Email Templates for Every Stage of Your Customer Journey

The backbone of effective customer success is great relationship management.

And teams that manage those relationships well are rewarded accordingly. Forrester research found that customer-obsessed companies grew 2.5 times faster than non-obsessed ones and retained 2.2 times more customers per year.

What might be less well-known is just how much logistical planning goes into maintaining those relationships. There’s a direct link between client success and annual recurring revenue (ARR). In our experience at Calendly, that payoff requires a great deal of backend coordination. 

The touchpoints a customer success manager (CSM) has to initiate range from light and celebratory to urgent and action-oriented. These touchpoints don’t just need to happen at the right times; they also need to be communicated in the right way, with the right tone and level of detail. That's a lot to put on a CSM — no one wants to spend time reinventing the wheel every time they want to have a lighthearted catch-up with a customer.

This is where CSM email templates come in. Most touchpoints can be generally categorized by the goal of that touchpoint.

In this guide, we’ve outlined eight common email templates that CSMs can use at each point in the customer journey, from account executive (AE) handoff to renewal.

Each customer’s journey, needs, and pain points are unique, and your communication should reflect that.

The purpose of these templates isn’t to copy, paste, and hit send. But using templates as a starting point can remove the guesswork and give CSMs a solid framework to enhance with their own voice and expertise.

The sales to CS handoff is one of the most important parts of the customer experience. It marks the end of the sales journey, but also signals the beginning of a much more important journey for the customer: getting value from your product and team. It sets the tone for what customers can expect from their relationship with you.

A good CS handoff instills confidence in the customer by welcoming them warmly, reiterating their goals, and outlining a plan for how they’ll achieve them with your help. It also minimizes any anxiety the customer may have about working with someone new.

What to include 

During the sales process, AEs collect a ton of information about the customer: what they’re struggling with, what they’re hoping to achieve, what their success metrics are, and any specific milestones they’d like to reach ASAP.

When the customer is handed off to CS, they want to feel like all that information is being transferred over as well. 

Using an email template prompts your AE to reiterate all the main talking points and outline a plan for how CS will help with everything that’s been discussed until now. It also ensures nothing is missed.

The email introducing and scheduling the AE/CSM handoff should hit a few key points:

Since multiple stakeholders are involved in this meeting, it can be tricky to find a time that suits all attendees’ schedules. This is where we’d recommend using a tool like team scheduling to make this process quick and easy. With Calendly, you can even embed suggested meeting times right into the body of the email.

Template #1: AE to CSM Handoff Email

It’s time to celebrate! Your customer has achieved the first of many milestones: completing their onboarding sessions. 

Your customer was already introduced to their CSM during the AE handoff, but now it’s time to start that relationship in earnest. During onboarding, your customer got familiar with your product and a glimpse into what their future will look like. 

Graduating from onboarding is an opportunity to celebrate the customer’s first win, encourage confidence, energize them, and reassure them you’ll be with them every step of the way. 

What to include 

This is one email that greatly benefits from personalization. Every customer’s journey is unique, and so is their onboarding experience. This email should:

Template #3: Onboarding graduation email

Not every CS touchpoint has to be a lead-in to or follow-up from a crucial meeting or conversation. Sometimes, people just want to hear that they’re doing a good job. Customer win emails are a great chance to showcase ROI and celebrate progress in the customer’s journey. 

These emails can be completely automated, which takes some pressure off your team. They also serve as a quick, positive check-in with the customer to let them know you’re rooting for them.

What to include 

No win is too small to celebrate. When you have good data flowing in, you can use it to trigger a send when customers hit certain benchmarks, like:

These emails should be short, sweet, and fun.

Template #5: Customer win email

Pro tip: Add your scheduling link to your email signature

Even though you don’t link to your booking page in the body of this email, it’s a good idea to add that link to your email signature, so customers can easily book time with you as needed.

Although contracts are typically renewed annually, the conversation leading to renewal can start much sooner. While all touchpoints leading up to the ultimate renewal conversation are an opportunity to strengthen the relationship and gauge the likelihood the customer will stay or expand their account, renewal conversations are where ARR can be significantly impacted. In fact, companies with high retention rates have been shown to yield as much as 2.3x higher revenue than those with low retention rates.

How you approach the renewal conversation depends on a number of factors:

Templates work well for renewal initiation emails because there’s a lot of ground to cover and many potential moving parts.

What to include 

Depending on your customer’s current account standing, there are a number of points to potentially include in a renewal email. Generally, health indicators are a great signal to help steer the conversation. 

Let’s take a look at two different approaches to the renewal email.

Template #7: Renewal touchpoint with an account in good standing

Template #8: Renewal touchpoint with an at-risk account