Most check-in emails fail for the same reason: there is nothing in them. "Just checking in" hands the buyer all the work — remember who this is, work out what they want, decide whether it matters this week. A bar manager reading it between a delivery and a shift change will not do that work. They won't reply, and they won't feel bad about it.
If you sell through distributors, the fix is already sitting in your depletion file. It shows what that account took and in what pack; line a run of those files up and you can also see how often, and roughly when it went quiet. One real detail from that file, in the first sentence, turns the message from a request for attention into a note about their own business — which is the only kind a busy buyer answers.
Five rules before you write anything
The craft here is small and unglamorous. Almost every check-in that gets answered obeys the same five constraints, and almost every one that dies breaks at least two.
Under five sentences. Not a style preference — a length that reads on a phone in a stockroom without scrolling. If it needs a sixth sentence, it needs a phone call.
One or two real details, no more. Cases a month, the pack or size, the month it stopped. Specifics prove you looked, and prove you are not sending this to forty people. Specifics prove you looked, and prove you are not sending this to forty people.
Exactly one question. Two questions is a form. One question can be answered in a single line, which is the whole objective — you want a reply, not a reorder, not yet.
No guilt. "We haven't heard from you in a while" makes the silence the buyer's fault. Nobody replies to an email that opens with a small accusation, least of all someone who dropped you deliberately.
An easy no. Offer a reply that costs them nothing — "happy to leave it alone" — and you get an honest answer instead of no answer. An honest no tells you where not to spend next week, which is worth almost as much as a yes.
Four openers that get answered
All four do the same job in different registers: they put a fact on the table before they ask for anything.
The specific observation. Open with something true about their business, not yours — two handles that came off in September, a pack size that halved. It reads as attention rather than pursuit, and it gives them something concrete to correct. Buyers enjoy correcting you.
The restock question. Assume the dullest and most likely explanation: it fell off the order guide. "Is the tripel still on your list, or has it come off?" Usually that is the true story, and it is answerable with one word.
The seasonal reset. Hook to their calendar, not yours — the autumn board, a menu change, the spring draft rotation. "If you're rebuilding the fall list in the next few weeks, should I ask your wholesaler rep to put it back on the order guide?" You arrive at the moment they were already going to think about it.
The short favour ask. Name the size of the ask up front and keep it to one fact. "Can I ask you one thing — was it price, or was it placement?" People who will never take a meeting still answer a question that takes a few seconds, and the answer is often the entire diagnosis.
Here is the restock question in full, minus the greeting. Subject: the pilsner handle. "You were taking about four cases of the pilsner a month through last spring, and the last order I can see is March. Did the handle go to something else, or did it just get away from us? Happy to leave it alone if it's spoken for — either way it's useful to know."
The test
If you could send the same email to forty accounts without changing a word, it is not a check-in — it is a mailshot, and it will be read as one. The detail that makes it impossible to copy is the message. Everything else is packaging.
Two openers that get ignored
"Just checking in." It carries no information, so all the effort transfers to the reader. Its cousins — touching base, circling back, seeing how things are going — fail identically, and a buyer clears a handful of them before the coffee lands.
Anything that reads automated. A merge field that didn't fill, a subject line in title case, three links, an unsubscribe footer on what claims to be a personal note, a send address starting with marketing@. One tell is enough. The message may be accurate and well argued; it will still be filed as a campaign.
A third way to get ignored: sending the same message to every lapsed account in a market on the same morning. The trade is small and buyers talk. Stagger them, and make sure each one is genuinely different — each account's data genuinely is.
Depletion data lags a day or two, and one thin period is not churn. Wait for a second empty period before you write. Telling someone they've stopped ordering when they ordered last week costs you more than silence would have.
When to route it through the distributor instead
Not every quiet account is yours to email. Sometimes the relationship sits with the distributor rep, and a direct message reads as going around the person whose help you'll need next month.
The distributor went quiet, not the account. Check that first. If a run of accounts under one wholesaler stopped in the same month, the answer is at the warehouse — out of stock, a delist, a rep who left — and no amount of emailing buyers will find it.
You have no direct relationship. If you have never met them, a cold note about their order history reads as surveillance. Ask the rep for an introduction, or to put the question on a call they are making anyway.
The decision sits above the account. Chain and group listings are set centrally. The on-site manager usually can't put you back on the guide, and won't enjoy being asked.
The rep is already working it. Ask them first, and keep it to one question: three accounts on the pilsner all stopped in the same month — has anything changed on your end before I call them?
What a supplier may do directly with a retail account varies by state, and so does what counts as an inducement. Keep to information and questions, and run anything promotional past whoever handles your compliance before it goes out.
Or have the draft waiting
None of this is difficult. It is just work that has to happen every week, on a list nobody has time to build — and the detail that makes the email land only exists if someone lined a year of exports up side by side. When Sightglass ran that comparison across one importer's own exports, it surfaced 630 accounts quietly sliding, 4.8% of the book, before anyone had written a word.
Sightglass reads the VIP feed nightly and keeps every snapshot, so the history outlives any single export window. Each rep gets a short ranked list of the accounts that went quiet, with the check-in already drafted in your own house voice — and a version addressed to the distributor rep when that is the better route. Nothing sends itself: a person approves every message, and approved mail goes from the rep's own mailbox, so the reply comes back to them. When the data isn't yet solid enough to support a flag, it stays quiet rather than guessing. Your reporting stays exactly where it is.
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