Hypertune email: where it stands and what to change

23 September 2026, Vinson Leow, for Austin. Numbers are live from Klaviyo, measured on payments that went through in Stripe, last 90 days unless stated. Gavin handles all email, paid hourly and ad hoc. Kevin does anything on the website, the app or Stripe.

Summary

• Email earned $1,628 in 90 days, about 1% of revenue. $1,248 of that is credited to the failed-payment flow, and most of it is Stripe retrying the card on its own. In the last 30 days that flow is credited with 51 payments from 5 clicks.
• Nothing in Klaviyo has changed since 23 July. Two campaigns went out in 90 days.
• Four gaps cost money. Failed-payment emails give people nothing to click. 1,811 yearly subscribers start renewing in November with no reminder. Nobody who leaves the payment page gets an email. The cancel emails written for each reason have never sent.
• Trials are now about 300 a month, against 3,319 in the June to July window, so the trial sequence moves down the list.
• Delivery is fine: 99.6% delivered, no spam complaints.

What to change, in order

The numbers

15,487 profiles can be emailed.

1. Failed payments

Today the flow restarts every time Stripe retries a card: 27,157 emails in 90 days to about 3,800 people. The first email links only to Discord. After 48 hours only "insufficient funds" customers continue; everyone else is dropped, although they recover better (2 to 8%, against 1.8%). The free-month offer went to 88 people and produced no payments.

At stake: in the last dashboard window 412 past-due subscriptions recovered and 484 were lost ($3,453 MRR). The rebuild is aimed at the 484.

Six changes to the rebuild agreed on 17 September:

1. One entry per customer per 30 days.
2. Every email has one button, "Update payment method", to the billing page.
3. Everyone stays to the end. The decline reason changes the wording only.
4. Emails on days 0, 3 and 7 (and 14 if change 2 is approved). The last one says the subscription closes today.
5. Pause the free-month offer.
6. Measure on Successfully Paid.

Kevin: an in-app banner from the day a payment fails until it is fixed, same button. In Stripe, Smart Retries on and Stripe's own failed-payment emails off, so customers do not get two sets.

2. Retry window

Stripe cancels a failing subscription after 7 days today. Stripe recommends 8 retries over 2 weeks. Customers with insufficient funds often recover on payday, and a 7-day window gives up on them first. Change: 14 days, with a fourth email on day 14.

3. Yearly renewals

1,811 subscribers on the legacy $47.88 yearly plan renew for the first time between November and June: 43 in November, 330 in December, then 170 to 310 a month. That is about $86,700 of renewals. 352 of them have already set their plan to cancel. Nothing tells anyone a renewal is coming, so the first they hear is the charge, and the ones whose card has expired go straight into failed payments.

Two routes:

• Stripe's built-in renewal reminder. A setting, Kevin, five minutes.
• Kevin writes the renewal date to each Klaviyo profile and Gavin builds two branded emails, 14 days and 3 days before, with the card-update button.

Recommended: Stripe's reminder now, the Klaviyo version before the December batch.

4. Abandoned checkout

Klaviyo has recorded no checkout starts since June. GA4 counted 2,963 checkout starts in the 20 days to 21 September against about 1,100 new paying subscriptions. Some are repeat attempts and some are trials that pay later, but the gap is large and nobody gets an email.

Kevin: when a Stripe checkout expires unpaid, send a "Checkout Abandoned" event to Klaviyo with the email, plan, price and Stripe's recovery link. Checkout expiry set to one hour. Skip anyone already subscribed. Gavin: an email after one hour and another the next day, one button to the recovery link, stopping as soon as they pay.

5. Campaign rules

The 8 September campaign went to two segments with no exclusions and Smart Sending off. One segment's definition includes "started a paid subscription in the last 90 days and has paid in the last 90 days", which is a current customer: 3,213 active subscriptions matched. Another 729 recent cancellers were partway through a cancel sequence. Result: 10 clicks, 15 payments, $135. In June the team excluded recent payers.

Standing rules for every campaign: exclude anyone who paid in the last 30 days, exclude anyone who entered a flow in the last 14 days, Smart Sending on, one job per email, one tagged destination. Fix the "Paid & Cancelled users" segment.

6. Cancellations

Both cancel flows branch on "Reason Left" to send a discount (too expensive), setup help (too complicated) or a fix-it email (no improvement). The field is never filled in, so those emails have never sent and everyone gets the generic one. The answers exist: the dashboard shows 730 survey responses last window. Kevin writes the answer to the Klaviyo profile on cancel. Gavin rewrites the first paid-cancel email, which reuses the trial version, so it acknowledges they were a paying customer.

7. Trials

About 300 trials a month now (306 trial-welcome emails in the last 30 days). They get one email. The day-2 and day-4 emails, including "your trial ends soon", are switched off. A five-email sequence is still right, but it reaches a tenth of the people it would have in July, so it comes after items 1 to 6.

8. Housekeeping

• Half the flows send as "Hypertune", half as "Austin From Hypertune". Pick one. Three rewritten "Became paid" emails sit unpublished.
• 13 draft flows from December 2025 to February 2026 have never sent. Delete them, or keep "Trail Ending in 3 Days" and "Free Trial Ended" as shells for the trial sequence.
• One pass over the 21 templates: button destination, price ($60 in the campaign, $59.99 on the site), first-name fallback, two typos in the failed-payment footer image.

Not doing

• Klaviyo's website script. Reporting does not need it. Its one use would be browse-abandonment emails to people already on the list; Klaviyo has recorded no product views this year because the script was never installed. Revisit after the speed release.
• Sender-name tests (4 clicks against 6 decides nothing), discounts to people who just cancelled, blasts to cancelled lists.

Decisions for Austin

1. Approve the failed-payment rebuild, and when Gavin ships it.
2. The billing page for the button: Stripe's portal or our account page.
3. Retry window to 14 days.
4. Renewal reminder: Stripe's email now, Klaviyo version before December.
5. The campaign rules as standing policy.
6. Kevin takes the abandoned-checkout event and the cancellation reason.
7. One sender name. Publish or delete the three "Became paid" drafts.
8. The one price shown on the last day of the trial.

Build sheet for Gavin

Exit filter on every flow: leave once Successfully Paid has happened since entering. Conversion metric everywhere: Successfully Paid.

Waiting on Kevin: