Referral email for ecommerce: give $15, get $15

Most DTC referral emails fail for one reason: they fire at checkout, before the customer has formed an opinion. Your skincare or supplement buyer has not touched the product yet. A link shared in that moment reads as a cash grab.

Fire this email off a satisfaction signal. The cleanest trigger in Klaviyo is "Placed Order at least 2 times," or the "Submitted Review" metric from Yotpo, Okendo, or Judge.me. Day 14 after first delivery is the sweet spot for a $40 to $80 AOV range. The customer has used the serum for two weeks or finished the first bag of coffee. The endorsement is real.

Offer dual-side store credit, not cash. Credit keeps the revenue inside your brand and lifts repeat purchase rate. Match the reward to AOV: $10/$10 under $40 AOV, $15/$15 in the $40 to $80 band (this template), $20/$20 or 15 percent above that. The friend gets $15 off a first order over $40. The referrer earns $15 credit after the friend buys, not before. That payout-on-purchase rule is what protects margin from fake referrals.

Lead with the give, not the get. People share to look generous to a friend, not to earn five dollars. "Give your friends $15" beats "Get $15 for every friend" in DTC subject tests by a wide margin. Park the referrer reward as the secondary line under the hero.

One CTA. The link is the conversion. A second button for "browse bestsellers" splits attention and tanks click-through on the only action that pays.

Example copy wired into this template: - Subject: Give $15, get $15 - Preheader: Your friends get $15 off. You get $15 in credit. - Hero: You love Saltwater Skin. Now share it. - Body: Give your friends $15 off their first order. When they buy, you get $15 in store credit. No cap. - Button: Share your link

Numbers to expect: referral programs drive 10 to 30 percent of new-customer acquisition for mature DTC brands. Referred customers land with roughly 25 percent higher lifetime value than paid-acquisition buyers, and they cost you store credit instead of Meta ad spend.

This email is built as nested HTML tables, not divs or flexbox. Outlook runs on the Word rendering engine, which ignores CSS layout entirely. Every structural row is a table with role="presentation" and fixed pixel widths, so the two reward cards line up side by side and the layout holds in Outlook 2016 through Outlook 365 on Windows.

All styling is inline. Gmail strips CSS out of the head and clips large style blocks after roughly 102kb. Inline color, font-size, and padding survive that strip. The head carries only what every client allows: the title, the color-scheme metas, and one small media query.

The CTA is a bulletproof VML button inside MSO conditional comments. Outlook's Word engine draws a real orange rectangle you can click instead of collapsing the link to flat blue text the way an image button does when images are blocked. Every other client reads the styled anchor and ignores the VML.

Reward amounts and headlines are live text, not images. Live text is selectable, translatable, and survives the image-blocking that Gmail and Outlook switch on by default. The two $15 figures render the instant the message opens, before any image loads.

Dark mode is handled with <meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark">. Apple Mail and iOS Mail read that tag and flip the cream background and dark footer on their own, without inverting your brand teal into an unreadable purple. The accent orange holds contrast on both light and dark backgrounds.

One mobile media query handles the phone layout. Below 480px the two reward cards stack and side padding drops to a thumb-friendly width. The breakpoint sits in the head, so Gmail's clipped-CSS rule does not take it out.

Web fonts fall back gracefully. The stack opens with -apple-system and Segoe UI, then lands on Helvetica and Arial. Your display font shows in Apple Mail and the iOS app. Gmail and Outlook see the system fallback, and the email still looks intentional.

1. Copy the exported HTML for this template. The MJML below exports to table-based, inline-CSS HTML that drops straight into either ESP.

2. In Klaviyo, open the flow you trigger off "Placed Order at least 2 times" or "Submitted Review." Add an email, drag in a Text or HTML block, and paste. In Mailchimp, start a campaign, choose Code your own, then Paste in code.

3. Swap the brand layer: logo image URL, the two hex colors (#1f3a3d teal and #c2673a orange), the lifestyle image, and the from-name. Edit the $15 reward copy if your AOV points to $10 or $20.

4. Wire the referral link with the merge tag that matches your stack. - Klaviyo with Friendbuy, Smile, Refersion, or LoyaltyLion: the integration writes the link to a profile property. Put {{ person|lookup:'Referral Link'|default:'https://saltwaterskin.com/refer' }} in the button href, or trigger off the "Referral Link Created" event and use {{ event.Referral Link }}. - Klaviyo first name: {{ first_name|default:'there' }} so the hero reads cleanly when a name is missing. - Mailchimp: connect Friendbuy or ReferralCandy, map the link to a merge field, and drop *|REFERRAL_LINK|* in the button href. First name is *|FNAME|*. Reward amount can be its own merge field (*|REWARD_AMT|*) if you A/B test $10 versus $15.

5. Test before you send. Check Gmail web and Gmail Android, Apple Mail in light and dark, and Outlook desktop on Windows plus Outlook.com. Confirm the orange button draws as a solid rectangle in Outlook, the reward cards stack on a phone, and dark mode does not invert your teal footer into mud.