Loyalty & VIP email template for Klaviyo and Mailchimp

A VIP email is not a discount email. Your top 5 percent of customers already buy at full price, so a 15 percent off code reads as an insult, not a gift. What they want is recognition and access. Lead with status.

Trigger on a milestone, never a calendar. The strongest sends fire the moment a tier flips. A customer crosses $500 in trailing 12-month spend, your loyalty platform pushes the event into Klaviyo, and the email lands within the hour. The same logic applies when points cross a redemption threshold (1,000 points unlocks $40) or when a quarterly drop is 48 hours from going public. Calendar blasts to the whole VIP list train people to tune you out.

One email carries one idea. 'You unlocked Gold' is an idea. 'You unlocked Gold, here are four perks, also refer a friend, also your points expire' is a newsletter, and VIPs delete newsletters. Put the single tier change at the top and list the perks as short live-text rows underneath. The points-expiry warning belongs in its own send.

Make the offer access, not money. The line that moves VIPs is 'Shop the spring drop 24 hours before everyone else,' not 'Take $10 off.' Pair it with a concrete points number: '1,250 points = $50 toward your next order.' Numbers outperform adjectives every time, and they survive the handoff between you and your client.

Hold the CTA to one button. Early-access sends need one destination, the gated collection page. Loyalty platforms that stack three buttons (shop, redeem, refer) see the primary click rate cut roughly in half. Pick one link and tag it with a single UTM so the revenue traces back to this send.

Expect high engagement, and design for it. VIP segments typically open at 2 to 3x your broadcast average and click through at 4 to 6x. That is why the single CTA matters so much: every extra click on a secondary link is revenue you left on the table.

This template compiles to the HTML email actually runs on: nested tables, inline styles, no divs, no flexbox. Modern CSS does not survive the trip to the inbox. Gmail strips your head styles when it clips, Outlook 365 desktop renders with Word's engine, and Apple Mail dark mode recolors your backgrounds on its own. The markup defends against all three.

The layout uses nested table elements, the same structure email has relied on since 2007. Each section is its own table, each column a td. That is why the email holds its shape in Outlook, where a flexbox grid collapses into a stack of unstyled text.

Every style sits inline on its element. When Gmail clips a message above roughly 102kb, it drops the head and kills any style block inside it. Inline styles survive the clip. We keep total weight near 19kb so the clip never triggers in the first place.

The CTA is a bulletproof VML button. Outlook 365 desktop runs the Word rendering engine, which ignores border-radius, so a plain CSS button shows up there as a flat outlined box. The template wraps the button in a VML roundrect that draws a real gold rectangle with rounded corners inside Word. In Apple Mail and Gmail the same link renders as a normal styled button.

Headlines and points numbers are live text, not images. Image text does not scale with the reader's font size, and it vanishes whenever images are blocked. The 1,250 points balance here is real text the recipient can copy.

Dark mode is handled with a color-scheme meta in the document head. We declare 'light dark' so Apple Mail flips the off-white footer predictably instead of guessing. The deep green hero keeps its color because it sits on the table background, which Apple Mail leaves alone.

One media query handles mobile. Below 480px the hero headline drops from 34px to 26px and the points number from 52px to 40px. We keep exactly one, scoped to max-width, because chained responsive tricks with three breakpoints break in Outlook. Web fonts load through a font import with a Georgia serif fallback, so the display headings hold their shape even when the font fails to load on Android or Outlook.

1. Copy the compiled HTML from the preview with the Copy HTML button.

2. In Klaviyo, open the campaign or flow email. For a full HTML build, pick the HTML template type and paste the whole document into the source view. For a single block inside a drag-and-drop email, drop in a text block, click Source, and paste the section. In Mailchimp, start a campaign, choose Code your own, then Paste in code, and drop the HTML in.

3. Swap the brand. Replace the name 'Maison Verde', the logo image URL, and the two brand hex values. The deep green is #0E3B2E and the gold is #C9A55C. A find-and-replace on those two recolors the brand accents across the email. The neutrals, the off-white background and the body text grey, stay where they are.

4. Wire in the merge tags. In Klaviyo the first-name tag reads {{ first_name|default:'friend' }}. In Mailchimp it reads *|FNAME|*. Pull the points balance from the profile property your loyalty integration writes (in Klaviyo, something like {{ person|lookup:'loyalty_points' }}; in Mailchimp, a merged field).

5. Test before you send. Send a live test to a Gmail account (web and the Android app), an Apple Mail account (toggle dark mode on and off), and an Outlook 365 desktop client. If your client owns Litmus or Email on Acid, run the full render check there. Fix what breaks, then schedule.

That is the whole production loop. A practiced strategist clears this in under ten minutes per client.