Would you be offended if you found out that a hand-written note you received was actually written by someone's secretary? Because that's pretty standard stuff most people wouldn't consider an ethical breach.
Today, no. But if I lived in a time when you could expect that a handwritten letter from the CEO was actually handwritten by the CEO, then maybe I would, because in that time, doing that would have been deceptive.
Did that time ever exist? I've gotten the impression that dictating a letter to one's secretary has been a pretty standard thing for at least the last hundred years.
Well, you can't. You can buy a wacom tablet with tilt sensors and make the robot replicate the same stroke. You could add randomness to it too. To apply different amount of force with the robot you use a spring and you control the force with the distance to the paper, it is very simple to do. We did exactly that with ABB robots in the University a long time ago. We used wacom drivers for linux and the wacoms were ove…
If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…
What if instead of employing an outside company these were in house employees?
Today, no. But if I lived in a time when you could expect that a handwritten letter from the CEO was actually handwritten by the CEO, then maybe I would, because in that time, doing that would have been deceptive.
Did that time ever exist? I've gotten the impression that dictating a letter to one's secretary has been a pretty standard thing for at least the last hundred years.
Depends on context, but at a smaller company we did receive them during fund drives and such. Wasn't thrown on a copier or whatnot, but then he only had to do about two dozen. Slight variations but he did follow a script.
So I would put it down to scale and what they feel is important. In that case it was for the local children's hospital. Secretaries are great when you need it written right, not only correct.
One of the things that readily annoys me is the "Important Information About your Current Account" letters from a credit card company that are just purchase checks inside. I do tend to open them, just in case; but have never actually used one. I don't think there is necessarily any trickery going on here, but it certainly trains people to ignore mail from them.
The mortgage companies are worse, in that they plaster the name of your current (or former) lenders on them; even though they have no actual association. These are usually easy to differentiate from real mail though.
It's unlikely that mortgage companies are deluged with bad leads because people thought the handwriting was legit. Weeding out false positives is only an issue if you have a false positive problem.
Why do you need handwriting if not to make people open the mail, who would have otherwise thrown it away? And if they'd have thrown it away, how likely is it they'll change their mind after having been tricked into opening it because it appeared to have been sent by a human? The point of junk mail is not to be read, it's to generate valuable/actionable leads; I don't see how handwriting helps -- maybe it does, but we…
The point is to get people to open the letter, yes. Having people open the letter who won't actually respond has zero cost to the advertiser. The letter itself is a sunk cost, so trying to push people away from opening it is not beneficial. By trying to entice them to read, in the worst case, they just throw away your letter a little bit later. More people opening the letter is not a negative like being deluged with thousands of false leads would be for the Nigerian scammer.
> I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it. You can give it to me. But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.
You want to buy a tv. You set aside an amount of money to buy that tv. From that point you're trying to get rid of that bit of money in return for a TV.
I don't think that's an accurate description. If you got to the store and they told you that, I dunno, you're the millionth customer and your TV is free, I doubt you'd feel like you failed to get rid of the money. Because you weren't trying to get rid of it — you were giving it up as a concession to get something else you want more.
Today, no. But if I lived in a time when you could expect that a handwritten letter from the CEO was actually handwritten by the CEO, then maybe I would, because in that time, doing that would have been deceptive.
Did that time ever exist? I've gotten the impression that dictating a letter to one's secretary has been a pretty standard thing for at least the last hundred years.
More like three or four hundred. And before that, replace "secretary" with "scribe."
I have the opposite issue, I'm constantly sending out personal emails asking to help people with getting setup (it's for Heroku SSL stuff and people often misconfigure things) and can't get a response from them.
Write a really short sentence and your signature should say "sent from my iPhone"
This.
More generally, the less attention that goes into perfecting the layout and wording, the more likely the reader is to believe you're on a busy human's to do list and not a mailing list.
HTML layout very bad, neat little bullet points bad, good copy bad, lack of line spacing and excessive terseness good.
If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…
DirecTV and credit card companies do this to me all the time. I'll receive a letter that looks like some kind of greeting card or invite with no identifier but an address. The font used on the outside mimicks human handwriting, so it looks authentic if you're not really paying attention. I kinda get excited I'm getting invited to something, I open it up, and its a fucking ad. I don't understand how people do business…
You can always tell by comparing two of the same letters.
For example, if two lowercase 'e's are exact clones of each other, you know it's a computer font.