Post-Purchase Email for Fitness Brands

A membership sale is not the win. It is the start of a 30-day churn window. Roughly half of new gym members who never attend a first session cancel inside the first billing cycle, so this email has one job: get them booked before the energy from checkout cools.

Trigger. Fire on Placed Order, filtered to your membership or program SKU. In Klaviyo, trigger off the order line item or product category. In Mailchimp, use the product category condition. Send immediately, within five minutes. The buyer is still in motion, still committed, still reading their phone. A 24-hour delay cuts booking conversion roughly in half.

Timing. Welcome at 0 to 5 minutes. Nudge at 24 hours if no session is booked. Follow at 7 days only if they still have not booked, then stop. Three touches, then stop chasing.

Offer. No discount. Discounts after a gym purchase train people to wait for the next one. The offer here is friction removal: a one-tap booking link, a named coach, the door code, and a stated session length. Give certainty, not a coupon.

Copy angle. Belonging first, logistics second. Open with membership confirmed, not "thanks for your purchase." Use the member's first name with a fallback to "athlete" for gift buyers and blanks. Name the coach. Give the schedule in plain numbers. Skip hype words like "transform" and "journey," because anyone who has not trained in 90 days bails on anything framed as a transformation.

CTA. One button, one verb: Book your first session. Resist adding a second link to the app, the class calendar, and the merch store. Every extra link costs you booking clicks.

Real copy we ship for clients:

Subject: You're in, {{ first_name|default:'athlete' }}. Here's your first session. Preheader: Book in 60 seconds. Doors open at 5:00am. Body lead: Welcome to Forge Strength Club. Your membership is live. Here is exactly what happens next.

Numbers we track across gym clients: members who book their first session within 24 hours of purchase attend 2.7 sessions in month one on average. Members who do not book inside the first week attend less than once. That single split is the whole retention curve.

Fitness brands run loud palettes: black backgrounds, electric accents, heavy type weights. That is exactly the combination email clients break. The HTML exported from this template stays safe by leaning on the rendering tricks that have worked since Outlook 2007.

Nested tables, not divs or flex. Every layout is a table inside a table, with role="presentation" and cellpadding, cellspacing, and border set to zero. Gmail, Yahoo, and the legacy Outlook Word engine all collapse flexbox and grid. Tables do not break.

Inline CSS. Styles live on each element, not in a style block the client may strip. The one exception is the mobile media query, which has to live in the head to fire at all.

Bulletproof VML button for Outlook. The Word engine renders buttons as flat text unless you wrap them in Vector Markup Language with mso- conditionals. MJML outputs that VML automatically, so the lime CTA shows as a real rectangle with rounded corners in Outlook 2016 through 2021, not a gray link.

Live text over images. Names, session times, and the schedule stay as selectable text. That keeps the email searchable, readable to screen readers, and visible when images are off, which is the default state on about 1 in 5 Apple Mail opens.

Dark mode. A color-scheme meta tag in the head tells Apple Mail and Outlook dark not to invert the background and text. We pin it to light on purpose, because a black gym logo on a flipped white background looks broken.

One mobile media query. A single max-width: 480px block shrinks the hero headline, drops the side padding, and keeps the steps legible on a phone. Anything more and you are maintaining two emails.

Web font fallbacks. System fonts load first. If you add a custom display face for the logo wordmark, every client without web font support falls back to Helvetica or Arial without a layout shift.

1. Copy the MJML below, then export it to HTML from the free MJML app. Or copy the exported HTML straight in.

2. In Klaviyo, open the flow email, drag in a Sign-up Form or HTML block, and paste. In Mailchimp, choose Create Email, then Code your own, then Paste in code.

3. Swap the brand. Replace the FORGE STRENGTH CLUB wordmark, the gym name and address in the footer, and the social links. Swap the colors. Two hex values drive the whole palette: the lime accent #B4FF39 and the charcoal #15171C. Keep button text contrast above 4.5:1.

4. Wire the merge tags.

Klaviyo examples for a gym: - First name with fallback: {{ first_name|default:'athlete' }} - Membership or program name: {{ event.extra.membership_name }} or {{ item.product.name }} - Coach name from a profile property: {{ person|lookup:'coach_name' }} - Start date: {{ today|date:'l, F j' }} - Booking link: a profile property {{ person|lookup:'booking_url' }} or a hardcoded Calendly or gym-software link

Mailchimp examples: - First name with fallback: *|IF:FNAME|**|FNAME|*|ELSE:|*athlete*|END:IF|* - Order date: *|ORDER_DATE|* - Product name: *|PRODUCT_TITLE|*

5. Test before you send. Send to Gmail on web and Android, to Apple Mail in light and dark, and to Outlook on Windows (2016 or newer). Open it on a phone. Confirm the CTA is a real rectangle in Outlook and that the lime does not invert in dark mode. Fix, resend, then set the flow live.