Win-back email for ecommerce

The trigger. In Klaviyo, build the segment "Placed Order at least once over all time" and "Placed Order zero times in last 60 days." Sixty days sits at about 1.5 times the median repurchase window for consumable DTC. Skincare, supplements, and coffee repurchase every 30 to 45 days. Apparel sits closer to 90. Drop a flow on that segment and you reach lapsed buyers without pestering the ones still ordering.

The timing. Send the first email at day 60 and the last chance at day 75. Two touches, not five. The day 75 email either raises the offer to 20% off or ships a sunset note ("this is our last email") to respect the inbox.

The offer. Stack 15% off with free shipping. Lapsed ecommerce buyers rarely left because they hated the product. They left because the shipping fee felt rude at checkout or because life got busy. Free shipping fixes the first cause. Fifteen percent fixes the second. Stacked, they beat a flat 20% discount in our test splits for skincare and apparel.

The copy angle. Lead with replenishment. Name the product and the order date: "You ordered Brightening Serum on March 4. At one pump morning and night, a bottle lasts about eight weeks. Yours is empty by now." Drop "we miss you." That line tests worse than naming the thing they ran out of.

The CTA. One button, one destination. "Claim 15% plus free shipping" links to a shop page with the code auto-applied. Resist a second "shop bestsellers" button. Two buttons roughly halve the click rate.

Numbers to expect. Ecommerce win-back open rates land between 20 and 30 percent. Click rates between 2 and 4 percent. A timed replenishment email with a stacked offer recovers 3 to 6 percent of lapsed buyers as repeat purchasers inside 14 days.

Nested HTML tables, not divs or flex. Outlook 2007 through 2021 renders email with the Microsoft Word engine. Word ignores flexbox, ignores most CSS positioning, and breaks floats. Tables are the one layout primitive it respects. Every section in the export is a table inside a table inside a table.

Inline CSS on every element. Gmail strips the head styles for some accounts, and a few mobile clients drop them entirely. When the style lives on the td itself, the styling survives.

A bulletproof VML button for Outlook. Standard buttons collapse to a thin text link in Word. The VML version draws a real mso rectangle with a working link and the correct background fill. Outlook users get the same button as everyone else.

Live text, not images. Gmail clips anything over 102 kilobytes. Live text keeps the file small, stays readable when images are blocked, and loads before the images do. Reserve images for product photos and the logo.

Dark-mode color-scheme meta. Apple Mail and Outlook mobile invert dark backgrounds unless you declare the scheme. Add a color-scheme meta and a supported-color-schemes style so your cream background stays cream instead of going muddy gray.

One mobile media query. Multiple queries fight each other. A single block at max-width 600 pixels handles the stack, the font sizing, and the padding for phones.

Web-font fallbacks. Apple Mail and iOS Mail render hosted fonts. Gmail and Outlook do not. Load the font with a link, then fall back to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif. The email holds its shape either way.

1. Copy the HTML from the Mailwright export.

2. In Klaviyo, open your flow email, drag in an HTML block (or choose HTML email as the message type), and paste. In Mailchimp, start a campaign, choose Code your own, then Paste in code.

3. Swap the brand. Replace "Marlowe Skin" and the logo text. Find the hex #C2724E and replace it with the client's primary color. Update the logo URL and the shop link.

4. Wire the merge tags. First name in Klaviyo is {{ first_name|default:'there' }}. In Mailchimp it is *|FNAME|*. For the last ordered product, trigger the flow from a Placed Order metric and reference the event item, or drop in a Klaviyo catalog block. In Mailchimp, use the Product Recommendations block.

5. Drop in the coupon. In Klaviyo, create the coupon COMEBACK15 in the integration settings and reference {{ coupon_code }}. In Mailchimp, insert the coupon content block or paste the code into the live text.

6. Test. Send to Gmail web, Gmail app, Apple Mail in light and dark, and Outlook on Windows. Use Litmus or Email on Acid if you have them. Otherwise mail yourself and open on a phone.