Payment failed email flow

Recover failed subscription payments with the Roadmap: Subscription payment failed metric, including the retry date for honest dunning emails.

Most failed subscription payments are fixable: an expired card, a blocked card, insufficient funds on billing day. The dunning email's job is to get the payment method updated before retries run out.

Klaviyo event name

• Roadmap: Subscription payment failed: fires when a billing attempt fails. Roadmap retries automatically per your failed payment retry settings; this metric lets you send an email notification when a failed attempt happens.

Event properties

The full contract snapshot, plus:

Extra property	What it holds
failed_at_date	when the attempt failed
next_billing_attempt_date	when Roadmap will retry

Recommended flow structure

1. Trigger: Roadmap: Subscription payment failed

2. Email, immediately: honest and calm:

We couldn't process your {{ event.product_titles.0|default:'' }} renewal on {{ event.failed_at_date|default:'' }}.
We'll try again on {{ event.next_billing_attempt_date|default:'' }}.

One CTA: update the payment method. See Updating a customer's payment method for the recapture options, including the Payment Method Update email.

Strategy

• Lead with the retry date. "We'll try again on the 20th" reads as helpful; a bare "payment failed" doesn't provide customers much clarity on next steps.

• No blame. Most failures are bank-side; write like it.

• One email per failure is usually enough, since the metric fires on each failed attempt and stacking extra reminders per attempt gets noisy fast.

Related guides

• Failed payment retries

• Subscription failed email flow: when every retry is exhausted