it came off an assembly line. A handwritten note looks like someone sat down and cared. In 1925, Caples understood that the medium was part of the message. Luna: So why did he test it? Was it a hunch? Lucas: It was a hunch backed by what we'd now call empathy. Caples talked to mail carriers, observed how people sorted their mail, and noticed that handwritten envelopes got opened first. So he extended that logic to the inside of the letter. Luna: Smart. He treated the letter as a continuum — the envelope sets the expectation, and the interior delivery has to match. Lucas: Exactly. And here's the thing — that 48 percent lift didn't come from any fancy headline or clever persuasive argument. It came from a single element that said 'a human being wrote this specifically for you.' Luna: Which is why I think the principle is even more relevant today. We're drowning in polished, templated, ai generated messages. When something looks handwritten, it's jarring in the best way. Lucas: It's a cognitive interruption. Your brain normally skims over promotional material, but handwriting forces you to slow down. You process it differently. Luna: I actually saw a modern version of this last year. A friend of mine runs a small e-commerce brand, and they tested two email sequences for a product launch. One was a beautifully designed HTML template with graphics and a clear CTA. The other was a plain-text email that looked like it was written in a hurry — lowercase 'i' and everything. Lucas: Let me guess — the sloppy one won. Luna: By 37 percent more clicks. Their subscribers actually replied to it thinking it was a personal message. That's the same mechanism Caples tapped into a hundred years ago. Lucas: It's the same mechanism, but the execution has changed. With handwriting today, you've got two options. One, you can actually handwrite short notes for high-value prospects — real estate agents, financial advisors, B2B sales reps still do this with some success. Two, you can use a handwritten font or a service that simulates handwriting. Luna: But simulation only works if it's convincing. Bad handwriting fonts are worse than none at all because they look creepy. Lucas: Agreed. The uncanny valley of handwriting. If it looks too perfect or repeats the same letter shapes identically, the spell is broken. But there are services now that use actual handwriting samples to generate notes. They're not cheap, but for high-ticket offers, the ROI can be massive. Luna: Caples's test was about a handwritten P.S., not the whole letter. Do you think that specificity matters? Lucas: I think it does. The P.S. is already the most read part of any sales letter — studies from the 1950s through today consistently show that readers jump to the P.S. before reading the body. So putting it in handwriting amplifies that existing behavior. It's layering one high-impact tactic on another. Luna: It's also a natural place for a final persuasive nudge. In Caples's test, the P.S. likely restated the offer or added urgency. Handwriting that part makes it feel like the author's last personal plea. Lucas: Right. It's not just decorative. It has to carry persuasive weight. In the original letter, Caples wrote something like 'P.S. I've enclosed a special bonus for you if you respond within the next ten days.' Handwritten. That combination of scarcity and personal touch is hard to beat. Luna: I want to get into the psychology a bit more. Why does handwriting feel more personal than typing, even when we know it's a mass-produced tactic? Lucas: Part of it is evolutionary. We've been reading handwriting for thousands of years; typewritten text is barely a century old. Our brains are wired to associate ink marks with a specific human hand. There's also the effort heuristic — if someone expended energy, the message must be important. Luna: And there's the risk factor. When you handwrite something, you can't delete or edit cleanly. Every crossed-out word is evidence of real-time thinking. That vulnerability signals authenticity. Lucas: That's a great point. In digital copy, we strive for polish, but sometimes the polish removes all traces of the person behind it. A handwritten P.S. brings the person back. Luna: So where does this work today outside of direct mail? I can think of handwritten notes left on hotel pillows, or in online orders, or even in fundraising letters. Lucas: Fundraising is a huge one. Nonprofits regularly see lift when they include a handwritten note from a beneficiary or a volunteer. One study from a few years ago showed that handwritten envelopes in donor acquisition mail increased open rates by about 30 percent and response rates by about 20 percent. Luna: And there's a whole industry of 'handwriting robots' now that can produce thousands of unique notes per hour. I have mixed feelings about whether that undermines the authenticity. Lucas: It's a tool. If the alternative is no handwritten element at all, a robot note is better than nothing. But you have to be careful — if a recipient finds out it's machine-generated, the trust is gone. The best use is probably for transactional touchpoints where the recipient already has a relationship with you. Luna: Like a thank-you note after a purchase, not a cold sales letter. Lucas: Exactly. Context matters. Caples's test worked because the letter was from a real person — he was a copywriter at an ad agency, but the letter was signed by a named individual. The handwriting reinforced that the offer came from a human, not a company. Luna: I think there's a broader lesson here that goes beyond handwriting. It's about adding 'human residue' to your copy. Anything that signals effort, attention, or individuality. Lucas: That's a great phrase. Human residue. So a handwritten P.S. is one form of it. But you could also include a coffee stain, a doodle in the margin, a slightly crooked signature — all of these suggest that a real person handled this piece before it reached you. Luna: Which is funny because the entire history of advertising has been about removing imperfections. We've gone from hand-drawn illustrations to perfect digital renders, from conversational copy to formulaic templates. Caples went the other direction — he added an imperfection on purpose. Lucas: And it worked because it stood out. In a world of perfectly uniform type, a smudge or a slant is a lighthouse. Today, in a world of perfectly uniform HTML emails, a plain text message with a lowercase 'i' can be the same thing. Luna: You know, speaking of standing out, I think that's part of why we don't run ads on this podcast. It feels like every show is interrupted by a perfectly produced sponsor read that sounds exactly like every other sponsor read. We wanted the conversation to feel like it's just between us and the listener — no polished interruption. Lucas: That's exactly it. The principle is the same. If someone values the show enough to support it, we want that support to come from a genuine place, not because we ran a clever ad. So if you find these episodes useful and want to keep them ad-free, there's a link at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just an honest option. Luna: And now back to Caples. I'm curious — did he ever write about why he thought the test worked? Lucas: He did. In his book 'Tested Advertising Methods', he wrote that the handwritten P.S. 'makes the letter seem like a personal communication rather than a circular.' He understood that the goal of direct mail is to feel like a letter, not an advertisement. Luna: So the lesson is: if you want your copy to feel like a letter, you have to actually make it look and feel like one. Not just say 'Dear ' and then revert to corporate boilerplate. Lucas: Exactly. And the handwriting is just one tool. The bigger lesson is to audit every element of your copy and ask: does this feel like it came from a human being? If the answer is no, change something. Luna: That's a great takeaway for our listeners. Next time you write a sales letter or an email, try adding one element that's intentionally imperfect — a handwritten P.S., a typo that looks deliberate, a sentence that breaks the rhythm. See what happens. Lucas: And if you do run that test, I'd love to hear about it. You can always find me on LinkedIn. But for now, remember: Caples got a 48 percent lift from a few lines of ink. The question is, what's your version of that? Luna: That's a good note to end on. Thanks for listening.