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9 Dunning Emails Examples With Do's and Don'ts

Dunning email examples from companies like Duolingo, Canva, Slack, Spotify and more.

Here’s the thing: the old playbook for failed payment recovery—a simple dunning email campaign—just isn’t cutting it anymore.

This strategy might recover a few payments, but it’s not enough to handle the growing complexity of today’s payment failures.

Typically, best-in-class dunning emails have a few key differences:

it's a sequence, not a one-off email
you control the timing
you control the messaging for each email
you can personalize it, and not just the {{first_name}} but blend in user profile data, subscription data, and usage data naturally into the copy
you pair them up with dunning SMS and in-app pause walls
you offer a one-click card updater without users have to log in
you can send from different senders to maximize open rates
you send to different receivers (account admin vs user)
you can track success rates and a/b test these campaigns
you send in the users' time zones and localize to their language
edits are easy to make without dev resources
you can exclude enterprise accounts that need a more personal touch
you can create pause offers and discounts that are easy to apply or automatically apply
you can create them in your brand and design language
you can collect partial invoices

When you look at the templates below, you'll only be able to view the copy and the messaging. But what you might not see is the behind-the-scenes operations that create category leaders.

So, take these templates with a pinch of salt. Be inspired by them. But lean towards a retention automation tool like Churnkey that can handle it all and deliver results right away.

Dunning Email Examples

Each example comes with a screenshot and a little helper text explaining the good in each.

1. Spotify's Dunning Email

Simple, mobile-friendly email with as little text as possible. A single CTA in brand colors. Manages expectation that payment retries will happen automatically to reduce support costs.

2. Duolingo's Dunning Email

Duolingo's dunning email goes through Stripe or in-app notifications via PlayStore/Apple Store. So they aren't able to customize the copy or the timing.

3. Canva Dunning Email

Canva sends a sequence of emails. Some are plain-text and some aren't.

4. Veed's Dunning Email

Veed uses a sequence of emails, personalized to the user's name. They also mention the last four digits on card number so people know which card caused an error.

5. Amazon's Dunning Email

Provides all necessary details like Order ID, a way to login, reasons why it would have failed.

Source: Regpack

6. Calendly's Proactive Email

This is a proactive email vs a dunning email. It is sent before a payment fails.

7. Slack's Dunning Email

Slack's dunning email looks almost like an invoice. It gives a lot of information.

Source: ChargeOver

8. Hulu's Dunning Email

Love the illustration of the card breaking. This is a reactivation email, sent after the window before an at-risk subscription can be recovered.

Source: Postmark

9. GSuite's Dunning Email

GSuite offers an deadline to fix the error which others didn't provide. The renewal process isn't easy to do though: you have to go through a lot of steps to renew. The CTA is 'Sign In' which is not ideal to improve conversion.

Source: Messaged

How Churnkey Can Help?

Unlike other email service providers, Churnkey's failed payment recovery integrates directly with your native billing provider in 1-click.

Clicking on the email CTA opens up a page to update the card. It's as frictionless as you'd like it to be. Everything is on-brand, personalized, and customizable.

So, save your team the time and adopt the best dunning software there is.

Build Your Dunning Emails