Abandoned Cart Email Template

The template is built around a single saved product and a single decision. There is no grid of recommendations, no coupon wall, no three-column cross-sell. The shopper sees the one coat they left behind and one button.

The layout reads top to bottom in a clear order. A wordmark header (MAISON RIVA) sits next to a quiet meta line (Paris, since 1987), with a thin hairline rule under it. Then a small oxblood eyebrow marker and the label "Still in your bag" set up a large serif headline: "You left something behind." One short paragraph follows with a real deadline, that the size is held until Sunday, instead of a vague "hurry."

Below that is a full-bleed product photo, then a detail card on a slightly lighter panel. The card stacks the product name (The Riva Coat) against the price on the same line, then the specifics: "Size 38, Oxblood, Double-faced Italian wool," then two sentences on how the coat is cut. One oxblood button reads "Complete your order." A trust line under it states free shipping and 30-day returns and repeats the Sunday hold.

The discipline is the point. There is exactly one primary CTA. The only secondary action is a low-key text link, "View your saved bag," plus a human note inviting a reply to a real stylist. The type does the hierarchy work: Bodoni Moda serif for the display headline and product name, Hanken Grotesk for body and UI labels. The palette stays narrow on purpose. A cool near-white ground (#f2f2f0, not cream), teal-charcoal ink (#1e2e2c), one cooled-oxblood accent (#8f2f42) behind light text, and a deep-teal footer band (#174349). It looks editorial and expensive, not like a generic discount blast.

Email clients are not browsers. Outlook on Windows uses Word to render HTML, Gmail strips parts of your code, and dark mode can flip your colors. This template is built for those rules.

The whole layout is tables, not divs or flexbox. Every visual style is inline on the element, so nothing breaks when a client drops the <style> block. The structure sits inside a 600px container centered in a full-width background wrapper, which is the width that holds up across clients.

The text is live HTML text, not baked into an image. That means it stays sharp, stays selectable, and still reads if images are blocked, which matters because many inboxes block images by default. The product photo is the only image, and it carries real alt text ("The Riva double-faced wool coat in oxblood") so the email still makes sense with images off.

The button is bulletproof. For Outlook it uses VML (a roundrect with a solid oxblood fill), and for every other client it uses a styled anchor with the same color and label. So the CTA is a real clickable shape in Outlook, not a broken image or a thin underlined link. There is also an MSO conditional block setting PixelsPerInch to 96 so Outlook does not inflate the sizing.

Dark mode is handled by declaring color-scheme and supported-color-schemes as light, plus the x-apple-disable-message-reformatting tag, so Apple Mail and others do not auto-invert the palette into something muddy. There is one mobile media query, the only one, that stacks columns, widens the padding, scales the headline down, and makes the button full-width on small screens. The hidden preheader text controls the gray preview line in the inbox so it does not pull a random sentence.

You do not need to rebuild anything. The flow is copy, paste, swap, test, send.

First, copy the full HTML from the template file. In Klaviyo, create or open your abandoned cart flow email, choose the HTML editor (or drag in an HTML block and paste the markup), and paste the whole thing. In Mailchimp, start a campaign, pick "Code your own," choose "Paste in code," and drop the HTML in. Both editors render table-based HTML without reformatting it.

Second, swap the brand. Replace MAISON RIVA with your name, change the product image source, and update the product name, price, specs, and copy. To rebrand the colors, find and replace the four hex values: the oxblood accent #8f2f42 (eyebrow marker, button, links), the teal-charcoal ink #1e2e2c, the near-white ground #f2f2f0, and the deep-teal footer #174349. Update the subject line and the hidden preheader at the top of the file, and point every example.com link at your real cart, browser, unsubscribe, and preferences URLs.

Third, wire in your ESP's dynamic tags so the email pulls the shopper's actual cart item, price, and image instead of the static coat, and confirm the unsubscribe link uses your provider's required tag.

Last, test before you send. Send a preview to yourself and check it in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook, then toggle dark mode on a phone. Click the button to confirm the cart link works. Once it looks right, set the flow trigger (a started-checkout that did not convert) and a sensible delay, usually somewhere from one to a few hours after the cart is abandoned.