Create urgency and drive action by adding a countdown to your outbound emails



Quickly and easily add countdown clocks to your email campaigns

Looking to increase click through rates for your marketing emails? Trying to build buzz and excitement around an event or product launch? Want to get your team or customers focussed on a deadline? Why not bring your emails to life with an animated countdown timer. It displays to your email recipients exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds are remaining until a specific time and date.

Customize a countdown to match your brand (or personality)

Use the editor above to customize the style of the countdown and of course, to specify the time and date that you're counting down to. If you want you're countdown to "blend in" to your email, you may want to pick a white background, or a background color that matches your branding. If you want the countdown to "stand out" you may want to pick a color that contrasts with the rest of your email.

See how simple it is to send your countdown using Mailchimp


Below you can find quick videos demonstrating the embedding of countdowns using various software.

Embed in broadcast emails as well as personal emails

Whether you're using MailChimp to notifying your entire marketing email list that your promotion is about to end, or telling your friends that it's almost your birthday, we have a quick and simple way to add a countdown to your emails.

How to add countdowns to broadcast emails
If you use an email service provider (ESP) like MailChimp, Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor, you can easily add a countdown to your email blast. Just copy the embed code that we provide and paste it into your email. For some system, such as MailChimp you'll add a "Code Block" into which you'll paste the code we provide. For other systems you may need to switch to "HTML editing mode" temporarily, to add the embed code we provide. Either way, once you have the countdown added to your email, send a test email to yourself. Open the test email and you'll see the countdown clock ticking away the seconds until the deadline, event or whatever it is.

How to add countdowns to personal emails
If you just want to send a countdown by email to a few friends, we have you covered. Once you start customizing your countdown on our website, you'll see a prompt below the countdown to email it to yourself. Enter your email address and hit "Send". Our system will then email the countdown timer to you. You can then simply copy and paste the countdown clock out of the email you received and into the email you're composing.

So how does this work?

As you may know, "email clients" (the software that people use to view received email) such as Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail, are very restrictive. They typically won't support iframes or JavaScript. This is important for security, but it means that the methods that we use to embed countdowns in web pages, won't work for embedding them in emails.

GIFs to the rescue!

The only reliable way to include animated content such as countdowns, in email is the trusty animated gif. So when you customize your countdown above, our system generates an animated GIF image and provides you a snippet of HTML code to include that image in your email. That works but you can't attach the countdown GIF to your email as you would with a regular image, because the animation is going to go out of date. For example, if it's 6pm, and you've created a countdown until 9pm, our system needs to generate a countdown animation starting at 3:00:00, then animating to 2:59:59, and so on. But if we look at that countdown animation, one second later, it's wrong, it should instead start the countdown at 2:59:59. If that seems confusing don't worry, the point is that the animated gif needs to be generated by our syatem at the time it's viewed in order for it to be accurate. So the embed code you paste into your email embeds an image of a countdown animation, but instead of being an image that's attached to your email, it's an image that's provided by our system when the image is viewed.

How much does it cost? / Is it free?

You can use our email countdowns for free with no restrictions. The only catch is that our brand name will be displayed on all free countdowns. If you don't mind some branding on your countdowns, it's win-win. You get to embed countdowns in your email for free and we get exposure for our brand.

If you don't want our branding displayed on the countdowns in your emails, please visit our pricing page and sign up for one of our pro plans. There are different plans to suit people sending different volumes of email. It doesn't cost us anything for you to send an email containing a countdown. It's only when the countdown is displayed to the email recipient that our servers have to work. Because of this, our pricing is based on how many countdowns are actually displayed. If you're sending 100k emails per month that contain countdown timers, and you're open rate is 20% then our system only actually has to display 20k countdowns. In that case you'd want to select a plan that includes at least 20k email countdowns per month. One more note on pricing: if you go over your monthly limit we won't cut you off, your countdowns will still keep working. If you're repeatedly going substantially over your monthly limit, we may contact you to discuss moving you to a higher volume plan.