In the armoury of modern communications there are many weapons - phone, text, letter, face-to-face or email. But what is your weapon of choice? What will be the most effective? Proposing marriage by email doesn't sound like a good strategy. Going round to your boss's house to ask for a raise wouldn't be advisable either . At worklifehome, we decided to investigate finishing touches in communications - conducting a survey of 2000 people to determine how we really like to communication with each other.

Why do we prefer post?

Almost 60% of the people we surveyed prefer getting post, to email and text. It is often a good strategy in life to study

what everybody else is doing, then do the opposite. So using letters, when others use email, can get you noticed. Getting out the old writing paper is more personal and more secure.

Ah but do we open it?

It seems email can often stay in the queue unopened and phone and text messages are also often ignored. It may be called snail mail, but 44.3% of people in our survey said they would read their post first compared to 32% who said they would open a text message first.

Style is important

Few things make the heart sink like a window envelope. Only 11% of the people surveyed said they would open an envelope with a window first. However flamboyance, within acceptable limits, can get you noticed. 70% said they would open a coloured envelope first. 73% of women said they would open a coloured envelope first. Get your communication to the front of the queue - by thinking about the finishing touches or with just more attention to detail.

Create your own finishing touches and impress your friends, colleagues and family. Design and print your own greeting cards, personalised business cards, professional-looking address labels to ensure your letters get noticed and much more.

Envelopes

The most popular office envelope in the DL which stands for 'Dimensions Lengthwise'. These envelopes often have a little window. You end up having to print your letter half-a-dozen times before you can actually see the address through the window.

Padded envelopes stuck down with sticky tape will survive just about anything. Anything, that is, apart from the attempts to open them at the other end.

Murphy's Law states that whenever you push an envelope (especially a posh, expensive one) into a printer, it will always print the address upside down rendering it totally unusable. Try using sheets of labels instead!

You can give many subtle finishings to paper. They all sound pretentious, martele, chamois, laid, wove, vellum etc. Businessmen who want to impress and need to make their exorbitant invoices convincing prefer to use heavier paper in the hope that it will give their dull missives the same sort of weighty significance as the Magna Carta. It does have a similar effect. They are immediately filied and forgotten about for hundreds of years

If you liked this article why not try our feature on amazing mail - Letter Stories

For all your postal supplies try the worklifehome shop - Worklifehome Shop