Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Speaker 2 (00:00.558)
All right, welcome to this another interview at Talk Commerce live from ecommerce forum in Minneapolis today I have James Schutrop with Scribe. James, go ahead tell us about yourself tell us a little bit about your company.
Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me. Well, basically what our company does is we use robots that hold real pens to produce robotically handwritten letters. And we plug that right into your CRM. So any email flow or automation that you have, you can simply just upgrade that to a handwritten letter automation. At end of the day, know, people are saturated with digital noise, getting over 120 emails a day, and they're sick of it. And their thank you email doesn't really make any
feel thanked or appreciated and everyone just wants to feel loved and a handwritten letter really does that and it does it automatically so you don't have to manage your employees doing so.
I know a lot of the shops will do handwritten notes, but this is truly automated where you don't have to sit down and write it. one of the things I've heard is like salespeople forget to write their letters.
Yeah, exactly, So almost every company knows that they should be treating their customers better. They should be writing them handwritten thank you letters. But the actual implementation of that usually stops at the sales manager and a couple of the top salespeople. Doesn't make it all the way down. And for those people that don't have employees, e-commerce companies, things like that, everything's driven off automations. So it truly allows you to just set it and forget it and cut
Speaker 1 (01:36.752)
to go back to the 80s. Marketing at the end of the day is kind of like fashion. If everyone's doing one thing, the cool thing is what everyone used to be doing 20, 30 years ago. So we're right back in that precipice right now and especially with everything that's happening with artificial intelligence, the digital noise is going to get even worse. There's going to be more texts, there's going to be more emails, there's going to be more advertisements and people are really craving human interaction.
interaction and this is the way that you can do that essentially. And give your customers and prospects a little breath from the bombardment.
And I was just watching the machine over here. It's not a printed thing that we saw in the past where it would go through a laser printer. This is an actual pen that's writing on the paper, right? So you get a little bit of that indent and a real pen and everything.
Exactly. Yeah. So basically the robot will hold a real pen. Intentionally, we use a ballpoint pen because you're really going for that perfect amount of imperfection. So you could use a higher quality pen and we can put those in there, but you actually get higher response rates having something that's going to breed some gaps in the ink because of the pressure variation. And then there's an algorithm behind the actual handwritten styles. So it's going to vary each individual character. So none of the O's look the same. None of the E's look the same.
And truly you're looking at something that looks like it came from your friend, your grandmother, it came off of somebody's desk, desk, whatever it is, and passes all those sniff tests.
Speaker 2 (03:12.46)
And does the machine have a small tongue that licks the end of your pen when it stops working, or does it just always work?
It just always works. Everything's quality checked in case something were to get a little sticky or something like that. But yeah, know, speaking of licking envelopes or looking pens or whatever it may be, you know, all the way down, everything's automated. So you got, you know, little inserters that will open up the envelope, fold the card, put it in there, put a little bit of liquid on the envelope so it seals it automatically. So yeah, just kind of goes through the assembly line like that.
I was talking to your associate earlier, one of things he said is that the postmark isn't necessarily going to say Minneapolis or some other city, it's going to be a local postmark to explain how that works.
Yeah, yeah. So that's actually really, really key for people that don't know. The postmark is basically the thing next to the stamp that says where it's mailed out. So if you were to use a handwritten letter company, typically you're going to see something next to that or your recipient is going to see something next to that stamp that says, this was mailed out of Arizona. Let's say, you you're an insurance agent and you're located in Ohio thanking your customer in Ohio, but your quote unquote handwritten letter
out of Arizona, that's going to be a really bad look. And the only reason why handwritten letters work is because it's the thought that counts and they think you spent the time on it. So if you have that out of state postmark on there, even if everything looks great, if that sets off, you know, the red flag for them and do that ad filter in their brain that, okay, maybe this was actually mass produced, they didn't actually write this, you're soiling the pond that you're fishing out of basically. So we're the only company in the world
Speaker 1 (04:56.56)
It's been able to do postmark removal on basically these one-off handwritten letters that are eventually to your CRM The USPS does allow a function where you can remove that postmark if you're sending batches over 500 pieces But if you're triggering out batches from your CRM that are individual triggers after something happens in there That threshold now falls below that 500 requirement for the USPS to do that postmark removal, but our system backpacks
hundreds and thousands of orders onto each other and produces them in the proper order that the post officer requires. So that even though it's technically a one off letter, we're batching it up and pre sorting it for the USPS as if it's a bulk order. Because we're bringing you together with all of our customers and in that we're able to breed that authenticity not just from 500,000 or 500 pieces up. But we can even on those
individual pieces, remove that postmark removal, which is where it's really, really important, is in those one-off thank you letters.
Yeah, and I'll say from my own experience, I used a service that's based in Phoenix and I sent a letter to my dad and he caught me. He's like, I got your note, but geez, it's based, it's sent from Phoenix. Which people, if my dad's going to catch it being 86, I would think that your average marketing person is also going to catch it,
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned Phoenix. Most of our two biggest competitors are out of Phoenix, but both of them don't have the capability to remove that postmark. So all these postmarks that are kind of ruining the pond that we're all fishing out of are typically from Phoenix. But yeah, if your dad catches it, anyone else is going to catch it.
Speaker 2 (06:45.966)
Right. So tell us how do they get a hold of you? Where is your website? Tell us a little bit about how they find you.
Yeah, so if you go to scribehandwritten.com, that's S-C-R-I-B-E, H-A-N-D-W-R-I-T-T-E-N.com. You can fill out a form on our website. You can book a conversation with us, and you can find us there. And then if you want to add me on LinkedIn, it's going to be James Schutroff. Last name spelled S-C-H-U-T-R-O-P.
That's awesome, thanks. we'll get those things on the show notes for our listeners. James, it's been a great conversation. What are you getting from the e-commerce firm? Is this your first year? Have you been here many times?
Yeah, this is our first year at the event and I gotta say it's really really cool. I love the bagpipes signaling everyone to go into the event and you know I haven't had a chance to check out any of the speakers yet but overall you know I think that this is a really really great event. It seems that the content itself is way more focused around things you can execute on as opposed to just motivational speakers. If you're at an event you're probably already motivated so
try and find events like this where they're actually giving you something to implement when you walk away.
Speaker 2 (08:03.404)
Yeah, great point. James Shoe Trap. Shoe Trap. jeez, I into the trap again there. Thanks for coming and appreciate it. We'll put everything on the show now.
Shoot, try.
Speaker 1 (08:14.766)
Awesome, thank you, appreciate it.