Price Drop Email Template

This template is built for a demo audio brand called WREN, around one product, the WREN One wireless over-ear headphones. It does one job. Tell someone who already showed intent that the thing they were watching now costs less, and move them to buy before the price moves back.

The trigger is what separates a price drop email from a promo. The shopper raised their hand first. They saved the headphones to a wishlist, or they opened the product page twice and left, or they clicked "Notify me when this drops." When the catalog price falls below what they last saw, the flow fires. You are not interrupting a cold list. You are closing a loop the shopper opened, which is why a well-run price-drop flow commonly converts at two to three times the rate of a batch sale send.

Timing decides whether it converts. Send as close to the price change as you can, ideally inside the hour, while the browse is still warm. Wait three days and the click rate falls off a cliff because the shopper has forgotten they cared. Speed also keeps you honest. If the price moved two weeks ago, the email reads like a stale reminder, not a timely heads-up.

The layout reads top to bottom as one idea. A small ember pill says "Price dropped" before anyone reads a word, so the reason for the send lands instantly. Then the headline does the work: "It dropped. The headphones you saved are $80 off." A short line under it gives the real numbers, that the WREN One went from $279 to $199 and that is the lowest price of the year. A hero product shot follows, then a clean name-and-price card with the old $279 struck through and $199 set big beside it, and a savings badge that restates it once: "You save $80 (28% off)."

The discipline is the part most stores get wrong. There is exactly one button, "Buy now for $199." No cross-sell row, no "You might also like" grid, no second product competing for the click. The shopper already told you what they want. Re-merchandising at this moment only splits attention.

Urgency has to be real. This drop is tied to a sale window, so the trust line says "Sale ends Sunday, 11:59pm PT" and "Free returns for 60 days." If your drop is permanent, do not bolt on a fake countdown. Just say "now $199" and let the savings carry it. Cap the frequency too. One price-drop email per item per shopper, and no more than one per subscriber every two to three weeks, or you train the list to sit on its hands and wait for markdowns.

Email clients are not browsers. Outlook on Windows lays out HTML with the Word engine, Gmail strips most of what sits in a head style block, and dark mode can invert colors you picked on purpose. This template is written for those rules.

The layout is nested HTML tables with role set to presentation, not divs and flexbox, because Word ignores flex and grid and any layout that leans on them collapses. MJML emits exactly that table structure when it compiles, so you do not hand-code it. Every visual style is inline on its element, so nothing breaks when Gmail drops the stylesheet. The structure holds at a 600px container width, the width that survives across clients.

The prices and the savings are live text, not baked into an image. The old price uses an inline line-through style so the strikethrough renders even where image text would vanish. That matters more here than in most emails. The whole message is the price change, so it has to stay sharp, stay selectable, and still read with images off, which is the default view in many Outlook inboxes.

The button is a real VML bulletproof button. It ships as a v:roundrect inside an MSO conditional comment, with an anchor lock and an ember fillcolor, so Outlook draws a solid clickable shape instead of a thin underlined link. Every other client gets a padded inline anchor with the same color and label. The head also carries a PixelsPerInch 96 fix and an MSO conditional container table so Outlook does not inflate the sizing or blow the width out.

Dark mode is handled on purpose. The file declares color-scheme and supported-color-schemes as light, plus the x-apple-disable-message-reformatting tag, so Apple Mail and iOS leave the graphite ink and ember accent alone instead of inverting them into mud. The web font, Sora, loads in Apple Mail and iOS Mail and falls back cleanly to Helvetica and Arial in Gmail and Outlook. One mobile media query scales the headline down to 38px, and that is the only class-based style the design depends on.

Copy the HTML the MJML compiles to. In Klaviyo, open your price-drop flow email, pick the HTML editor, or drag an HTML block into a drag-and-drop template, and paste the full markup. In Mailchimp, start a campaign, choose "Code your own," then "Paste in code," and drop it in. Both editors keep the table structure and inline styles intact.

Swap the demo for your brand. Replace WREN with your name, point the hero image at your own hosted photo, and update the product name, the two prices, and the copy. To rebrand the colors, find and replace two hex values: graphite ink at #1b1b1f and ember at #e0532b. The ember carries the "Price dropped" pill, the savings badge, and the button, so change it in all three places.

Wire in your ESP's dynamic tags so the email pulls the real product, the real old price, and the real new price for each shopper. In Klaviyo that means mapping the catalog event onto the flow, with fields like {{ event.product_name }}, {{ event.previous_price|default:'279' }}, and {{ event.price }}, and a button link built from {{ event.product_url }}. In Mailchimp, use a connected product block or your merge tags for the same fields. Then confirm the unsubscribe and view-in-browser links use your provider's required tags.

Set the trigger before you send. In Klaviyo, use the catalog "Price drop" metric or a custom "Product price decreased" event, and add a filter so the flow fires only for subscribers who viewed or saved that specific item, and only when the drop clears a floor like 10 percent. That keeps you from emailing on a 3 percent move that no one cares about.

Test before you send. Send a real preview to yourself and open it in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook on Windows, then toggle dark mode on a phone. Confirm the strikethrough renders, the button shows as a solid shape in Outlook, and the old price and new price both pull through your dynamic tags. When it passes, turn the flow on.