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Recovery emails contact customers when a failed payment needs their attention. They complement payment retries: retries handle failures that may clear on their own, while emails help customers replace an expired card, approve a transaction, or resolve another account issue.

Set up recovery emails

Follow the launch guide to configure your sending domain, DNS, tracking, branding, scenarios, testing, and reporting.

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When Emails Help

Payment retries work well for temporary bank declines or insufficient funds at the moment of charge. Customer communication is more useful when the failure requires action, including:
  • A hard decline that another retry will not resolve.
  • An expired, lost, blocked, or inactive card.
  • A bank approval or authentication step.
  • A stopped recurring payment or cancelled billing agreement.
Slicker coordinates the two channels without treating them as the same action. Retry timing can be optimized around the next collection attempt while email timing and copy can focus on getting a response without over-communicating.

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How Recovery Emails Work

1

A failed payment matches a scenario

A scenario represents a type of payment failure and the audience that should receive an email. When more than one scenario matches, the higher-priority scenario wins.
2

Slicker selects the appropriate template

A scenario contains one or more enabled templates. Sequence positions distinguish first, middle, and final messages; multiple templates at the same position can be used as copy variants.
3

The email is scheduled and sent

Slicker renders customer and invoice variables, applies the scenario’s email configuration, and sends from your verified domain.
4

Results appear in Emails

You can inspect scheduled and sent messages, recovery outcomes, scenario performance, and—when tracking is configured—open and click activity.

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Scenarios and Templates

Slicker prepares an initial set of scenarios and templates for your payment-failure patterns during onboarding. They are a starting point, not a locked configuration. On the Scenarios page you can:
  • Review enabled and disabled scenarios and filter them by trigger.
  • Change a scenario’s name, description, trigger, priority, assigned email configuration, and enabled status.
  • Review its templates, sequence positions, and performance.
  • Edit template names, subjects, and message content using the available customer, invoice, and payment variables.
  • Add templates and send test emails before using new copy with customers.
Use Detailed View to compare sent volume, recovered invoices, recovery rate, and available engagement metrics across scenarios. Higher scenario priorities are evaluated first, so review overlapping scenarios carefully before enabling them.

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Sending From Your Domain

Customers receive messages from an address on a domain you control. Use a dedicated subdomain such as billing.example.com or payments.example.com instead of the root example.com. A subdomain separates recovery-email reputation from login, support, and marketing mail. It is also required for Slicker’s custom-domain open and click tracking. Configure the domain, DNS records, sender name, from address, reply-to address, and optional BCC recipients in Emails → Settings. SPF and DKIM records authenticate sending and must be verified before emails can be sent. DMARC is recommended for spoofing protection and deliverability. DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate; the Settings page shows the live status of every record and lets you re-run verification.

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Branding and Calls to Action

An email configuration controls the sender domain and shared presentation of an email. In Styling & configuration, you can manage:
  • The sending domain, logo, alignment, font, and button color.
  • CTA text and either a static payment-page URL or a customer-specific dynamic destination.
  • Help text, signature, and footer links.
  • Multiple configurations for different brands or business units, including one default.
  • A live preview and test email.
A scenario can use a specific email configuration or fall back to the default.

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Tracking and Reporting

Optional tracking DNS records route images and links through your sending subdomain. Slicker records an open when the tracking image is requested and a click when a tracked link is followed. Email clients can block images or prefetch links, so engagement metrics are useful directional signals rather than proof that a person read an email. The Emails area provides three reporting levels:
  • Overview — scheduled emails, recovered invoices and amount, total emails sent, and available open and click rates.
  • Scheduled Emails and Sent Emails — recipient-level records with timing, invoice, scenario, message preview, and recovery information.
  • Analytics — scenario recovery rates, send volume and timing, monthly recovered invoices and amount, plus engagement charts when tracking is configured.
For broader recovery reporting, see Analytics & Reporting.

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Connect Email Outcomes to Your Systems

Use an email-outcome webhook when another system should react after Slicker attempts a recovery email—for example, to enqueue an SMS or update an internal workflow. Webhooks include structured customer, invoice, scenario, and email-attempt data and support idempotent retry handling.

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Next Step

Follow the Email dunning launch guide for the complete setup sequence, DNS troubleshooting, tracking behavior, launch checklist, and advanced configuration.