The unboxing email: what to send between dispatch and the doorstep

The most attentive days in the whole relationship

Look, between the order confirmation and the parcel landing, your customer is more likely to open your email than at any other point in the relationship. Including the day they signed up. They're checking whether it's shipped, and they'll read whatever's attached to that answer.

That window shuts the second the box gets opened. Whatever you want the unboxing to feel like has to be set up before it happens, and that's what this campaign is for.

Three things, and none of them is a product recommendation

They've just spent money with you. Asking for more, in the gap before they've received anything, is the most common mistake in this part of the lifecycle. And it reads exactly as badly as it sounds.

• What's in the box, described so they know when it's all there, which matters enormously on a multi item order
• What to do first when it arrives, in one line, linked to the fuller version
• What the packaging is and what to do with it, because somebody chose that material and nobody ever explains it

That third one is the quiet winner. Tell somebody the outer carton is recyclable and the inner wrap isn't, or that the box is meant to be kept, and the first ten seconds of the unboxing goes from a mess to a considered thing.

Plant the review request before the parcel lands

Review requests fail because they arrive cold, days later, from a brand the customer hasn't heard from since the tracking link. One sentence in the unboxing email saying you'll ask what they think once they've used it a few times makes the later request expected. Not intrusive.

It improves what comes back, too. A customer who knew the question was coming has been paying attention, and writes something specific instead of five stars and no words.

This is where before and after pairs come from

If your category has any visible result at all, this is where you ask for the first frame. One line, before they open it: if you're planning to use this on something, take a photo of it as it is now.

Almost nobody does this, and it's why most brands have hundreds of after photographs and no before ones. The ask costs a sentence, and it supplies the before and after campaign for the rest of the year.

Four ways this send annoys people

The second row is the expensive one. A code sent between payment and delivery is the fastest way to teach a brand new customer that they paid too much, and the damage carries into every send after it.

Open your own shipping notification

Place an order with your own store and read what turns up. In most accounts the dispatch email is whatever the platform sends by default: unbranded, no message in it, and the most opened email the brand sends all year.

Fixing it is an afternoon's work with an outsized return, and it's the first thing we look at inside the post purchase sequence on any account we take over. The attention is already there. It's just being wasted.