Omnisend does have a countdown of its own. The Countdown timer element sits in Add Elements, takes an end date and time, and lets you set the format, fonts, colours, alt text and a fallback image. Two things about it decide whether it’s the right Omnisend countdown timer for you. It’s for paid plans only, and it counts to one fixed date for everyone. There’s no evergreen mode and no way to read a deadline from the contact.
For a sale ending Sunday on a paid plan, use it. For a free-plan store, or for the abandoned-cart and welcome flows where every contact’s clock should start at a different moment, this guide adds an Alterable countdown timer through the HTML element instead.
Step 1: Create the timer in Alterable
1. Open the Alterable countdown timer page.
2. Pick a type. Standard counts to one date. Evergreen starts each contact’s own window on their first open, which is what a cart-recovery flow wants. Merge tag reads the deadline from a contact property in the image URL.
3. Set the deadline and its timezone, then match the style to your template.
4. Click Create and copy the embed, a link wrapped around an image.
Step 2: Add the countdown timer to your Omnisend email
1. Open the campaign or automation email in the Email Builder.
2. In Add Elements, drag the HTML element into the template where the timer should sit.
3. Click the element and paste the Alterable embed into the code editor on the right. Leave the separate Styles input empty.
4. Save.
Omnisend’s HTML element documentation asks for body content only and refuses to save a list of tags: iframe, script, div, font, video, audio, object, embed. The div one surprises people, but the Alterable embed doesn’t use it. It’s a link and an image, both allowed. Image URLs must be absolute https, which they are. The element works in Automation Workflows exactly as in a campaign.
Per-contact deadlines with Omnisend’s Liquid tags
Omnisend’s templating is a Liquid variant with double square brackets, and its own HTML element guide puts a tag inside an image URL, so this is supported ground.
An evergreen timer needs to know who’s opening so it can start and keep that contact’s clock:
<img src="https://next.alterable.com/countdown-timers/YOUR-TIMER-ID.png?uid=[[contact.email]]" />A merge tag timer takes the deadline itself, as an ISO date such as 2026-10-01T18:00:00Z. Omnisend imports contact dates in ISO 8601 already, and custom properties are addressed by name:
<img src="https://next.alterable.com/countdown-timers/YOUR-TIMER-ID.png?d=[[contact.custom_properties.offer_end]]" />Store the property as the full ISO string and pass it through untouched. Omnisend’s date filter can reformat a real date property with strftime tokens if you need to, but text in, text out is the version I’ve seen survive contact with real data.
Testing an Omnisend countdown timer
Omnisend is candid that its test emails and Preview don’t render dynamic tags, and that automations can only be tested by triggering them. So a URL containing [[contact.email]] arrives literal in a test and the image fails. Omnisend’s own advice is the right one: send the campaign live to a segment that contains only your address. A standard timer has no tag in it and shows correctly in an ordinary test.
Once the deadline passes, the timer holds at zero, or shows the text or image you chose as its expiry placeholder in Alterable. Unlike a fallback image set per element, that placeholder is on the timer, so every email already in an inbox shows it on the next open.