How to Automatically Add Print Inserts to Specific Orders

An important retention tool for any DTC ecommerce brand is the unboxing experience – when a customer receives an order from you, what do they experience when they open up the box and unpack their goodies? 

Ideally you want them to feel renewed enthusiasm for your products, and reassurance that they’ve made a wise investment. A big contributor to those feelings is your box presentation.

I’m going to do a more in-depth post about box presentation soon, but for now I want to take you through one critical piece of it: print inserts. 

Let’s first look at what a print insert is, then I’ll show you an easy trick for how Shopify-based brands can add specific print inserts to specific orders.

What is a Print Insert?

A print insert is any printed marketing piece that gets added into a shipment.

Here are two that I designed for the brand Sea to Table (I collaborated with a writer and photographer for the words and photos):

Designing for print involves working within the design specs of your printer of choice. VistaPrint is a good option for print inserts, or perhaps you have a local printer you like to work with.

Once printed, have it delivered to your order fulfillment center(s). 

How To Add Specific Print Inserts to Specific Orders

One way to make a great first impression on a new customer is by including instructions for how to handle your product.

But how do you set it up so that you’re not adding this to every order the customer may place down the road? Not only is it a waste of money for you, it may actually be a turnoff for a repeat customer to receive the same print material over and over again… just another thing to have to throw away.

And what if you want to take it a step further and include different information with their second delivery?

Shopify Flow to the Rescue

Shopify Flow is a free app developed and maintained by Shopify that allows users to automate workflows in their Shopify store. It monitors the store for events and creates automated actions in response.

Once you’ve added Shopify Flow to your store via the Shopify App Store, your next step is to set up your print insert as a product in Shopify. The process is the same as with any product, except you want to make it hidden on your store and hidden to search engines (this article does a nice job explaining how to do this).

We can then use Shopify Flow to say, “If an order is placed and it is the customer’s first (or second) order, then add the 1st (or 2nd) Order Insert to the order.” 

It will then show up on the packing slip when the order is being fulfilled by your team.

Here is what this looks like in Flow:

Voilà! You’ll want to monitor your Flows for a bit to make sure they’re adding to the correct orders, but that is easy to do with the “Recent Runs” report within each Flow.