670 - Why Letters Still Outperform Email and LinkedIn Messages
In this episode, Jens Heitland explains why a handwritten letter still gets more attention than an email or a LinkedIn message, and what that pattern reveals about trust, effort, and attention in a saturated digital environment.
Want to build your Personal Brand?
Join the free Rising Stars Community
Why Letters Still Outperform Email and LinkedIn Messages
Every outreach channel available today shares the same underlying condition. There is more volume moving through it than any single recipient can absorb. Email inboxes fill with hundreds of unsolicited messages a week. LinkedIn message requests stack up faster than most people can read them, let alone respond to them. The channels built to make communication easier have, at scale, made most individual messages disappear.
Inside this environment, a pattern becomes visible. As digital volume increases, the signal carried by any single digital message decreases. An email sent to a stranger competes with automated pitches, newsletters, and spam filters that were built specifically to catch it before a human ever sees it. A LinkedIn message competes with connection requests from people the recipient has never met and never intends to respond to. The channel itself has not failed. It has simply been used at a scale that erodes its own value.
A handwritten letter operates under a different set of constraints, and that difference is what gives it weight. It cannot be sent to ten thousand people at once. It requires physical effort, a stamp, an address, and time that cannot be automated away. Because of that cost, a letter signals something a digital message cannot easily convey on its own: that a specific person chose to spend real time reaching another specific person. Recipients notice this, even when they are not consciously aware of why. The reaction rate reflects it. Most letters get a reply, even if the reply is a polite decline. Most cold emails and LinkedIn messages get nothing at all.
I still write my own letters by hand. Not because I am uninterested in what digital tools make possible, and not as a rejection of efficiency. I do it because the two methods solve different problems. Digital outreach scales. A handwritten letter earns attention precisely because it does not. In a landscape where nearly everyone is optimizing for reach, the rare message optimized for weight instead stands out simply by existing.
This is not an argument against digital communication, nor a case for abandoning modern tools. It is an observation about what happens when a channel becomes crowded. Attention becomes the scarce resource, and scarcity changes what gets valued. As automated outreach keeps growing in volume and sophistication, the manual, deliberately inefficient alternative may keep gaining relative value, not despite its inefficiency, but because of it. That is worth sitting with, particularly for anyone whose work depends on being heard above the noise rather than simply being present within it.
Highlights:
00:00 Why Letters Get Read
00:17 Digital Outreach Gets Ignored
00:23 Handwritten Notes Spark Replies
00:38 AI Meets Old School
00:53 Cutting Through Spam
01:04 Why It Still Works
Links:
===========================
Equipment and Software I Use for My Videos and Podcasts
Jens Equipment and Software overview:https://www.jensheitland.com/equipment
===========================
Books that I read and recommend.
My Book Recommendations: https://www.jensheitland.com/books
===========================
Here are the ways to work with me:
Speaking:https://www.jensheitland.com/speaking
Leadership Skills Assessment:https://www.wearesucceed.com/
===========================
Connect with me!
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensheitland/
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/JensHeitlandofficial/
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/jensheitland/
TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@jensheitland
X/Twitter:https://twitter.com/jensheitland
Newsletter:https://www.jensheitland.com/newsletter
===========================
Subscribe and Listen to The Jens Heitland Show Podcast HERE:
YT:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuSGi1feauCNSER3IKuGWg
Web:https://www.jensheitland.com/podcasthome
Apple:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jens-heitland-show-human-innovation/id1545043872?uo=4
Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/7H0GWMGVALyXnnmstYA1NL
===========================
Subscribe and Listen to The Daily Hint with Jens Heitland Podcast HERE:
YT:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2tLdutVh6b6nCBgWQ817eQ
Web:https://www.jensheitland.com/the-daily-hint
Apple:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-hint-with-jens-heitland/id1722930497
Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/4T02uYPvcOrajPC6FgH64r?si=8aab1e7683204160&nd=1&dlsi=0f69c72af017454a
Transcript :
The thing with the letters is that I believe that when you get a letter in these days where hundreds of thousands of people are writing emails or LinkedIn messages, the letter is at least considered to be read way more often than the email. The email goes into spam folder, the LinkedIn messages is not even read at all. If you write a letter like that, which I still do by hand myself, not an- anyone else, it's read most of the time, even if they say, "Thank you. No, I'm not interested to do like a podcast interview," or whatever it is, they at least react to it. And I think this is fascinating that when you get... On one hand, you have AI possibilities to the extent that we have and growing from now on, and on the other hand, you have a completely manual old school way. Both things work, but I think the old school way is interesting in a way that it is getting more attention than the digital, because digital can be so much spam these days. So that's one of the reasons I still do it, and I think it's working at least for us.