When offering online coffee sales, part of your responsibility is to ensure the product arrives at customers in pristine condition.
Statistics show a staggering 80.2% of returned orders are due to damaged or broken products. This represents a huge proportion of a business’s total lost costs.
It is clear that adapting coffee packaging to suit home delivery is vital to running a successful brand. Combining flexible packaging and coffee mailer boxes can provide beans with additional protection during transit and delivery, minimising the risk of returns.
A further way to reduce the number of returns is to ensure your coffee mailer boxes fit into your market’s mailboxes.
Here’s how you can pick coffee mailer boxes that will facilitate effortless mailbox deliveries while preserving the quality of the product and promoting your brand.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter
Sign upWhy should you adapt the size of coffee mailer boxes?
Delivery times for online purchases have become extremely competitive, with sites such as Amazon offering same-day delivery.
This can make it challenging for smaller businesses to justify why customers must wait an extended period for delivery.
One way to streamline and improve the delivery experience is to adapt the elements you have direct control over. For instance, the box in which your coffee is mailed can make all the difference for several reasons.
Having a coffee box that fits into mailboxes guarantees it will be posted through your customer’s door.
During the 2022 festive season, delivery drivers around the world faced increased pressure – particularly with the labour strikes that plagued the UK.
Several reports indicated packages were being left outside homes, and in turn, stolen. It can be difficult to determine who is responsible for an incident like this. Normally, it falls back on you, the retailer, to resend the package, costing you more in delivery and product.
Therefore, you should ensure your coffee box can be slotted through the letterbox or placed in a mailbox to avoid leaving it unattended.
Furthermore, adapting the size of your coffee mailer boxes reduces the risk of the packaging being damaged. Smaller mailer boxes will easily slip through a letterbox, and ensure the bags inside are not put under any additional pressure.
Determining the right-sized coffee mailer boxes
To ensure your coffee mailer box is designed for mailbox deliveries, it’s important to familiarise yourself with the size of the mailboxes in your distribution area, as these can vary from region to region.
Mailboxes in the UK are typically 41cm in height and 31cm wide with a depth of 16cm, while residential mailboxes in the US are around 18cm high, 15cm wide and between 40cm and 50cm deep.
Important to note is the standard size for residential mailboxes in Canada is not specified by a governing body, such as the Canada Post. However, the general mailbox dimensions are a height of 41cm, a width of 31cm and a depth of 16cm.
Similarly, there is no single standard size for mailboxes in the EU. That said, they are usually up to 45cm high, 35cm wide and 20cm deep.
Older homes often have smaller letterboxes, so you may need to check this information with your customer before they place orders.
This can help prevent disappointment and delivery delays, and allows you to factor in additional components such as brew guides and degassing valves.
As these dimensions are a guide, you will want to give yourself a bit of leeway to ensure your coffee mailer boxes fit through comfortably.
More importantly, you must ensure the weight of your coffee mailer box and its contents do not exceed 750g. Otherwise, you may be charged more, especially with international delivery.
Designing custom coffee mailer boxes: What to consider
Designing custom coffee mailer boxes is unlikely to require a branding overhaul. However, it will require some additional thought.
For instance, the branding on your coffee mailer boxes should match that on your bags. This can prevent customers from thinking it is a counterfeit product, which can build negative perceptions of your brand.
More so, inconsistent packaging can come across as careless and messy – traits you want to avoid being associated with your coffee beans.
You can also make up for a loss in face-to-face engagement by adding a personalised message to your coffee mailer boxes.
Alternatively, should you have time, you can include a handwritten note with each order. Handwritten notes are a powerful marketing tool that can help you increase sales and create deeper relationships with your customers.
Additionally, it can be highly beneficial to make your coffee mailer boxes “insta-worthy”. An unboxing experience that customers want to share online doubles as free marketing for you, and can entice others to order.
Ideally, you want to keep the design of your coffee mailers accurate, simple, and eye-catching. Too much copy can be overwhelming, so choose to use custom-printed QR codes instead.
You may also want to designate space in your design for the shipping label, so your branding is in clear view at all times.
Whatever size coffee mailer box you choose, remember to revisit your product from the customers’ perspective.
The team at MTPak Coffee understands the importance of a memorable customer experience.
We offer a range of custom coffee mailer boxes of various sizes to accommodate the mailboxes in your markets.
Our custom coffee mailer boxes are made from 100% recycled cardboard are strong, durable, and weather resistant.
These highly customisable and recyclable coffee boxes can be used for ecommerce sales, coffee subscriptions, blind-tasting boxes, and more.
Additionally, we offer a range of 100% recyclable coffee packaging options made from renewable materials such as kraft paper, rice paper, or multilayer LDPE packaging with an environmentally friendly PLA lining.
Choose from our range of coffee bag structures to ensure they fit perfectly into your coffee mailer boxes.
All of our coffee packaging options can be fully customised to your specifications, including debossing, embossing, holographic effects, UV spot finishes, and custom printing using digital printing technology.
This allows us to offer low minimum order quantities (MOQs) to micro-roasters, as well as a quick turnaround time of 40-hours and 24-hour shipping time.
