Email inspiration guide: 18 examples that drive engagement 

Email remains one of the most reliable and impactful channels for lifecycle marketing. Why? Because it’s a proven way to foster meaningful, long-term relationships with your customers. Not only is email highly effective, but it’s also scalable. Well-crafted automated campaigns can guide customers through every stage of their journey, from activation to monetization, retention, and even win-back strategies.

In this guide, we’ll share 18 real-world examples of lifecycle emails designed to deepen customer relationships and drive engagement. Whether you're welcoming new subscribers, nurturing them with educational content, or keeping them engaged with regular updates, these emails form the foundation of a successful lifecycle marketing plan. Bonus? You don't need to be a technical wizard to craft any of them.

Let’s start with the most important message you’ll send: the welcome email. Why is it so crucial? Because it’s your first chance to start a direct conversation. With a welcome email, you engage with your customers when they’re most primed to pay attention to your brand.

When to send it: Immediately after you collect an email address and opt-in preference.

When your welcome email arrives, your brand is fresh in the recipient’s mind, and they’ve just opted in to hear from you. Whether approving a new customer’s account or educating potential buyers, this is your big moment to kick off a strong relationship.

What to include: A greeting and a clear, concise outline of the value your brand will deliver.

Highlighting the real-life outcomes of using your product or service is a great way to make your value plain. For example:

• If you’re a SaaS tool that generates social media captions, mention that writer’s block is now a thing of the past.
• If you’re an edtech company selling coding courses, point out that your customers’ days of being intimidated by HTML are over.

The welcome email is also perfect for setting customer expectations and fostering trust. You might tell them how often you plan to communicate, what content you share, and how your future emails will provide value.

Good Pair Days’ wine subscription boxes are hand-selected to match every customer’s palate. An app tracks wines sampled, tasting notes, and ratings, so each month’s pairing is more refined. The brand’s welcome email is straightforward and full of personality without being overwhelming.

Bubble is a no-code app and marketplace development tool. Its welcome email is simple, with nothing detracting from the core message about the product’s value. By linking to a video guide, the email offers an option to go deeper immediately or at a later time.

Sending an educational email in the days following the welcome email can move your customer toward the next lifecycle stage. When people aren’t quite ready to take the plunge, empowering them with helpful information can nudge them toward conversion.

When to send it: Typically, up to seven days after the welcome email.

The ideal timing of this email can vary significantly based on the length of your sales cycle, making it an excellent subject for testing. For example, try experimenting with a one-day versus a three-day delay to see which performs better.

What to include: Focus on helpful information, not a hard sell.

The idea is to ensure everyone understands what your product or service can do for them. How-tos, product reviews, and feature lists can help customers feel they’re making an informed choice. And while a heavy sales push doesn’t belong in an education email, a discount code can be valuable if you have a short sales cycle.

Here are a couple of examples:

• A SaaS platform could send a plan-comparison breakdown to encourage recipients to subscribe
• A fintech company might send an explainer video to help potential customers understand a complex financial concept

Treatwell is a beauty appointment booking app. The brand's educational email gives the reader a sense of “you already know us” by referencing prior emails. That tactic eases customers into education, which gently moves them toward monetization. The email also brings in their brand values to connect emotionally.

Parcel, an email coding platform (which happens to be part of the Customer.io family!), brings new customers into the fold with a clear breakdown of all their features and how to use them.

Parcel knows that customers are more likely to stick around long-term if they understand the capabilities of each plan tier. They focus this email on education instead of a hard sell.

It’s unsettling to be ghosted by a brand after making a purchase. Without a post-purchase email, your customers may even wonder if their order was ever placed! An excellent post-purchase email can keep people moving from monetization to retention. What’s more, you can go beyond transactional messaging to imbue the post-purchase with your brand value, building a stronger customer relationship in the process.

When to send it: As soon as possible after the purchase.

Many customers expect a post-purchase email within seconds of placing an order. The faster you can get the email to the customer’s inbox, the better.

What to include: Everything the customer needs to know to get the most value from the purchase as quickly as possible.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes; start by asking yourself, “What do I want to know after I buy something?” Common content includes:

• Purchase details, including what was bought and the cost
• When they’ll receive their purchase (shipping timeline for physical products; when and how to download or access digital products)
• How to reach you with questions about order fulfillment or returns
• How to connect with you if they need help

Think of post-purchase emails as a more personalized, specific kind of welcome email. But with the post-purchase email, you’re no longer trying to sell. Instead, you’re helping the customer get the full value of your product.

When customers order from Crocs, they get a post-purchase email that quickly and clearly tells them what to expect as they await their comfy footwear. The graphic explains the fulfillment process visually. There’s a barcode for in-store returns, and the customer can quickly find out how to contact the company if needed.

Native, a personal care brand, beautifully blends need-to-knows with brand personality. The copy isn’t just friendly and funny; it humanizes the brand, which can be incredibly effective at building a relationship. The email also confirms the transaction and introduces a loyalty program.

Customers know that brands collect data about them—and you can deepen engagement by ensuring they also get value from it. Spotify’s wildly popular Spotify Wrapped campaign is a shining example. Customers love to see their lives and tastes reflected back to them. You can tap into that impulse with data specific to your brand: session count, trends over time, milestones, and more.

When to send it: Use a predictable cadence that aligns with your customers’ needs.

Regularly receiving data-driven insights helps customers recognize trends, and look forward to hearing from you. The best interval is unique to every brand; ask yourself how often an account usage email would feel meaningful to your particular audience. Account usage emails can also be time-intensive to launch, and you’ll need to dedicate resources to ongoing upkeep, so bear that in mind when determining your frequency.

What to include: Data showing how customers benefit from your product.

Start by thinking about the data you can access. It might be a session count, like the Headspace check-in email, or a calculation showing how many hours the customer has saved using your product. Other options to consider include how long someone has been a customer, which features they’ve used most, or specific benefits (like how much money a customer using a budgeting app has saved by making automatic transfers to their savings account with each paycheck).

You’ll be most successful with these emails if you know what action you want the reader to take and include logical next steps related to the data you share. It’s also a good idea to start with just a few events and data points. By starting small, you’ll be less likely to feel overwhelmed with building these emails—and the content will be more digestible for your customers.

Loom, a video messaging tool, sends a monthly account usage email that shows customers how many times they’ve used the product, the number of people they’ve connected with, and how using Loom benefits them—a combo that reminds people of the platform’s importance in their lives. The email also gives the customer ideas for using Loom to amplify engagement.

Writing assistant tool Grammarly sends a weekly account usage email packed with data on how the writer compares to other customers, their most frequent mistakes, and how many words the tool has checked over the subscription lifetime. These insights help the customer celebrate victories, zero in on areas for improvement, and see how much the tool has helped them.

Newsletters cultivate lasting relationships and keep your brand top of mind by providing your customers with a steady stream of fresh, valuable information. Some marketers shy away from newsletters because they fear curating new content will be too labor-intensive. But just one well-selected article or monthly offer can keep your brand on a customer’s radar. If a customer has opted in, they already believe you have value to offer, so don’t be afraid to deliver.

Feel free to play around with cadences to find what works best for your brand; just be sure to set clear expectations upfront.

When to send it: Let your audience be your guide! Consider experimenting with cadences to see which performs best, and make sure your audience knows what to expect.

When creating content for newsletters, recall the customer’s experience at opt-in. What did they sign up to receive? Early access to special offers? The latest news? Strategies about how to grow their business? Ensure your content matches the customer’s expectations, and you’ll be well on your way to building engagement. Even a relatively simple newsletter can significantly impact if thoughtfully written and personalized.

What to include: Well-curated, personalized content that matches what customers expect to receive and offers immediate value.

Investment app Wealthsimple sends a weekly newsletter about the stock market and international politics. Its playful approach sets this newsletter apart: hard news delivered with humor, fun graphs, and emojis. The weekly cadence also adds value by reminding customers to check the performance of their investments.

Wise is an online money-trading tool. Its quarterly newsletter outlines new features and encourages customers to refer friends and family. The company reuses existing copy for maximum efficiency and creates a sense of community by sharing updates about the company. The minimalist content and less frequent cadence work perfectly for their audience.

For its newsletter, Parcel sends a weekly email marketing tip. The focus stays on practical advice, not promotion, offering immediate value to customers. By making it easy to pause the newsletter or opt-out entirely, Parcel builds trust and inspires loyalty.

Birthday and anniversary emails are a great way to make a personal connection. And because the data you need to create these emails is typically easy to access, they make it easy to invest in relationships at scale. For instance, you’ll know when your customer made their first purchase or signed up for your newsletter. And if you choose to collect birthdates, you can also mark that important milestone with your customer.

When to send it: On the date of the birthday or anniversary.

A generic greeting is a bad look when you want customers to feel like you know them. Be sure you build your campaigns with date triggers and have accurate data flowing into your messaging platform.

What to include: Something to make the customer feel special—a gift or discount is always welcome!

Look for ways to celebrate the customer through personalized content and a pleasant surprise. If you’re including an offer, make it better than the ones you usually send.

Beauty behemoth Sephora has a legendary rewards program, including an annual birthday gift for rewards members. The annual email is ultra-personalized, with product picks for the customer’s astrological sign and a dynamic footer reflecting their rewards points balance.

Once again, Headspace provides an excellent example of lifecycle emails done right. In this case, it’s a 30-day anniversary email. That’s a pretty short timeframe for an anniversary, but the brand recognizes how hard it can be to stick to a new habit—so a one-month anniversary is a big deal! The email is an uplifting pat on the back that can easily be shared with a friend, and it includes an offer of asynchronous or live support.

Once a customer has shown they’re engaged—by making a purchase, subscribing, or any other meaningful conversion metric—it’s up to you to keep the relationship going. Check-in emails do just that. They’re typically more personalized than a newsletter but sent less frequently. Checking in with customers can be a great way to increase retention. For instance, you can use these emails to:

• Extend a relationship post-purchase
• Build a connection based on an action taken
• Re-engage a customer who’s at risk of churn

When to send it: At a critical moment in your brand’s customer lifecycle.

Typically, you’ll tie your check-in email to an action, like an upgrade, or lack of action, like a period of inactivity. For instance, after someone upgrades to a paid plan, you might follow up after a week to ask how things are going. And if a customer hasn’t used your app in a few weeks, you could reach out to see if they need help.

What to include: Content that delivers additional value to the customer.

Check-in emails must reference an action taken by your customer, like a recent purchase. Based on the action that triggers the email, think more about who your customer is. Are they an advocate who sings your praises to their friends? Are they repurchasing? Have they started to show interest again after a period of inactivity? Provide information and calls to action that align with this intel so the customer feels seen (and will be more likely to engage).

Uber uses a check-in email to kick off a win-back campaign for inactive riders. It’s friendly, concise, and personal. A simple acknowledgment of inactivity and a gentle invitation helps keep customers connected to the brand.

Outdoor Voices, an eCommerce fitness clothing brand, reaches out to virtual window shoppers who visit one product repeatedly. The check-in email’s urgent copy, paired with a simple call to action, makes it easy for the customer to finally make the purchase they’ve been eyeing.

The popular meditation app Headspace sends annual check-in emails that show each customer personalized details about their app usage. The individual stats and celebratory tone help reinforce the app’s value in the customer’s life and renew their commitment to meditating. And by including links to relevant articles, the email leads customers into deeper engagement.

Technically, interactive emails aren’t their own type of communication—interactivity can be applied to any kind of email. But it deserves mention here because interactive features can effectively make your emails stand out and reduce friction when you want customers to take action.

Using tools like AMP for email, you can make your emails emulate the behavior of web pages with forms, accordions, surveys, and more. Interactive emails reduce the number of hoops a customer has to jump through to complete the action you want them to take.

Mailgun, an email delivery service, uses interactivity in event messaging by including the registration form in the email. Recipients learn about the event, sign up, and receive confirmation in seconds—without ever leaving their inbox. It’s a friction-free experience.

Endy, an online B2C mattress company, uses interactivity by including a feedback form in the post-purchase email. Customers can rate and review the product without having to click through to a landing page. That makes it so much simper for customers to take action—a surefire way to increase submission rates.

Lifecycle emails are more than just messages—they’re opportunities to create meaningful connections with your customers. Whether it’s a warm welcome, an insightful educational email, or a thoughtful check-in, every interaction strengthens the relationship.

The examples and tips shared in this guide are just the beginning. Use these insights as inspiration to design emails that are strategic and personal. With Customer.io, you have everything you need to create scalable, impactful email workflows that turn engagement into lasting connections. Start your 14-day free trial today!