Win-Back Email: How To Bring Lapsed Customers Back, And When To Let Them Go

After the holidays, your list carries a fresh crop of people who’ve bought from you once. A win-back email is what you send a past customer once they’ve gone longer than usual without ordering again. In Klaviyo, a win-back email runs as an automated flow, and it belongs in the same set as the core Klaviyo flows: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment and post-purchase.

Time your win-back email to your own store’s repurchase interval rather than a round number. Give people a reason to come back before you offer them a discount. Then finish the win-back email series with a step that stops mailing anyone who never responds, because those are the people who hurt your inbox placement for everyone else.

Klaviyo builds its winback flow (opens in new tab) for customers who bought from you before and then went quiet for longer than your business’s average buying cycle. That cutoff is different for every store. A shop selling coffee and a shop selling mattresses won’t share one, and neither should use the other’s.

Drawing that line from your own customers’ buying patterns is the first job in any customer segmentation strategy. If the line is too early, your win-back email lands on people who were about to reorder anyway. If it’s too late, you’re writing to people who’ve already found another brand.

Lapsed and unengaged aren’t the same group. A lapsed customer may still open every email you send and just hasn’t ordered. Klaviyo’s unengaged segment (opens in new tab) is about email behavior instead: people who’ve received at least five emails and haven’t opened or clicked in the last 90 days, with 90 days as an example you can change. The win-back email goes to the lapsed group, and the sunset step at the end of the flow goes to lapsed customers who’ve also stopped opening.

A past buyer already knows your products, already trusted you with a card number and is already on your list. Bringing one back costs you a few emails, while replacing them means paying to reach someone new. Our guide to retention marketing covers how to measure whether repeat purchases actually moved, which is how you’ll know whether a win-back email series earned its keep.

Set the delay before the first win-back email a little longer than your average buying cycle (opens in new tab), so customers get some leeway before you ask. Klaviyo’s own example flow waits 180 days, and its Buy with Prime winback flow (opens in new tab) waits 75. Those are examples, not a win-back email schedule to copy. A round 90 days is easy to pick and has nothing to do with how often your customers actually reorder.

There are two ways to get your buying cycle. If your account qualifies for Klaviyo’s predictive analytics, average time between orders is already on your customers’ profiles, and the next section covers what qualifying takes. If it doesn’t, build a segment of customers (opens in new tab) who’ve placed an order at least twice in the last two years, export it to CSV and average the Average Time Between Orders column.

That average comes only from people who reordered, so it describes your repeat buyers, not your one-time ones. That’s the right number for timing a win-back email, because the delay is asking whether someone is late compared with customers who did come back. If you don’t have enough repeat buyers for the average to mean much, put yourself in your customers’ place: when would they want to order next, and when would they run out?

Say the column averages out at 48 days. A first win-back email at 55 to 60 days gives the leeway without waiting so long that the customer has forgotten you. A store whose buyers reorder twice a year might land closer to Klaviyo’s 180-day example.

Pull anything replenishable out of your win-back email flow. If a product has a set buying cycle, like a refill, filters or a consumable, exclude it from your winback flow (opens in new tab) and give it its own replenishment flow, timed to when the customer runs out.

Klaviyo’s predictive analytics (opens in new tab) add fields to each customer profile, including average time between orders, churn risk, predicted customer lifetime value (the amount a customer is expected to spend in the next year) and an expected date of next order. They show up on a profile’s Metrics and insights tab only once your account clears four bars. You need at least 500 customers who’ve placed an order, which counts buyers and not total profiles, and at least 180 days of order history with orders in the last 30 days.

You also need at least some customers who’ve placed three or more orders. Orders have to reach Klaviyo through an ecommerce integration or the API, and canceled, refunded or zero-value orders don’t count. A young store, or one that ran most of its sales through a single holiday push, can miss these bars for a while, and should time its win-back email from the CSV average instead.

One-time buyers still get an expected date of next order. With too little history of their own, Klaviyo bases the prediction on how your other customers behave (opens in new tab), so a holiday buyer’s predicted date is really your store’s pattern applied to them. Profiles that have never ordered get no date at all.

Churn risk is the probability that a customer won’t buy again, and it’s driven by the number and frequency of their orders. Each order lowers it and time between orders raises it. It exports as a number between 0 and 1 (opens in new tab), so 0.45 means a 45% churn risk, and a store with a large number of one-time purchasers can carry a high average churn risk. A list full of holiday buyers looks exactly like that, so read a high average as a fact about your customer mix before you read it as a warning.

The standard Klaviyo winback flow starts on a metric trigger, Placed Order (opens in new tab). Every order starts the clock again. The profile filter is “Placed Order zero times since starting this flow,” which drops anyone who orders again before the next win-back email goes out.

Profile filters are checked when someone enters the flow and again before each step (opens in new tab). A customer who reorders between the first and second win-back email never gets the second one.

Check the re-entry setting while you’re in the trigger. Klaviyo now puts re-entry criteria in the flow trigger settings (opens in new tab), with three choices: people enter only once, re-enter whenever they qualify again, or re-enter after a minimum time. A customer who comes back, buys and then lapses again should be able to get the win-back email a second time, so don’t leave it on enter once.

You can’t start a flow from opens or clicks. Opened Email and Clicked Email can’t trigger flows (opens in new tab), so a win-back email built around people who’ve stopped reading has to start from a segment instead. Build that group in Klaviyo segments as customers who’ve placed at least one order and haven’t opened or clicked an email within a window set by your buying cycle, then trigger the flow on it. A segment-triggered flow queues people when they’re newly added to the segment.

If you sell through Buy with Prime on Shopify, the standard flow won’t account for customers whose original order came through Buy with Prime (opens in new tab). Klaviyo has a pre-built flow for them, triggered on Placed Order (Buy with Prime), with a 75-day delay before the first win-back email and 15 days before the second. Pre-built Buy with Prime flows are only offered for Shopify.

Once the basic flow runs, give your best customers their own path. Klaviyo suggests separate flows or branches for VIPs or high spenders (opens in new tab), using splits on spend or purchase count over a period, days since last site activity or days since the last email open. And when you test a win-back email, change one thing at a time, whether that’s the timing, the subject lines or the content.

Klaviyo recommends keeping the flow to three emails per recipient (opens in new tab). In its pattern, the first win-back email is a short, light touch with three to six best-selling or new products and an incentive. The second reminds people about the incentive with some urgency, such as an expiration date, and features different products. The third is a last-chance call to action with a prominent unsubscribe link.

How big the discount is, is your call.

We’d change the first email. A discount in the first win-back email goes to everyone who opens it, including the customers who were going to reorder on their own a week later. Unless you test it, you can’t tell the orders the discount moved from the ones it simply made cheaper.

Open the first win-back email with a reason to come back instead. That can be what’s new since their last order, a restock of something they bought, the product that pairs with what they already own, or a change to shipping or returns that answers why they might have drifted. Hold the incentive for the second win-back email, where it reaches only the people the first one didn’t move.

Test it rather than take either pattern on faith. Run the incentive in win-back email 1 against the incentive in email 2, one change at a time, and judge the result on placed orders, not opens. Apple Mail Privacy Protection can inflate open rates (opens in new tab), so an open in a win-back email isn’t reliable evidence that anyone read it.

For customers who’ve agreed to receive texts, an SMS step between the second and third win-back email gives you a second channel before the last one. Send it only to people who’ve consented to texts from you.

Some people won’t answer any win-back email in the series, and if nothing changes they stay on every campaign you send. Google’s sender guidelines for Gmail tell senders to send email only to people who want to get messages from you (opens in new tab), and to periodically confirm that recipients want to stay subscribed. The line that applies here reads, “Consider unsubscribing recipients who don’t open or read your messages.”

Yahoo says the same thing more bluntly: “Sending email to users who are not reading them, or who report them as spam, will harm your delivery metrics and reputation.” Its sender best practices (opens in new tab) also tell you to monitor inactive recipients and to consider sending them a reconfirmation email periodically. Klaviyo warns that sending to profiles who haven’t engaged in three to six months (opens in new tab) can get your emails placed in spam by Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. Our guide to email deliverability covers how sender reputation works across those providers.

Klaviyo’s example sunset flow (opens in new tab) won’t catch these people. It’s triggered when a profile is added to a segment, and Klaviyo’s example segment requires zero placed orders over all time, which means it targets subscribers who never engaged or bought. A lapsed customer who ordered once never enters it. The sunset step for a winback campaign has to be built from the win-back email’s own non-responders.

After the third win-back email, add a grace period. Klaviyo’s sunset flow uses three days, assuming you send daily (opens in new tab), and 7 to 10 days if you send less often. Then add a conditional split on whether the person has opened or clicked an email since starting the flow. Anyone who did leaves the flow, and only the people who stayed silent go on.

For everyone left, add an update profile property (opens in new tab) action that sets a property such as Unengaged to true. A flow can’t suppress a profile on its own: it isn’t currently possible to suppress profiles as a flow action (opens in new tab). Build a segment on that property, then go to Audience, then Lists & segments, open the action menu beside the segment and choose “Suppress current members.”

Because suppression is manual, put it on a calendar. Anyone who unsubscribes is suppressed automatically (opens in new tab), so this step only has to handle the people who went quiet without unsubscribing. We build that step into the end of the win-back email flow itself rather than relying on a separate sunset flow for lapsed buyers.

Suppression also comes off your bill. Any profile Klaviyo can email counts as an active email profile, and suppressed profiles don’t count toward your billing plan’s profile count (opens in new tab). A suppressed profile stops receiving marketing email and becomes eligible again if the person resubscribes or you remove the suppression manually, so the step isn’t permanent for anyone who wants back in.

Gmail treats you as a bulk sender once you send close to 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail accounts (opens in new tab) within 24 hours, and you stay one permanently after crossing it once. Messages from the same primary domain count together. Bulk senders’ marketing email has to support one-click unsubscribe, and Google recommends processing unsubscribe requests within 48 hours.

Google tells all senders to keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3% (opens in new tab), and to stay below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching 0.30%. On a send of 20,000 messages, 0.3% is 60 spam reports and 0.10% is 20. Yahoo’s ceiling is also below 0.3% (opens in new tab), and it asks you to honor unsubscribes within 2 days.

Make the unsubscribe link in the third win-back email easy to find. A customer who no longer wants your email and can’t find the link is left with the spam button, and every one of those reports counts against that ceiling.

Your holiday buyers cross your buying cycle one cycle after their December order, which for many stores falls in the new year, so the flow should be live before they do. Work out your average time between orders first, from predictive analytics if your account qualifies or from a CSV of repeat buyers if it doesn’t. Build the flow on Placed Order with the zero-orders filter and re-entry turned on, lead the first win-back email with a reason to come back, and end it with the sunset step.

If you’d like a team to build it with you, our Klaviyo email marketing agency work starts with an audit of the Klaviyo account you already have, then builds welcome, cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase and win-back flows, each on the right trigger.