Birthday Email for Fitness Brands (Free Class HTML Template)

The birthday email is the one automation gym members actually open. Health and fitness birthday sends clear 40 to 55% open rates in Klaviyo benchmark data, and they arrive when the member already expects to be celebrated. The job is not to sell merch at 10% off. It is to put that member back on the floor once, on the house, during the one week a year they feel invincible.

**Trigger.** Fire on the member's birthday from a "Birthday" profile property, captured at signup or pulled from the membership system. Store month and day only, never the year. In Klaviyo, set the flow to recur annually and check the profile's birthday against today's date. In Mailchimp, the built-in Birthday automation handles the recurrence for you. A gym that asks for a birthdate on the trial waiver collects the field before the first visit.

**Timing.** Send five to seven days before the date, not the morning of. A morning-of send lands after most members have already planned their evening. A pre-birthday send gives them the whole birthday week to book and overlaps the "treat yourself" decision instead of trailing it. Morning delivery, 6 to 9am local, beats afternoon.

**Offer.** One free class, single redemption, seven-day expiry. That beats 20% off apparel and beats a free shaker. A free class drags a lapsed or seasonal member back onto the floor, where they remember why they joined. Use a unique single-use code per profile (Klaviyo coupon codes or Shopify discounts) so the perk cannot be screenshotted and dropped into the gym's member group chat.

**Copy angle.** Energetic, second person, name in the subject and the hero. One warm line, then the gift, then the button. No stock photo of someone flipping a tire. Live text survives dark mode, loads instantly on the locker-room phone, and keeps the file well under Gmail's 102KB clip.

Real copy for a strength gym: - Subject: It's your birthday week, {{ first_name|default:'athlete' }}. - Preheader: One free class. Any coach. Any time this week. - Body: Another year stronger. Your gift is on us: one free class, any session, any coach.

**CTA.** One button, one action: Book my free class. Link it straight to the booking page with the code pre-applied (repclub.com/book?c=BDAY-REP), so the member never has to retype anything mid-workout. A second link to "shop merch" or "refer a friend" splits attention and tanks the click-through. One offer, one button, one week.

This template ships as table-based HTML, not divs or flexbox. Outlook on Windows still renders mail through Word's engine and ignores modern CSS, so every layout block is a nested table (table inside table inside td). The structure holds in Outlook 2016 through Outlook 365 New, where a div-and-flex build collapses.

All styling is inline. Gmail strips your head styles and ignores body classes, so each td, p, and a carries its own color, size, and padding. The CSS in the source is the CSS that lands in the inbox.

The CTA is a bulletproof VML button. Outlook gets an MSO vector rectangle wrapped in a real v:roundrect with its own v:fill, so Outlook shows a true clickable orange button instead of a flat image. Gmail and Apple Mail get the rounded a version. Same click, two render paths.

Copy is live text. The hero greeting, the offer line, and the redemption code are all selectable text, not images. The member can copy the code, a screen reader can read it, and dark mode can recolor it. The one image (a small logo) carries alt text and a fixed width.

Dark mode is handled with the color-scheme meta pair in the head: meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark" and meta name="supported-color-schemes" content="light dark". Apple Mail and Outlook dark then invert the white background to a near-black without mangling the orange accent, and the footer text stays readable instead of going black on black.

One mobile media query, max-width 600px, stacks the single column and drops the hero type from 38px to 30px so the subject fits a phone screen. A second breakpoint is wasted bytes; one is enough for a one-column build.

Web fonts fall back gracefully. The head requests Inter, but the font stack lists Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif after it. Outlook never downloads web fonts, and Apple Mail only does under some configs, so the email looks correct even when Inter does not load.

1. Copy the HTML. Grab the exported HTML, or use the MJML below and compile it at mjml.io/try-it-live.

2. Paste it in. In Klaviyo, open your Birthday flow email, switch to the drag-and-drop editor, drag in an HTML block, and paste. In Mailchimp, start a campaign, pick Code Your Own, then Paste in code.

3. Swap the brand. Replace "REP CLUB" and the logo link in the header, the studio address in the footer, and the two colors (accent #FF4D1F, dark #0F0F0F) in the head attributes. The hero, body, and footer all read from those tokens, so two edits restyle the whole email.

4. Wire the merge tags. For a gym in Klaviyo: - Greeting: {{ first_name|default:'athlete' }} - Redemption code: {{ coupon.Code|default:'BDAY-REP' }} (set up a single-use coupon set, for example BDAY-REP) - Booking link: https://yourgym.com/book?c={{ coupon.Code|default:'BDAY-REP' }} - Unsubscribe: Klaviyo manages the footer link for you; in a custom block use {% unsubscribe %} In Mailchimp the same fields are *|FNAME|*, a single-use Promo Code block for the free class, and the unsubscribe tag *|UNSUB|*. Map the member's birthday to the Mailchimp Birthday automation trigger, or to the Klaviyo "Birthday" profile property.

5. Test before you send. Run a Litmus or Email on Acid render across Gmail (web and the Android app), Apple Mail (iPhone and macOS), and Outlook (365 on Windows). Then send a live test to your own phone with dark mode on. If the orange button is visible and the code is selectable, ship it.