Here's a question we get asked constantly: "Why should I send a high-tech audience a letter that looks like it was produced on a typewriter?" The short answer is: It works. We've tested our usual "prestige elite" typeface against other, more high-tech fonts like garamond, palatino, etc. and the old-fashioned look pulls a higher response. By a dramatic margin? No. But they generate more leads nonetheless.

The more important question here is: Why do they work? Probably for the same reason that letter packages consistently outpull self-mailers - because the most effective campaigns are those which have the tone and appearance of a letter from one individual to another. Self-mailers are inherently impersonal: they say to the recipient "we printed 10,000 of these flyers and you happen to be on our mailing list." Letters, on the hand, deliver the impression at least of being one-to-one correspondence.

The benefit of using "old-fashioned" fonts like courier, times roman and prestige elite, besides being easier to read, is that they maintain that aura of personal communication. The more your letter looks like it came out of a computer, the more it looks "duplicated" or "word-processed", and ultimately, less personal. In other words, it starts to look less like a letter, and more like a flyer