Trial Ending Email Template for SaaS

The trigger is mechanical, not behavioral. Your billing system fires each send off trial_started_at plus a fixed offset, so the recipient lands on the right message on the right day no matter how they used the product. For a 14-day trial that means day 11 (three days out), day 13 (one day out), and day 14 or 15 (ended). Save the "you have not logged in" nudges for a different stream. This series stays a clock.

Each send carries one job. The three-day-out email is a low-urgency heads-up, and it earns the highest open rate in the series. We routinely see 50 to 60 percent open rates here because recipients expect transactional trial mail and recognize the sender. The one-day-out email tightens the screw: name the deadline, show the price, link the upgrade. The ended email is where most teams leave money on the table. Do not apologize and do not hide the free plan. State plainly that the trial ended and the work is still waiting, one click away.

Loss aversion does the heavy lifting, so get specific about what they lose. "Your premium features will expire" is wallpaper. "You set up 12 projects and ran 38 automations. On Friday, Free caps you at 3 automations and locks CSV export" is the line that gets a click. Pull real usage numbers from your product database and drop them into merge fields. The closer the loss sits to work the user already did, the better it converts.

One button per email, and the button restates the price. "Upgrade to Pro, $29 per month" beats "Upgrade now" every time, because the reader never has to leave the email to learn what it costs. Drop the secondary links. No "read the blog," no "follow us on Twitter." Trial mail converts on focus, and a clean B2B SaaS funnel turns 15 to 25 percent of trials into paid accounts. A disciplined series typically lifts that by two to five points.

Subject lines stay literal. Use "Your Cadence trial ends in 3 days," "Last day of your Cadence trial," and "Your Cadence trial ended, here is how to restore it." Personality costs opens at this stage. Save it for the lifecycle newsletter.

Email clients are not browsers. Outlook on Windows still renders mail through the Word engine, Gmail drops parts of your style block when it rewrites the message, and Apple Mail flips everything dark without asking. We built the template on the patterns every inbox understands.

Nested tables, not divs. The whole layout is one outer table holding section tables, which hold column tables. Flexbox and CSS grid do not exist in Outlook, and floated divs collapse to nothing. Tables render the same in Outlook 2016, the Gmail app, and Apple Mail, and MJML compiles to this structure for you.

Inline CSS, everywhere. Gmail strips chunks of your style block, so every color, font size, and padding value lives as a style attribute on the element it controls. The head section sets your defaults once, then each component inherits them. MJML inlines these at build time.

Bulletproof button for Outlook. The Word engine ignores border-radius and turns your rounded CTA into a flat gray rectangle. A bulletproof button layers a VML rounded rectangle behind a linked cell, so Outlook draws a real colored, clickable button instead. MJML's mj-button emits the VML fallback automatically when you set a background color.

Live text, not image text. Image-based text stays blank when images are off and is invisible to screen readers. That is why every word in this template, from the headline down to the CTA, is real text you can read, translate, and select.

Dark mode. Apple Mail and Outlook mobile invert backgrounds in dark mode. A color-scheme meta tag in the head tells the client the email knows what it is doing, and we avoid transparent backgrounds that turn black on inversion. The template sets both. Test it.

One media query. A single max-width 600px query stacks the columns and widens the text for thumbs. More queries mean more ways to break in Yahoo and Samsung Mail, which still choke on complex CSS.

Web fonts. Inter loads only in Apple Mail and the iOS app. Every other client falls back to the system font stack set in mj-all, so the visual hierarchy holds even when the web font never arrives.

Klaviyo path. Copy the compiled HTML. Go to Content, Email Templates, Create Template, Import, and paste the markup into the source view. From here you edit raw HTML. Swap the brand name and colors with find-and-replace. Wire merge tags: replace the first name token with {{ first_name|default:'there' }} and point the upgrade link at your checkout URL. Save and preview.

Mailchimp path. Campaigns, Create, Email, then under "Design your email" pick Code your own and Paste in code. Drop the HTML in. Mailchimp merge tags look different: use *|FNAME|* for the first name and either hardcode your pricing URL or a merge field you set up in the audience. Save.

Swap the brand. Two colors drive the design. Indigo #4F46E5 sets the CTA and the top accent bar. Amber #FEF3C7 with #92400E text sets the urgency badge. Find-and-replace those hex values across the file and the whole email re-skins. Change the wordmark text, the body copy, and the usage numbers to your product's real feature names and stats.

Test before you send. Send a proof to yourself, then open it in Gmail on the web and Outlook on Windows, and reopen it in Apple Mail on a phone with dark mode switched on. If you use Litmus or Email on Acid, run the full pre-send scan there. Fix anything that breaks, then schedule the three sends to fire from your billing system at trial start plus 11, 13, and 14 days.