Bond now offers self-service handwritten notes with variables

If you’ve risked carpal tunnel syndrome to hand-write thank-you notes to your customers or wedding guests, here’s some news you can use.

New York City-based Bond, which specializes in mass-produced handwritten notes on paper, has launched this week a new feature called Bond Groups. The company points to research showing a phenomenal 99 percent open rate for handwritten notes, and cites clients that have seen as much as a threefold boost in engagement or an ROI of 800 percent from the missives.

The new Groups lets individuals and small businesses self-generate handwritten notes with personalized fields for names and a variable, like the present you gave or the product you bought. Up to 550 notes can be created in one order. Previously, businesses with orders of 1,000 notes or more could get this kind of personalization, but it would be handled by an account manager using a tool internal to Bond.

Users write a message in the Bond site’s self-service dashboard, and, with Bond Groups, employ variables that can call on fields in an uploaded spreadsheet.

Bond offers about 20 different handwritten house styles. After the note and address are composed and the style chosen, robotic pen-writers at a fulfillment center in Tennessee — who never worry about hand cramps — write the notes on selected paper and envelopes. The notes can be reviewed before being snail-mailed.

Users can also utilize their own handwriting style via an intake form that requests you write various sentences and characters. All alphabet letters are covered, and Bond’s software generates a couple of dozen variations for each written letter.

When the note is written, the software employs the variations of each alphabet letter to compose a unique version of the chosen handwriting style for each note.

“Every [note] could be a snowflake,” Bond Director of Product Nick Pelletier told me.

Some enterprise orders have been for as many as 60,000 notes, he said, each one of which is a different combination of letter variations.

While such competitors as Handwrytten or Felt also offer a handwritten note service, Pelletier said that Bond Groups is “the only handwritten note service [that allows you] to send one note to many people,” via a self-service dashboard that offers personalization through variables.