Launching a physical product by email: what the sequence must say

You have 400 copies of something physical in your hallway. A zine, a deck of cards, a print run of a book you spent a year on. Everything you know about launching came from selling files, where the buyer pays and the thing appears instantly and your involvement ends. None of that applies here. This launch has a queue at a post office in it, and your emails have to say so.

The part of physical selling that nobody writes about

Digital launches are forgiving. If the sequence goes out a day late, nothing changes. If you sell three times more than expected, that is unambiguously good news. Physical launches have edges. There is a number of units, a weight, a cost per envelope and a finite number of hours in which one person can pack them.

So the hard part of a physical launch is not the copy. It is the honest scheduling that the copy has to communicate. If you sell 200 units on a Tuesday and you can pack 40 a day around your actual work, somebody is receiving their parcel eleven days later than they assumed. They assumed because your email did not tell them otherwise, and a digital-shaped email never has to.

The second edge is money. Postage is not a rounding error. It varies enormously by destination, and international shipping can cost more than the product. The platform gives you a flat delivery fee you set yourself, shown before payment, which means the decision about what to charge and where to ship is a decision you make deliberately, once, before the first email goes out.

Taking orders in the comments versus taking them properly

Plenty of small physical launches run on direct messages and a note app. It works for the first twenty and falls apart at the fiftieth.

The sequence, in order

Four emails, not eight. Decide your delivery fee and your shipping regions before you write any of them, because both facts appear in every message.

1. 1Set the product up first: price, flat delivery fee, and a description that states which countries you will post to and roughly how long dispatch takes.
2. 2Email one, about a week out. Show the object. Say the date it goes on sale, the delivery fee and the shipping regions in plain figures. Nobody has to decide anything yet.
3. 3Email two, on the day. Short. One link, the price with delivery stated separately, and the dispatch window in a sentence: orders placed this week are posted by Friday.
4. 4Email three, when the run is genuinely running low or the pre-order window is genuinely closing. Only send this if it is true. Physical scarcity is real, which is exactly why faking it is unforgivable.
5. 5Email four, after you post. Tell people the parcels have gone, when they were posted, and roughly how long to wait before worrying.
6. 6In every email, state that you pack these yourself. It sets expectations and it is the most likeable fact about the whole operation.
7. 7Keep a packing day in your diary and honour it. The dispatch email is only possible if the dispatch happened.

A print run of 300, in practice

Say you have printed 300 copies of a zine at £14 with a £3 flat delivery fee at home and a higher one abroad. You can comfortably pack 50 an evening. If half the run sells in the first 48 hours, that is 150 parcels and three evenings of packing, which is fine if you said so and quietly disastrous if you promised same-day dispatch. These numbers are an illustration, not a forecast for your launch.

The email that prevents all the trouble is the plainest one. Something like: I post these myself on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so an order today goes out on Wednesday, and delivery is a few days after that within the UK. Nobody has ever been annoyed by that sentence. People are annoyed by silence, and silence is what they get when a physical launch is written from a digital template.

The mistake most people make

One flat delivery fee for the entire planet. It feels generous and simple, and then a third of your orders come from another continent and the postage eats the margin on all of them. Decide which regions you will actually post to, set the fee against a real trip to the post office with a real parcel on the scales, and say no to the rest for now. The second mistake is running a discount campaign without checking how it interacts with postage — worth understanding before you build a launch around discount codes, which are part of the Pro plan.

A physical launch email is mostly logistics written kindly, and it sits beside the nine other things you can sell from the same page. Where it ships, what it costs to ship, when it leaves your table and who is carrying it to the post office. Get those four sentences right and the rest of the copy can be as plain as you like.