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How To Build A Strong Customer Success Template
Improve Customer Retention With These Email Templates
Nicola Vaughan
January 4th, 2025
Building a brand is no easy feat - it probably feels like your life is consumed by getting your brand seen by as many people as possible. But once these people become customers, it can be even more difficult to keep them, while ensuring you’re generating engagement.
This is where email and customer success come in. Email makes retaining your customers a more manageable task, particularly when using customer success email templates.
Today, we’ll explore the importance of customer experience, relationship building, and how customer success email templates can simplify managing customer success. You’ll also learn how to measure results to understand what’s working best for your customer success strategy.
Table of Contents
Understanding Customer Success and Its Importance
Before looking at customer success email templates, it’s important to understand customer success and why it’s integral in your email campaigns.
We’ll also delve into the role of email in customer success, exploring how email communication is a vital tool for customer success teams to engage and support customers.
What is Customer Success?
In essence, customer success is a strategic approach focused on retaining customers, meeting their needs, and fostering long-term satisfaction.
Without customer success, you may find that your growth of new customers is strong, but repeat purchases and engagement are low. Customer success aims to ensure your customers are successful in using your product/service, therefore fostering long-term relationships with your audience.
The Role of Email in Customer Success
Email communication is incredibly valuable for customer success managers and teams. It provides them with a quick, easy way to keep in touch with customers at relevant milestones, ensuring a long-term, problem-free customer experience.
Here are some key benefits that email provides in a strong customer success strategy:
Efficiency: Using email, and more specifically email templates, is a highly efficient way of maintaining customer relationships. You can contact customers from anywhere in the world at any time, with templates that are pre-populated to allow for a more structured strategy.
Consistency: Email templates provide consistent customer success emails that can be customized while maintaining core elements. This ensures your email campaigns are streamlined and efficient every time.
Professionalism: Regularly keeping in touch with your customers via a slick email template gives your brand a professional edge. Using an email template ensures that all of your company’s communications are consistent and reflect your brand values.
Improved Accuracy: You can reduce human error by utilizing email templates for your customer success strategy. Email templates will contain all relevant information, helping to ensure customers receive all the details they require in a format that has already been proofed for errors.
Brand Authority: An effective customer success email template will boost your brand authority more than you’d think. When customers receive consistent communication from your brand that reflects your core values and mission statements, they’ll know exactly what your brand stands for whenever they hear from you.
Key Types of Customer Success Emails
There are a variety of customer success emails that work together to provide your customers with everything they need to best use your products/services.
Read on to understand the different types of customer success emails and how they can help retain your customer base.
Welcome and Onboarding Emails
We all know that first impressions are everything, which is why Welcome and Onboarding emails are integral to customer success. Welcome emails can generate up to 320% more revenue than other emails (Dotdigital), making them some of the most important emails that you’ll ever send.
A great welcome email will guide new customers through the onboarding process, explaining the value of your products/services to pre-empt a long relationship with your customers.
These emails should promote why your customer has chosen you over your competition, provide them with other ways of getting value from your brand, and personally connect with your customer to instill confidence in your company.
There are some great tips on the beehiiv blog for writing a welcome email template that gets results - check it out here.
Product Usage Tips and Updates
Keeping your customers updated with tips and tricks for getting the most from your products is a key element of an effective customer success strategy.
Product set-up emails would be an integral part of your email strategy, ensuring customers understand the best ways of using your products. This is also a good way of pre-empting issues your customers may have and preventing any hiccups before they occur.
You and your team will have worked hard on your products/services, so make sure your customers know as much as you do to get the most out of your products. This will not only improve retention but will also prevent them from checking out the competition for something better.
You’ll also want to send your audience information on the latest updates so they know you’re constantly improving your offering and stepping up your game.
Customer Check-Ins and Health Checks
Regularly checking in with your customers is key to customer success. If your audience only receives sales emails from your brand, you won’t know how your customers truly feel about your brand and this may affect your relationship moving forward.
Schedule periodic check-ins and health checks with your customer base to understand how they feel about your brand and allow you to address any concerns.
Feedback and Survey Requests
The best way to understand if your audience is happy with your offering is to directly ask them. A personal approach is best here, usually in the form of feedback or survey requests to understand valuable insights about your customers and help to improve the overall customer experience.
Issues you can easily resolve may also come out in these communications, helping to reduce customer drop-offs in the future.
Renewal and Upsell Opportunities
Your existing customer base is a potential gold mine for new sales opportunities. We know that these users have already bought into your brand and trust you, making them ideal candidates for upselling opportunities.
Upselling can boost a customer’s lifetime value by between 20% - 40% (Wisernotify), plus your audience will rely on you to update them with your latest offerings/renewal opportunities to ensure their businesses are as successful as they can be.
Thank You and Appreciation Emails
Never undermine the value of saying thank you to your customers. Showing some vulnerability through appreciation can make your brand feel more personal, improving customer success by ensuring your customers feel valued and appreciated by your brand.
Make sure to regularly thank your loyal customers - these users can be your best brand ambassadors on social media if treated well, or your worst enemies if they feel forgotten and undervalued.
For more tips on building customer trust and loyalty, take a look at the beehiiv blog.
Best Practices for Crafting Customer Success Email Templates
There are some key best practices to keep in mind when crafting customer success email templates.
By sticking to the following pointers, you’ll be able to create powerful customer success campaigns each and every time.
Personalization and Relevance
Customer success email templates should always be customized, ensuring they are relevant to each individual customer.
If an email is generic, it’s unlikely to make your customer feel valued which can be detrimental to a customer success campaign.
Here are some simple ways you can personalize a customer success email template to make it more applicable to individual audience members:
Use Recipient’s First Name: Using a recipient’s first name in the subject line of an email can increase the open-rate by up to 50% (Sender), with emails standing out in their inbox and providing a more bespoke feel.
Segment Email Lists: Segmenting your email lists ensures that your customers are receiving content that is most relevant to them. Try segmenting your data by demographics or interests to provide personalized content your subscribers are most likely to enjoy.
Utilize Dynamic Content: Dynamic content can make changes to your emails based on customer information, making your emails more personalized in a quick, efficient way. Experiment with dynamic content to adapt text, image content, or Calls To Action (CTAs) to display the most relevant content for each recipient.
Tone and Language Considerations
Using a friendly, professional tone in your customer success email templates may sound obvious, but it’s incredible how many brands get this simple step wrong.
The language you use in your emails can dramatically affect your customers’ perception of your brand, so make sure your emails are light in tone, simple in language, and avoid controversial content to ensure your emails are a joy to read and don’t evoke any negative feelings.
You’ll also want to make sure your emails align with your brand voice to improve brand authority and customer retention with your customer success email campaign.
Clear Calls to Action
Including clear, actionable steps for your customers to take in your customer success email templates is vital in aiding conversion and retention.
If CTAs aren’t obvious within your template, it’s unlikely that your customers will know how to complete those conversion goals that you want them to make.
Make sure your CTAs are clear in terms of font size/color and are placed strategically throughout the content to provide multiple opportunities for conversion.
Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
Examples of Effective Customer Success Email Templates
If you’re looking for inspiration to create your own customer success email template, you’ll love this next section.
We’ve provided below some of the best email templates for customer success, focusing on 3 email types - Onboarding New Customers, Product Tips/Updates, and Gathering Customer Feedback.
Templates for Onboarding New Customers
Email templates for onboarding new customers are arguably some of the most important emails that you’ll send.
Welcome emails should set a great first impression for your customers, providing reassurance as to why they chose you over your competition, and allowing them to interact with your brand.
Take a look at the three examples below for inspiration when creating a great onboarding email template.
SAXX Underwear
The below email template is from SAXX Underwear, a brand specializing in men’s underwear that is comfortable and personal to the customer.
SAXX Underwear immediately instigates a CTA, with their ‘Take The Quiz’ link. This enables them to find out more information about their customer and provides the user with an opportunity to find the best products for them within the range.
Its welcome email also provides instant reassurance for the customer by offering a comfort guarantee, informing the customer that they can get a refund/exchange if they’re not completely satisfied.
Glassdoor
The company reviews site Glassdoor is another brand that issues a powerful welcome email.
Glassdoor provides a clear headline welcoming the customer to their mailing list, followed by 3 actionable steps that will guide them in the best way of using their website.
They also encourage users to engage by suggesting they share their review, salary, or interview experience with their current/past employers.
This is a great example of how they’ve provided opportunities for the customer to engage in a short, snappy welcome email.
ModKat
Cat litter box experts ModKat is another contender for a powerful onboarding customer email.
Modkat uses the humorous headline of ‘Purrr’ to engage with cat lovers, showing that they are as obsessed with their feline friends as their customer base.
They then show cute cat pictures to further entice their cat-loving customers, and issue a discount code with a limited usage time.
In this engaging welcome email they’ve managed to connect with their customers through their mutual love of cats, encourage them to buy from them with a discount code as an incentive, and even encourage them to connect with them via their Instagram account.
Templates for Providing Product Tips and Updates
Next up are three powerful email templates focusing on Product Tips/Updates.
These templates should help if you’re stuck on customer success when it comes to introducing new product updates and tips for how best to use your products.
Asana
Project management platform Asana is well-known for their succinct emails launching new products/offerings.
Here’s a noteworthy instance of them launching their new reporting tool, Dashboards. They provide an interactive video screenshot of their reporting tool, giving customers an idea of what they can expect from this tool.
They’ve paired this with the CTA ‘Read More’ to encourage customers to learn more about this launch via their website. This saves the email from becoming too text-heavy with lots of product info, while still providing a resource for subscribers to gain more information.
Figma
This update email from Figma, a web application brand for interface design, focuses on packing a punch by including all of their latest updates in one quick email send.
They issue a ‘friendly reminder’ to their customers of their 7 latest features, keeping customers informed and updated with their brand and ensuring they get the most from their product offering.
This saves customers receiving multiple emails with different updates that will clog up their inbox, and thanks the customer for being part of their community.
Another great element of this email is that they’ve signed it off with a thank you from an individual employee, Badrul, the brand’s Community Product Manager. This makes the email more personalized and shows that the email is coming from one of Figma’s experts on product updates.
Last up for Product Update templates is Skillshare, the famous online learning platform.
In the below example, Skillshare has provided customers with a technical update in a readable way via their highlights section, making sure customers understand their latest update without making their email too text-heavy.
It may not be the most exciting email, but it provides integral information in a digestible way.
Templates for Gathering Customer Feedback
Last up are some exemplary email templates for gathering customer feedback.
Asking your customers what they think of your brand can be daunting, so here are some effective examples to give you the inspiration and confidence to reach out to your customers for their honest feedback.
Everlane
Clothing retailer Everlane has produced a powerful customer feedback email template that directly asks consumers what they think of recently purchased products.
This personalized approach shows Everlane cares what their customers have to say about the products they’ve purchased and uses dynamic content to show images of recently purchased products which will be great for Click Through Rate (CTR).
Everlane can then use this data to better understand their customers, show positive reviews on their website, and make changes to products that could be improved.
Bellroy
We love the email template below from Australian accessories brand Bellroy, focusing on collecting data on how likely customers are to recommend their brand to a friend.
They’ve sent this email 30 days after their customer has first connected with them. This is clever as it provides enough time for the customer to get a feel for the brand, and also sends a gentle reminder to the user that they recently subscribed.
Bellroy can then use data from the feedback form to understand if the customer has had a good onboarding experience and where they can improve moving forward.
Slack
Last up we have a survey request email template from messaging app Slack.
This email example instantly makes the customer feel special by explaining they’ve been chosen from a small set of users to share their personal experiences. Not only does this provide a personalized approach, but it also increases the chance of customers completing the survey and allowing Slack to collect the data that it needs.
Users are reassured that the survey is quick to complete, and are provided with a clear CTA to take the survey.
They’ve also made sure to thank the user for their help - a step that is simple but will resonate with the user that Slack is grateful for their customer’s feedback.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Customer Success Emails
Now that you’ve got some inspiration under your belt for creating strong customer success emails, it’s important that you know how to measure them.
Without analyzing the results from these campaigns, you won’t know how your campaigns are performing and if there are any elements you should change to improve performance.
Check out the below sections to understand key metrics you should be measuring, some tips on A/B testing, and how you can best use customer feedback to your advantage.
Key Metrics to Monitor
One of the best ways to measure the effectiveness of your customer success emails is to keep a close eye on your key metrics.
Key metrics can indicate how successful your campaigns are, and where you should direct your attention in improving results.
Some key metrics you should track are:
Open Rates: Open rate indicates the percentage of users that have opened your emails. This can guide you on whether your subject line is punchy enough, and if you have a relevant mailing list.
Response Rates: If you’ve emailed customers asking them to reply with their feedback on your products/services, the response rate will be super important. This will suggest whether your email is compelling enough, or if you need to improve your CTAs to encourage people to reply.
Click Through Rates: Click Through Rates measures how many users have clicked through to another page after reading an email. This metric will be important if you’re directing users to certain landing pages on your website, or giving them opportunities to interact with you on other platforms.
Customer Satisfaction Scores: When sending out customer feedback forms, satisfaction scores is a highly important metric to keep track of. These scores will tell you what your customers really think of your brand, allowing you to improve your offering based on this data.
A/B Testing for Optimization
A/B Testing is integral for brands looking to figure out which are the most effective email strategies for their specific brand.
This involves testing out different emails with small changes to see which elements drive the best results.
For example, you could send out two different Welcome Email templates to selected audience members and measure the response to see which content is more compelling.
You could even use A/B testing to analyze small details such as subject lines, CTAs, or dynamic content to see what the best elements are for your customer success emails.
A/B testing is a prominent feature in the beehiiv newsletter platform - learn how to use it here!
Utilizing Customer Feedback
Analyzing customer feedback is one of the strongest methods for measuring results from a customer success campaign, and ultimately improves your emails to provide a better experience for your customer.
You can regularly send out feedback forms to your customers to see if there’s common ground on what needs to be improved from your brand offering. It may also be beneficial to open a line of communication with long-term customers who really understand what you’re trying to achieve. This feedback will be super valuable in making improvements, plus your customer will feel valued in the feedback process.
Conclusion
We hope that after reading this help guide, you have a better understanding of customer success and feel equipped with the tools to create your own powerful email templates.
To summarize:
Focus on maintaining strong relationships with customers after they’ve connected with your brand, be it via a purchase or mailing list sign-up
Use customer success emails to retain customers and foster long-term relationships
Take inspiration from the email templates to create punchy customer success emails
Measure results to understand where you can improve
If you’re looking for an effective email platform for your customer success emails, why not check out beehiiv. Our newsletter platform provides creators with a user-friendly platform from which to send regular newsletters, with Unlimited Email Sends, Audience Segmentation, and Campaign Analytics coming free with our no-commitment Launch plan.
You can also set up a free 30-day trial to explore some of our premium features such as the beehiiv Ad Network, Paid Subscriptions, and 3D Analytics.
Start a free trial today and get to work improving customer relationships with beehiiv.
FAQ
What is the main role of customer success?
The main role of customer success is to work with customers to ensure they’re getting the best out of your product offering, and enabling them to succeed with their own business.
Customer success aims to retain customers for as long as possible, fostering long-term relationships through personalized communication.
How do you provide customer success?
Customer success is provided by understanding your user’s needs and issues.
This is best achieved by keeping in regular contact with your customers, providing information on your brand and requesting feedback to better improve your offering.
Is customer success the same as sales?
Customer success is different from sales. While sales focuses on generating new customers for your business, customer success is key in retaining customers and ensuring their needs are met at all times.
How hard is customer success?
Customer success can be challenging as keeping customers happy may result in difficult situations.
Effective customer success can be achieved by keeping in touch with your customers regularly to rectify any issues they may face before they even arise.
How would you introduce yourself as a customer success manager in email?
The best way to introduce yourself as a customer success manager is to include your first name in your introduction. This provides a personal feel and gives your customers a direct contact if they need to get in touch with your brand.
Reassure your customer that it’s your job to help them with anything they need to achieve their business goals. Explain that you’re passionate about your role and are keen to get started.
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