Blog/How to Create Winback Flows to Re-engage Churned Subscribers

How to Create Winback Flows to Re-engage Churned Subscribers

There are fundamental flaws in how most winback flows are created and triggered:

  • Timing
  • A lack of consideration of purchase latency
  • Discounts as the default offer
  • Treating all churned subscribers the same

This translates to a lot of money left on the table, especially when you consider that it’s easier and more cost-effective to re-engage churned customers than it is to acquire new ones. 

So, what’s the solution?

You can do quite a few things to create successful winback flows, personalization and data being the most essential. We’ll cover everything you need to know to generate winback flows that can turn past customers into loyal fans. 


Perfect the timing of your winback flows

It’s become industry standard to email and text disengaged or churned customers after 90 days, but this doesn’t make sense for many brands.

Why?

The longer a customer goes without engaging with you, the harder it is to win them back. In that case, 90 days could already be too late. Of course, depending on your purchase latency, it could also be too early.

(Purchase latency is the measurement of time between a customer’s purchases. Many brands with subscriptions automatically schedule renewals on a 30-day cadence, but this doesn’t make sense for all brands. Assuming this cadence can impact your winback success. )

You can run A/B tests on winback timing to see what’s most effective for your brand. Or, you could leave it to AI.

Tools like the WinBack Engine use AI to conduct A/B tests within a given time range to unlock the perfect timing with the highest probability of reactivation. AKA you don’t have to go through all the manual set up and guessing that goes with conducting A/B tests. The AI does it all for you!

Winback Engine

Perfect your winback timing with the WinBack Engine >>>


After finding the perfect timing, the WinBackEngine will send Klayvio a Winback Ready event metric brands can use as a base for more effective winback email flows. 

Of course, when you trigger the campaign, you want to ensure you’re including the right offer.

Find the perfect offer to add to winback emails

The automatic assumption is that customers churn for some price-related reason (they subscribed to catch a deal; they can no longer afford it; they found a cheaper alternative…), and thus, a discount/ coupon code should win them back.

That isn’t the case for all customers. In fact, a discount may grant you the exact opposite reaction than what you’re hoping for. Most disengaged customers already see tons of emails offering them discounts through regular promotions.

If your customers continuously receive marketing emails and are not interested, they will start tuning emails out as a channel entirely.

There are two things you can do to avoid that:

  1. Automatically remove disengaged customers from your regular promo lists. That way, they’re more likely to notice when you send an offer.
  2. Choose a different trigger.

Of course, you don’t know the right trigger until you A/B test it.

A/B test your offer to find the right fit

The right offer might be a complimentary product based on the customers’ past purchase history. This requires subscription SKU data and works even better if that data is automatically passed from your customer portal to Klaviyo to trigger personalized winbacks.

For instance, if your customer purchased peanut butter in the past, you might offer them jelly, marshmallow fluff, or a Nutella-like spread in their winback email to compliment their past purchase.

Or, the right offer could be a free gift.

It might be a shaker bottle that helps customers take their protein powder on the go, recipes that complement products they’ve purchased in the past, sweatbands for their workouts, free samples… you get the picture.

A/B testing

Either way, test these offers against each other before you ship your winback campaign. 

Personalize the messaging of your winback campaigns

You don’t want to send the same winback email to every customer, just like you don’t want to send the same winback offer/ trigger. 

Again, customers churn for very different reasons, and any winback email campaign needs to be tailored to those reasons for success. That means personalizing everything from the triggers to the email subject line. 

Here’s what could be personalized in each re-engagement email:

  • Referencing products the customer was previously subscribed to
  • How long they were subscribed for
  • Their reason for cancellation

Once you have those details, you can create a messaging flow over the appropriate time period with the right triggers.

Use customer data to segment your inactive subscribers

Your customer’s reason for canceling could be anything from “too much product” to “I can’t afford it anymore.” Those are exceptionally different reasons; one is much easier to win back than the other.

Customers who can no longer afford your products would need a longer time before you jump into their inbox with a discount. 

On the flip side, if your lost customer has too much product, winning them back could be as simple as informing them that they could skip next month’s box, pause their subscription until they catch up, or slow down the frequency of their renewals. 

This would call for a winback email that quickly follows their cancellation. 

For an effective winback strategy, segment your audience based on their cancellation reason data directly from your cancellation surveys

cancellation flows

Enable Klaviyo Quick Actions

When you make an action simple and easy, customers are far more likely to perform that action. 


Klaviyo quick actions enable you to offer discounts to your customers within their customer portal. So, if you offer them a discount via email and ask them to click a button to receive it, quick actions will vault the customer into their customer portal to claim it.

winback email example

(With the URL Builder you can generate a quick action URL by navigating to the Quick Actions page in your merchant portal. Once there, you can get a quick action URL based on the desired customer action.)


Need help? Here’s How to Create Klaviyo Flows Using Stay AI Metrics >>


Winback flows can be incredibly lucrative for your business, especially when done well. All it takes is the right tools, the right insights, and a little personalization. 


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