The product tutorial email, sent when the box has just landed

Send it to the parcel, not to the calendar

A tutorial email sent as a campaign reaches everybody at the same moment, which is the wrong moment for almost all of them. The version that works is triggered by delivery, so it arrives while the box is still on the kitchen table.

If your platform receives fulfilment data, that timing is already available to you. If it does not, dispatch plus a realistic transit window is close enough, and still far better than a Tuesday send to the whole list.

Campaign versions do have a place, aimed at people who bought before you built the sequence. Everything after that should be automated.

One product, three steps, one mistake to avoid

The temptation is to write a manual. Resist it. The email covers the shortest path to a good first result, and the detailed version lives on a page you link to for the people who want it.

1. The one thing to do before first use, which is usually the step people skip
2. The three steps to a good result, written as instructions rather than as benefits
3. The most common mistake, named plainly, with what it looks like when it has happened
4. What good looks like, so they can tell whether it worked
5. Where to go if it did not, with a real reply address

The third item is the one that earns the send. Naming the common mistake feels like admitting a flaw and it is the sentence customers remember, because it is the only place anybody has told them the truth about the product.

A photograph of the step beats a paragraph about the step

That send is a tutorial in campaign clothing. The advice is specific to a material people are frightened of ruining, and it is the reason the email gets kept rather than deleted, which is not a thing that happens to a promotional send.

Use video, but never as the only route

Video is the right medium for anything involving a sequence of hands, and the wrong one for anybody reading in a queue with the sound off. Embed a still with a play badge that links out, and put the same steps in text underneath.

Never make the video the only path to the information. An email whose instructions are locked inside a platform the reader is not signed into is an email that failed.

The second order is the thing this campaign defends

A tutorial email is usually judged on the wrong metric. It will not produce much direct revenue, because the recipient bought days ago. What it changes is the reorder rate, the return rate and the volume of support tickets, none of which appear in the campaign report.

Look instead at whether customers who received it order again sooner than those who did not, and at whether the questions it answers stop arriving in the inbox. Those are the returns on it, and they are worth more than the click rate.

It also sets up everything that follows. A customer who got a good result is the only one for whom a cross sell send makes any sense at all.

Read your last twenty support tickets

Open the last twenty questions your support inbox received and count how many are answered by information you already publish somewhere. In most accounts it is the majority, which means the information exists and the timing is what is missing.

Those tickets are the script for this campaign, more or less written. Turn the three most common into the tutorial email, then check the ticket volume a month later. The programmes we run treat that drop as the measure of whether the sequence is doing its job.