Clearing Invoices: Learning the Art of Curating Effective Payment Reminder Email Templates

While the relationship a business shares with its customers possesses many nuances, for the sake of clarity, one can broadly classify it into two categories: emotional and transactional. 

• The emotional involves taking stock of your buyers’ needs, interests, and grievances, working scrupulously toward making them feel heard, and delivering a hyper-personalized experience. 

• The transactional, on the other hand, requires you to exercise a vigilant eye on payments, making sure that your customers are paying their bills on time. 

At the end of the day, no matter how friendly your relations are, you need your buyers to clear their dues in order to run your business. The conduct of this transactional relationship, which is understandably tricky, leaves many businesses fumbling and stumbling. 

While talking to customers about overdue payments can appear rather uncomfortable at times, it is a conversation that must be had as unambiguously as possible. And what’s a better way of going about it than sending them an effective payment reminder email? Wondering what goes into crafting a winning one? You’re just at the right place. In this blog, we will dive into an array of payment reminder email best practices, along with discussing a handful of custom-coded email templates that might come to your rescue. Eager to discover what we have in store? Let’s go!

Writing an Impactful Payment Reminder Email

Keeping it real with your customers while also trying to seem polite can be quite a tough nut to crack. But, if you want your payment reminder email templates to be impactful, you’re going to have to learn to maneuver this tightrope skilfully. Let’s take a look at some techniques that one should keep in mind while composing a payment reminder email. 

1. Cut to the Chase With Your Subject Lines

With the sheer number of emails that populate subscribers’ inboxes on a daily basis, they obviously can’t be expected to open and engage with every single one of them. So, which ones are most likely to demand their attention? Those that have an engaging subject line. Now, there are many things that make a subject line attractive, but one attribute that it must possess is clarity. In the process of making your subject lines witty and clever should you happen to bungle up their lucidity, you stand to reduce the chances of your emails getting opened. This assumes all the more importance when payment reminder emails are concerned. 

The subject line itself should set the reader’s expectations the moment they lay their eyes on it. Sure, they will have to eventually open the email to get the complete debriefing, but you’ll be earning plenty of brownie points if you manage to give them a definite idea of what’s inside using your subject lines. Crisp and informative- those are the two checkboxes you ought to be looking to tick off while writing the subject lines of your payment reminder email templates.

2. Write a Pleasant Introduction

As we mentioned earlier, payment clearance negotiations with customers can get a bit challenging occasionally. You don’t want to start your email by straightway listing out your subscribers’ dues; that’s likely to leave a sour taste in their mouths. Start your email with a polite and friendly introduction. Even better if you manage to personalize it. Doing this will increase your chances of getting a response from your customers. That said, don’t try to be overly friendly as well. A professional tone peppered with a hint of politeness is what you should be aiming for. 

3. Elucidate on all the Available Payment Options

After you’ve alerted your customers to their pending invoices, you also need to ensure that when they do get to the payment part, subsequently, the experience is made as hassle-free for them as possible. Hence, you should spare no detail while listing out all the various options through which they can complete their payments. Additionally, provide thorough instructions for every individual option so that there’s no scope for confusion whatsoever. Before sharing these options, however, we’d recommend that you first check if all of them are functioning as desired. Especially in matters of financial transactions, an unaccounted-for glitch can induce great stress and anxiety among customers and resultantly cause them to harbor a negative perception of your business.

4. Don’t Make Customers Hunt for the Invoice

Even if you have already shared the invoice with the customer, do attach it to your payment reminder email as well. Should they be made to dig out the invoice themselves, they would feel that much deterred from completing the payment. So, make sure your payment reminder email contains the invoice, the initial payment due date, the duration for which the payment has been overdue, and, of course, the payment options. Some businesses even choose to list out the consequences of late payment to instill a sense of emergency in their customers. However, when you are employing this tactic, make sure that said late payment terms have been communicated to your buyers at the very beginning. Otherwise, it might backfire. 

5. Don’t be shy of Following up

If you want customers to respond to your payment reminder emails, it is best that you execute them in a series. If your first email itself begets a response, that’s wonderful, but if it doesn’t  (as is so often the case), you must follow up with tact and discipline. Before shooting your follow-up emails, however, confirm the receipt of your first email with your customers. Many times, subscribers change their email addresses without communicating the same to you. Confirming receipt, thus, will help you understand how many email addresses in your database are still relevant. 

Payment Reminder Templates for Different Scenarios

As we just discussed previously, payment reminder emails are best implemented in a series. Now this entails you having to prep yourselves for diverse situations and composing an appropriate reminder email for the same. Below we take a look at some payment reminder templates encompassing a wide range of scenarios.

• Before Due Date

If you want to send your customers a gentle reminder a week or 10 days prior to when your invoice is due, you can consider using this template.

• Few Days After the Due Date

Been a week or two past the due date and still haven’t received a payment from your customer? Consider using this template

• Long After the Due Date

If a couple of months or more have passed since the payment due date, your payment reminder email must take up a tone of urgency. Take a look at the following template.

• Expressing Thanks for Payment

Conveying your gratitude to customers after receiving payment is a must for it goes a long way towards strengthening customer relationships. Here’s a template you can use for the same.

Wrapping It Up

Writing an effective payment reminder email can, no doubt, be challenging. We hope the tips and tricks shared above have helped you understand what to take into account while crafting one. Are there any interesting payment reminder templates you wish to share with us? Let us know in the comments!