Win-back flows: what to send at 90 days, 180 days and never

Every shop has a pile of people who bought once and drifted. The standard response is a 20 % code with "we miss you" in the subject line, sent to all of them at once, once a quarter. It produces a small spike, a larger unsubscribe rate, and a slow erosion of what your list thinks a full price is.

Win-back deserves more care than that, because it is the one programme where the wrong message actively destroys value: you are offering a discount to people who might have come back anyway.

Lapsed is a date, and the date depends on the product

"Lapsed" means nothing until you say lapsed relative to what. Take the median gap between orders for your repeat customers and multiply by two — that is roughly the point where somebody has stopped behaving like a customer.

• A coffee shop with a 30-day rhythm has lapsed customers at 60–90 days.
• A furniture shop does not have lapsed customers at 90 days. It has customers.
• If you sell both, you have two definitions, and one blanket rule will be wrong for half the list.

Everything below assumes a consumable-ish rhythm. Stretch the intervals to fit yours rather than copying the numbers.

Three tiers, escalating in effort rather than in discount

1. 90 days — assume nothing is wrong. No offer. Show what is new since they last looked, and what people who bought their product bought next. Many people simply forgot.
2. 180 days — ask a question. One email, plain text, from a person: did something go wrong, or is it just not the right time? The replies to this are the most useful marketing research you will get all year.
3. 365 days — make the offer, once, and mean it. This is where the discount belongs: last, time-limited, and framed as a reason to come back rather than as an apology.

Then stop. Actually stop.

After the 365-day email, somebody who has not engaged is not a dormant customer; they are a liability on your sending reputation. Dormant addresses are where complaints and spam traps come from, and Google's published guidance is a complaint rate below 0.1 % with enforcement at 0.3 %.

• Stop marketing sends. Keep the record and the consent state — you are not deleting anyone.
• Reinstate instantly on any click, order or form submission.
• Do not escalate to a bigger discount. Nobody who ignored three emails is waiting for a fourth with 30 % on it.

Removing 8,000 dormant addresses feels like deleting revenue. It is not: they produced none, and they were taxing the deliverability of the people who do.

Consider a different channel before a bigger discount

Somebody who has ignored email for a year may simply not read that inbox any more. If you hold consent for SMS or WhatsApp — separately obtained, because consent is per channel and an email tick is not a phone permission — one message there will outperform a fourth email.

Price it honestly first. WhatsApp marketing templates are billed per conversation and a win-back blast to 20,000 lapsed contacts is a real invoice, not a rounding error. Send it to the top tier by past value, not to everybody.

Measure against a holdout, or do not measure

Win-back is the programme most distorted by attribution, because a meaningful share of lapsed customers return on their own. Hold back 10 % at every tier, permanently, and report the difference.

Shops that do this routinely find the 90-day tier carries most of the lift and the 365-day discount carries almost none — at which point the discount can go, which is worth more than the campaign was.