Customer notes
Notes to go in the parcel
A note that goes inside the parcel is a different object from a card that arrives by post. It is read standing up, in the thirty seconds between opening the box and picking up the product, and it is competing with the thing the customer actually ordered. Fifteen words is plenty.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
Plain and short
[FIRST NAME] - hope you love it. Packed by [PACKER NAME].
Thanks [FIRST NAME]. Any problems at all, just reply to your order email.
Where the note carries one piece of information
[FIRST NAME] - wash it cold and it will outlast the rest of your wardrobe.
[FIRST NAME], if the size is not right just send it back in this bag. No forms.
For a returning customer
[FIRST NAME] - good to see you back. Third order this year, by our count.
Premium or gift orders
Enclosed with care for [RECIPIENT NAME]. [BUSINESS NAME]
[FIRST NAME] - wrapped by hand this morning. Thank you for letting us be part of it.
Subscription and repeat shipments
The note in box six should not be the note in box one. A subscription that keeps thanking somebody for joining tells them nobody is looking.
[FIRST NAME] - box [NUMBER]. Still glad you are here.
[FIRST NAME], a year of these now. Thank you for sticking with it.
Where you want one piece of feedback
The only acceptable ask in a parcel note, and only if it goes to a person rather than a form.
[FIRST NAME] - if the [PRODUCT] is not right, reply to your order email and it comes to me directly. [NAME]
Getting it right
- What to mention. The customer’s name and almost nothing else. Where a note needs to do a job, make it one job: care instructions, a returns reassurance, or who packed it.
- What to leave out. A folded A5 letter. A second note about your brand story. Anything that has to be read before the product is unwrapped, because it will not be.
- How long. 8 to 30 words. This is the shortest format in the library.
- How personal. Casual. A parcel note that is formal feels like it came from a warehouse, which it did, and the point is to hide that.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [PACKER NAME], [RECIPIENT NAME], [NUMBER].
On a gift order the billing name and the delivery name are different people, and a note thanking the recipient for their purchase gives away that it was a gift and who paid. Merge from the gift-recipient field or write the neutral version.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
Parcel notes are the highest-volume, lowest-word format there is, which makes them the one most often handed to a printer and the one where a printed result is most obvious at close range.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap and varies the letterforms piece to piece the way handwriting does.
Thousands of parcels and a note in each? Get a per-piece price
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Writing more of these than you have evenings
Tell us roughly how many and what they say. We will come back with an exact price and a production window.