Price Drop Email for Fashion Brands

The trigger fires the moment a catalog price drops on a SKU someone has viewed, wishlisted, or added to cart. In Klaviyo this is the Price Drop flow, built on the Viewed Product event plus a catalog sync. Set it to fire only when the discount is real: at least 10 to 15 percent off. Smaller moves train shoppers to wait you out.

Timing is 30 to 60 minutes after the price change, not the next morning. Fashion shoppers buy on impulse when the deal lands in their inbox while they are still on their phone. Cap frequency at one price-drop email per SKU per subscriber per 30 days, or you will burn the list during end-of-season sales.

Offer math matters. Strike through $295 and show $199 next to it, then spell out the savings: Save $96 (33% off). Fashion shoppers run the mental math, and showing all three numbers removes friction. Put the product image, the variant they viewed (color and size), and the price block above the fold.

The copy angle is the size. Generic "your favorite item is on sale" loses to "The Marlowe Wool Overcoat in Camel, size M, dropped from $295 to $199." Size is the scarcest thing in apparel. Use it.

Keep urgency light. Skip the countdown clock. Instead, pull live inventory: Only 4 left in size M. That line is honest, and it converts because it is true. The single CTA is "Shop the overcoat," linking straight to the product page with the size pre-selected.

Real numbers from a mid-market apparel client: this exact structure pulled a 38% open rate, 6.2% click rate, and $11.40 in revenue per recipient during a fall markdown. It outperformed the generic "sale now on" blast by 3x on attributable revenue.

Email is still built like it is 2009. The whole layout is nested HTML tables (table, tr, td), not divs or flexbox. Every cell carries its styling inline, because Gmail and Outlook both strip style blocks and class definitions at random.

Outlook renders mail through Microsoft Word, not a browser. It ignores border-radius and CSS padding on links, so a button built from an <a> tag shows up as flat underlined text. The fix is a bulletproof VML button: an mso-style conditional block that draws a rounded rectangle (v:roundrect) with the link baked in. Outlook users see a real button. Everyone else gets the CSS version.

All text is live text, not images of text. That means dark mode can invert it, screen readers can read it, and Gmail can load it without downloading images first. The price block, the savings line, and the CTA are all live.

Dark mode is handled with two meta tags in the head, color-scheme and supported-color-schemes, set to "light dark." Body cells get an explicit background-color inline, and a media query scoped to (prefers-color-scheme: dark) flips those cells and the text color through a class. The product image stays as-is.

One mobile media query, max-width: 600px, stacks the columns and stretches the button full width. That is the only responsive rule the template needs.

Web fonts load through @font-face in the head, but every font stack ends in a real fallback: Georgia, "Times New Roman," serif for editorial brands, or Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif for cleaner ones. Gmail strips @font-face entirely and Outlook ignores it, so the fallback is what most inboxes actually render.

Copy the exported HTML. In Klaviyo, open Email Templates, click Create Template, choose HTML, and paste. In a flow email you can also drag an HTML block into the canvas and paste there. In Mailchimp, start a campaign, pick Code your own, then Paste in code.

Swap the brand wordmark, the product image URL, the product name, the price numbers, and all links. The accent color appears in three places: the eyebrow text, the button background, and the VML fillcolor. Find-and-replace that hex once and all three update.

Wire up merge tags so the email personalizes per shopper. In Klaviyo, drop in {{ first_name|default:'there' }} for the greeting, {{ event.Price|floatformat:2 }} for the new price, {{ event.PreviousPrice }} for the struck-through old price, {{ event.VariantName }} for the exact color and size they viewed, {{ event.ImageURL }} for the product shot, and {{ event.URL }} for the CTA link. In Mailchimp the equivalents are *|FNAME|*, *|PRICE|*, *|PRODUCT_URL|*, and *|PRODUCT_IMAGE|*.

Test before you send. Open it in Gmail on desktop and mobile, Apple Mail in light and dark mode, and Outlook 365 plus an older Outlook 2016 if you can. The VML button should render solid in Outlook, the price block should stay legible in dark mode, and the columns should stack on a phone. Then send to the segment of subscribers who viewed or wishlisted the SKU in the last 30 days.