Win-back emails: the highest-ROI loyalty automation

If you could only automate one message, it would be this one. Not the welcome email, not the newsletter, not the birthday treat. The email that goes to somebody who used to come in and has stopped.

The reason is arithmetic. A lapsed customer has already proved three things: they can find you, they like what you sell, and they were willing to hand over their details. Every one of those is a hurdle a stranger has not cleared. Getting one of them back is cheaper than finding someone new, by a distance.

When is somebody lapsed?

This is the setting people get wrong, and the answer depends entirely on your visit frequency.

• Coffee shop: a daily regular who has not been in for 10 days has changed something. Send at 10 to 14 days.
• Ice cream, dessert, juice: weekly at best, and weather-dependent. Send at around 21 days.
• Occasional treat businesses: 30 to 45 days.

The failure mode in both directions is worth understanding. Send too early and you annoy someone who was coming in on Friday anyway, and you spend an offer you did not need to spend. Send too late and the habit has already been replaced by the shop nearer their new office.

If you are not sure, start at 21 days and watch what happens. It is one number in one settings box.

What to actually say

Short. Warm. One offer. No paragraph about your journey as a business.

Hi Amelia, it's been a while. Come back this week and have a free topping on us. Your card is still here, with 6 stamps on it.

Three things are doing the work in that message:

1. It notices them. "It's been a while" is a small human acknowledgement, and it lands differently from a generic promotion.
2. It has a deadline. "This week" turns a nice thought into a decision. Without it, the email becomes something to act on eventually.
3. It reminds them what they'd be abandoning. Six stamps is sunk cost, and sunk cost is a powerful motivator when the thing sunk is effort rather than money.

What to offer

Smaller than you think. The goal is to remove the last bit of friction from a decision they are already half-inclined to make, not to buy them back with a discount.

A free topping, a free extra shot, an upgrade to a large. Something that costs you pennies, feels like a gift, and does not train people to wait for offers. Avoid percentage discounts entirely: they teach customers that your normal price is negotiable, and they are harder to explain at the counter.

The rules that keep it from becoming spam

• Once per lapse. If someone has been sent a win-back and still has not come in, do not send another one a fortnight later. They will unsubscribe and you will lose the ability to reach them for the rest of time.
• Only to people who opted in. Anyone who joined without ticking the box, or who has unsubscribed, should never enter the queue. This is both the law and the right thing.
• Stop the clock the moment they visit. The trigger should be based on last visit, not on a schedule.

How to tell whether it is working

The metric is not open rate. It is: of the people sent a win-back, how many were stamped within the next fourteen days?

You need a loyalty system that can connect the email to the subsequent visit, which is the whole reason for the stamp log existing. If you send win-backs from a mailing-list tool that has never heard of your till, you will never know whether it worked.

Somewhere between 5% and 15% coming back within a fortnight is a normal result for a small food business. On a list of 300 lapsed customers, the low end of that is fifteen people through the door from one automated email that you wrote once.

In Regulars this is on by default from the first day of the trial, set to 21 days, and you can change the wording and the timing in about a minute.