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What Are Recovery Emails?

Recovery emails are automated emails sent to customers when their payments fail. While payment retries re-attempt the charge directly, recovery emails reach out to the customer to prompt action — updating an expired card, approving a flagged transaction, or resolving an issue that retries alone cannot fix.

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Why Emails Alongside Retries?

Payment retries work well for transient failures like temporary bank declines or insufficient funds at the moment of charge. However, many failure scenarios require the customer to take action:
  • Hard declines — the issuing bank has permanently refused the charge, and no amount of retrying will change the outcome.
  • Expired or lost cards — the payment method on file is no longer valid and needs to be replaced.
  • Authentication required — the bank requires the customer to approve the transaction (e.g., 3D Secure).
  • Fraud holds — the bank has flagged the charge and the customer needs to confirm it is legitimate.
In these cases, a well-timed email is the most effective way to recover the payment. Slicker runs recovery emails independently from retries so each channel can be optimized on its own terms — retries target the best time to re-charge, while emails target the best time to reach the customer without over-communicating.

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How It Works

Scenarios are the core automation unit. Each scenario defines matching rules based on a rich set of conditions including payment error codes, transaction amount, customer country, number of past transactions, and more. A scenario contains a sequence of email templates that fire over a defined cadence. Slicker uses smart intelligence to suggest optimal scenarios and templates for your business, and continuously runs A/B tests between them to maximize recovery rates. You can edit templates, adjust priorities, or create your own scenarios if you want — but the system is designed to deliver strong results out of the box with no manual tuning.

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Works With Your Existing Setup

Recovery emails can run alongside your existing email infrastructure or as a total replacement. If you already send recovery emails through another system, you can run Slicker in parallel to compare performance before switching over entirely.

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Setup

Getting recovery emails running involves two areas of configuration. The setup UI guides you through each step with inline instructions, copy-to-clipboard values, and live verification status.

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Sending Domain & Identity

Emails are sent from your own domain, so customers see a familiar sender they already trust rather than a generic third-party address. In Settings, you configure the domain and sender identity:
  • Custom sending domain — add your domain and configure the required DNS records:
    • SPF and DKIM records for email authentication.
    • Optional DMARC record for spoofing protection.
    • Optional tracking records to route click and open tracking through your domain.
  • Verification — the UI shows the status of each DNS record (pending or verified) so you know exactly what is left.
  • Sending identity — once the domain is verified, configure a from address (e.g., billing@yourcompany.com), a display name, a reply-to address, and optional BCC recipients for compliance.
  • Multiple domains — you can manage several domains and mark one as the default.

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Styling & Branding

In Styling, you create email configurations that control the look and feel:
  • Company logo with height and alignment options.
  • Font family for the email body.
  • CTA button — customize the color, text, and URL.
  • Help text line, email signature, and footer links.
  • Live preview — highlights each section as you edit it, and you can send test emails to verify the final result.
  • Multiple configurations — create separate styles per brand or department, assign them to specific scenarios, and set one as the default.

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Tracking & Analytics

Slicker tracks every email through the full lifecycle:
  • Scheduled Emails — view pending future sends.
  • Sent Emails — view delivery status and recovery attribution showing whether the email led to a successful payment.
  • Scenario & template stats — each scenario and email template tracks its own metrics including emails sent, open rates, and recovery rates. These stats drive A/B testing — Slicker automatically splits traffic between competing scenarios and templates, measures performance, and shifts volume toward the highest-performing variants.
  • Analytics dashboard — monitor recovery rates by scenario, email volume trends, and monthly recovery amounts.
For more on analytics, see the Analytics & Reporting page.