Review request email template

Trigger this email off the delivered event, not the placed-order event. A buyer who has not held the product has nothing to say. In Klaviyo, use the Fulfilled Order metric filtered to your Shopify delivered status, or wire your carrier's delivered webhook into a custom metric. The review you collect at day 10 beats the one you collect at day 1, every time.

Send it 7 to 14 days after delivery. The window is short enough that the customer still remembers the unboxing and long enough that they have actually used the product. For a 30ml serum, 10 days gives most people two applications. For a coffee blend, 7 days is enough for a few morning cups. Day 1 sends pull generic five-star ratings. Day 30 sends get ignored.

The whole email carries one message: rate this specific product. Put the product name in the subject line, because subject lines that include the product name lift open rates by roughly 20 percent over generic "How did we do?" copy. "How is your Vitamin C serum working out, Maya?" outperforms "We would love your feedback" by a wide margin. Lead the body with the order date and a concrete use cue, so the reader knows exactly which item you mean.

Hold the CTA to one link. One button to a review form that is pre-filled with the product and the order. Some teams put five star icons inside the email, each linking to a different starting score. That lifts click-through because the rating feels done the moment the reader taps. If you run star links, route every star to the same form and capture the score as a URL parameter, so a one-star tap still reaches the form instead of hitting a dead end.

Incentive is optional and conditional. A 10 percent code on the next order roughly doubles review volume. Never gate the reward on a five-star rating. Trustpilot, Google, and Yelp all penalize that pattern, and in some regions it is illegal. Offer the code for any submitted review, then say so out loud in the email: "We send the code whether you rate us five stars or one." Review-request flows typically see 8 to 15 percent click-through and convert 3 to 6 percent of recipients into a published review. Those numbers collapse when you bundle a cross-sell or a survey into the same send. Keep it to one ask.

Every section is a nested HTML table: a table, a row, a cell, and inside that cell another table for the column. No divs, no flexbox, no CSS grid. Email clients render tables reliably because tables predate the CSS box model every modern renderer depends on, and Outlook for Windows still ships the Word rendering engine from 2007. The compiled HTML you paste into Klaviyo or Mailchimp is that table structure.

Every style sits inline on the element it styles. Gmail strips class-based CSS from the body, Apple Mail keeps it, and Outlook ignores most of it. The headline, the body copy, and the button each carry their own font-family, font-size, color, and line-height on the tag. When you swap brand colors, you change a handful of hex values and the whole email moves with them.

The call-to-action button is a bulletproof VML button, not an image. Outlook's Word engine cannot draw CSS rounded corners or padding on a link, so without VML the button collapses into a thin underlined text link. MJML writes the VML rectangle and the fallback link for you, so Outlook desktop shows a filled, rounded plum pill, and Gmail and Apple Mail show the same pill from the styled link.

All text in this email is live HTML text. The headline, the product recap, and the CTA are selectable, scale on zoom, and pass the spam filters that flag image-heavy mail. No review request should hide its ask behind a PNG, because Gmail and Outlook commonly block images by default and the reader then sees nothing.

Dark mode is handled with a color-scheme meta tag in the head. Apple Mail in dark mode reads color-scheme: light dark and inverts your cream background and white card predictably, instead of guessing and turning your plum headline into a muddy grey. One mobile media query at max-width 480px drops the headline from 30px to 26px and the body from 16px to 15px. Gmail clips any email over roughly 102KB and ignores media queries in the body, so the CSS stays lean and lives in the head.

Web fonts load through a Google Fonts link guarded by an Outlook conditional comment. Apple Mail and the iOS Mail app render Inter. Outlook ignores web fonts and falls back to the system stack: Segoe UI on Windows, Roboto on Android, Helvetica on macOS. The email holds its layout in every fallback, because that fallback stack is what most subscribers actually see.

Start with the HTML. Copy the compiled output, not the MJML source, unless your team runs an MJML build step. The HTML is one file, ready to paste.

In Klaviyo, go to Templates, create a new template, and import the HTML file or paste it into the source editor. Save the template, then build your flow. Trigger the email off Fulfilled Order, add a 10-day wait, and send. For a one-off campaign, open a new email, switch a content block to Source, and paste the same HTML.

In Mailchimp, start a campaign, choose Code Your Own, then Paste In Code, and drop in the HTML. Mailchimp keeps the table structure intact as long as you paste into the code view and never toggle back to the visual builder, which rewrites your inline CSS.

Swap the brand before you wire data. Replace HALCYON with your store name. Replace the plum hex (#3E2A41) and the rose hex (#D98C7E) with your two brand colors. Replace the serum product name, the order date, and the image URL. Find-and-replace in any text editor covers all of it.

Wire in your ESP merge tags. In Klaviyo, swap Maya for {{ first_name|default:"there" }} and swap the product line for {{ event.Products.0.Name }} or the property your integration pushes. Set the review link to your review form with the product ID and a token as URL parameters, so the form loads pre-filled. In Mailchimp, use *|FNAME|* for the first name and *|PRODUCT_TITLE|* if your store runs the Mailchimp e-commerce connection, otherwise hardcode the product per send.

Test before you send. Send a preview to a Gmail address, an Apple Mail address, and an Outlook desktop client. Open it on a phone at 375px width and toggle dark mode on iOS. Confirm the button fills as a plum pill in Outlook, the headline scales down on mobile, and every merge tag resolves to a real value instead of raw braces. Then set the flow live and cap it to one review request per customer per product, suppressing anyone who already left a review.