The standard winback flow is three emails at 60, 90 and 120 days with escalating discounts. It recovers some customers, gives the largest discount to the least loyal, and teaches the whole file that the way to get the best price is to disappear for four months.

A winback ladder that starts with a reason

1. What’s new, for themNew products related to what they bought, a new size, a fix to the thing their review complained about. Personal, not a newsletter.
2. What they’re missingTheir points balance, the collection they started, the refill their product needs by now.
3. A human noteA short, plain-text letter from someone real, asking what happened. Replies are data, and a reply is a re-engaged customer.
4. An offer, last, and only for the ones who need itGate it behind the same churn-risk rule from the last chapter. Customers who come back on step 1 never see it.

Reaching back a year, safely

From my work, the same jewelry plan had to wake up customers who had lapsed as far as a year back. Waking a whole file at once is how a sender reputation gets damaged, so the plan sent in waves, warmest first: recently active on the site and still opening email; then active but not opening; then older buyers; then older non-buyers who had engaged. Each wave kept a random tenth as a holdout that received nothing, so the result could be measured instead of claimed.

Between waves the plan had stop rules, written in advance: spam complaints under 0.1%, bounces under 1.5%, unsubscribes under 0.6%. Breach one, and the next wave pauses and shrinks. Google’s bulk sender guidance asks senders to keep spam complaints below 0.1% and never reach 0.3%, which is why the first threshold sits where it does.

A winback without a holdout is a guess about who would have come back anyway.

How to judge a winback

• Incremental revenue per recipient against the holdout, over 30 or 60 days. Not attributed revenue: lapsed customers come back on their own at some rate, and the flow will be credited for all of them.
• Deliverability during the send: complaints, bounces and inbox placement by mailbox provider. It’s the license to keep sending.
• What happens after: do won-back customers order a third time, or only when there’s a code?

Do this

• Rewrite your winback flow’s first email with no offer in it. Put the offer last, behind a rule.
• Add a holdout of one in ten before you send it again.