15+ Milestone Email Examples: Celebrating User Anniversaries & Achievements

Celebrating wins and milestones, whether big or small, helps build confidence and provides the positive motivation to keep moving forward.

So instead of letting your customer data gather digital dust, why not leverage it to celebrate your users and encourage them to stay active?

We've searched the web, our own inboxes, and asked around the communities to collect this list of 15+ milestone emails to inspire yours. You'll also learn how to use these emails for nurturing customer relationships, and when you should send them.

What are milestone emails?

Milestone emails are sent out to celebrate an important event in a user's lifecycle.

Whether it's to mark their signup anniversary, or congratulating them for reaching a new progress level on your platform, sending milestone emails can help strengthen the relationship with your customers.

Why should you send milestone emails?

Here's how milestone emails can help both your customers and your brand:

• Expressing gratitude to your customers. Your business won't be where it is without your customers, so grab this opportunity to say thanks. Remember, a simple "thank you" can go a long way.
• Demonstrating user progress. Your users are often preoccupied with scratching off things on their to-do list, so it's often difficult to see the bigger picture. These emails are a good reminder of what else they've achieved so far (i.e. time saved).
• Reinforcing product value. It's a perfect way of reminding your users of the business value you're adding.
• Creating a habit loop. Milestone emails reinforce the desire to re-engage with your product to achieve further results.
• Building brand loyalty. This simple way of cheering your user on helps sustain their motivation, builds their confidence, all the while associating your brand with positive experience.

When to send milestone emails

• User anniversaries. Anniversary emails are based on the time spent using your product, e.g. years since signup. These simple powerful emails remind the user of your history together, and mitigate churn.
• Activity milestones. Similar to sports and video games, seeing the numbers or receiving things like badges to symbolize growth and progress gives users the positive motivation to keep going.
• Value milestones. Things like "amount in fees saved" or "time saved" remind users of the compounding effect of their activities on your platform.
• Activating a new feature. Whether they found it through your onboarding campaign or figured it out for themselves, celebrate users when they reach that "aha" moment with a feature for the first time. Acknowledging this helps build their confidence and encourages them to keep repeating it.

Implementing your milestone emails

Milestone emails heavily rely on your customer data. They should be set up as trigger-based email campaigns.

Before writing that milestone email, you need to make sure that you track the necessary data.

Here are some properties you can track:

• Their signup date
• Specific success metrics (e.g. number of project completed)
• Usage metrics (e.g. time spent in the app)
• Value metrics (e.g. revenue recovered, time saved)

You can use these numbers to trigger the campaigns, or include them in the body of the email using Liquid.

How SaaS brands are celebrating their users (15+ examples)

User anniversaries

#1. Duolingo

Subject: 🥳 Happy 2nd Duoversary, [First Name]!

Duolingo is a popular language learning platform.

To celebrate the user's 2nd anniversary, Duolingo shows a roundup of the achievements during the 2-year period. Together with the clear CTAs, they encourage the user to keep making progress with their learning.

#2. Twitter

Subject: Happy Twitterversary!

Twitter (now X) is a social networking site that lets users broadcast short posts.

This short but sweet email from Twitter shows a birthday cake to celebrate the user's sixth anniversary on the platform. They then encourage the user to share this milestone with others on the platform.

#3. Busuu

Subject: It's your Busuuversary 🥳 Open for a treat 🍬

Busuu is a language learning platform that lets users interact with native speakers.

To celebrate the user's 3-month anniversary on their platform, Busuu offers them a 60% discount to upgrade to a premium plan. They share how a Premium plan will boost the user's language learning, and encourage the user to upgrade at a special price.

#4. Grammarly

Subject: You've reached a new weekly streak milestone!

Grammarly is a digital tool that provides grammar and spell checking, plagiarism checks, and more to help users improve their writing skills.

Instead of doing separate emails, Grammarly includes important user milestones in their weekly writing update emails.

In this example, Grammarly celebrates the user's 6-month mark of using the platform with the Half-Year Hero badge. The badge section includes a short copy telling the user that not everyone reaches this milestone and a little fun fact about intermissions.

#5. Payoneer

Thanks to Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner for providing this example.

Payoneer is a platform that provides online money transfers, and digital payment services.

The hero section of the email features a graphic to celebrate the user's third anniversary on the platform and to thank them for using the platform.

The second half of the email focuses on referrals, telling users to invite their friends and earn $25 for each successful referral.

What can be improved?

Payoneer could have written a short copy to bridge the hero section to the referral section so that its cohesive.

#4. WP Tasty

Subject: Your subscription is about to renew

WP Tasty provides plugins for food bloggers.

This subscription renewal email doubles as an anniversary email. The email opens with an anniversary greeting before reminding the user about their upcoming subscription renewal.

What can be improved?

While it's fine that this email serves two purposes, WP Tasty should have made a bigger deal about the user anniversary before getting down to business (i.e. having a dedicated anniversary section).

#5. Semrush

Thanks to Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner for providing this example.

Subject: It's your Semrushversary! 🥳

Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights.

This is a great example of a well-written user anniversary email because aside from celebrating the user milestone, Semrush also took the opportunity to thank the user for their business.

To show their appreciation, Semrush gives the user an exclusive anniversary gift to celebrate the occasion.

Activity milestones

#6. Tumblr

Subject: Tumblr achievement unlocked: 10 posts on lessons in renovation

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that became popular in the late 2000s.

They sent out this email to celebrate the user's 10th post on the platform. We like that they injected some wit and humor in the short copy accompanying the badge.

While the email shows to CTAs, the goal for both is to encourage the user to keep posting on the platform.

#7. Todoist

Subject: ✅ It's official: You're a Pro, [First Name]

Todoist is a task manager and to-do list app for professionals and small businesses.

They send out this email to tell the user that they've reached the Pro level of their Karma journey. They celebrate the milestone by giving the user a badge and showing them a roundup of their achievements so far.

To encourage the user to stay on track, Todoist mentions how many productivity points the user needs to earn to reach the next level.

#8. Google Maps

Subject: New milestone—1,000 views for your review 👌

Google Maps is a platform that lets users explore and navigate the world.

This email celebrates the user for their review reaching 1,000 views. Google also lets the user know how the review impacts other users as well: helping them get the information they need about the business.

By highlighting this social impact, Google encourages the user to keep contributing well-thought-out reviews.

#9. Fitbit

Subject: Congrats on earning your first High Tops badge!

Fitbit is an all-in-one personalized fitness app that lets users track their activity, goals, and progress.

This email gives the user the High Tops badge for reaching 20,000 recorded steps on their app. Their CTA button encourages the user to share this exciting milestone with their social network.

#10. LinkedIn

Subject: Hit your next posting milestone (it's close)

LinkedIn is a business and employment-focused social media platform.

Their email congratulates the user for posting three times this year. They go on to explain that it's not merely about posting, but they're also doing other things with a post such as:

• Starting conversations
• Inspiring others; and
• Expressing one's self

By listing the other social impacts of posting, LinkedIn encourages the user to keep using the platform so they can reach their next milestone, publishing their 5th post.

#11. Transistor

Subject: 🎉 Your weekly podcast achievements - [MM/DD/YYYY]

Transistor is a podcast hosting, distribution, and management platform.

Transistor's milestone email is short and sweet: it gives the user a badge to celebrate the milestone per show. It also tells the user to keep up the great work.

What can be improved?

They could have added a CTA to let the user easily share the badge on their social media.

Value milestones

#12. Wise

Subject: Here's how your 2023 adds up

Wise is an international money transfer company.

In their year-in-review email, the hero section shows the total amount in savings all users achieved with Wise.

The succeeding sections highlight each of the user's personal milestones for the year:

• Amount in fees saved
• Number of international transfers made
• Total transfer time
• Number of payments received

By showing these value and activity milestones, Wise reminds the user of the convenience and savings they're enjoying on their platform compared to other forms of international money transfer.

They wrap up the email with a clear and well–written CTA section to encourage the user to keep using Wise in the coming year.

13. The Conqueror

Subject: New milestone reached! 80% Milestone

The Conqueror is a platform that lets users virtually traverse a real-life landmark.

This email celebrates the user for reaching the 80% milestone of their virtual challenge. Instead of receiving badges, Conqueror recycles 10 plastic bottles on behalf of the user to reflect the value milestone.

By knowing the real-life environmental impact of their progress, Conqueror encourages the user to keep going until they finish their selected virtual challenges.

Feature milestones

#14. Lyssna

Lyssna is a user research and usability testing platform.

This email congratulates the user for completing their first test using their platform. Lyssna's email gives the reader some tips on what to do next, including:

• Viewing the results summary
• Filter responses based on demographic attributes
• Use the comment and tagging features for better collaboration with their team
• How to share the results with team members

#15. Zapier

Subject: Congrats, you've created your first Zap!

Zapier is an automation platform that lets users seamlessly integrate the tools in their tech stack so they can focus on what matters.

In this email, Zapier celebrates the user for reaching the "aha" moment (creating a zap) for the first time.

To encourage the user to keep using the platform and reach that "aha" moment again, Zapier gives out some tips which include:

• Get an idea for their next zap using their AI feature
• Read the docs to create a higher-level zap
• Create Webhooks if their tool doesn't have a Zapier integration
• Build the next zap with ready templates

#16. Zight

Thanks to Nidhi Kala for providing this example.

Zight is an all-in-one screen recorder that lets users create, edit and share videos, screenshots, and GIFs for business.

This email is divided into four sections:

• The productivity dashboard
• The content section
• Productivity tips
• Referral section

The dashboard shows the stats for items created and time saved with Zight. The content section breaks down the numbers for what type of content the user created for the period.

The productivity tip section tells the user that they've tried out 2 out of 6 core features on the platform and they should try out the remaining 4. By doing this, Zight encourages the user to experience more "aha" moments on their platform.

Full-text milestone email templates

Welcome to grab these templates for your own milestone emails.

Anniversary email template

Activating a new feature email template

Time to set up your milestone emails

Sending a milestone email is a simple yet effective way to remind users of their progress and encourage them to keep going.

Whether for a user anniversary or using a feature for the first time, that milestone email will be a nice surprise in their inboxes. Don't procrastinate — today is the day to set it up!If you need more help, welcome to book a demo call or check out our done-for-you services.