Acquiring a new customer costs five to seven times more than retaining an existing one. Yet most Shopify merchants focus almost entirely on acquisition and do almost nothing to recover customers who have gone quiet.

A lapsed customer already knows your brand, has used your product, and made a buying decision in your favour once. Winning them back is not the same as converting a cold prospect. It is a reminder, a reason to return, and sometimes a small incentive. Done well, it recovers meaningful revenue from a segment you have already paid to acquire.

How do you define a lapsed customer for Shopify?

The definition depends on your purchase cycle. A lapsed customer for a subscription coffee brand (repurchase expected every 4 weeks) is very different from one for a high-end furniture store (repurchase cycle of 12-24 months).

The right way to define it is by calculating your average time between first and second purchase across your customer base. Klaviyo makes this straightforward: go to your customer profiles, filter by customers with two or more orders, and look at the average days between order one and order two.

A general framework that works for most consumer goods stores:

Status	Days since last purchase
Active	0-90 days
Cooling	91-150 days
At risk	151-270 days
Lapsed	271-365 days
Dormant	365+ days

Your win-back campaigns should start at the "at risk" stage, not once someone has been dormant for a year. At 270 days, the customer still has relatively fresh brand recall. At 365+, you are working much harder.

How do you segment lapsed customers in Klaviyo?

Create segments based on the last order date and engagement behaviour.

Segment 1: At-risk (90-180 days, single purchase)

Customers who bought once and have not returned. This is the most common and most important win-back segment. Single-purchase customers who never return are the biggest missed opportunity in most Shopify businesses.

Klaviyo segment logic:

Placed at least one order: true
Number of orders: equals 1
Last order date: is more than 90 days ago AND less than 180 days ago

Segment 2: At-risk (multi-purchase, gone quiet)

Customers who bought multiple times but have not purchased in longer than their typical repurchase window.

Klaviyo segment logic:

Number of orders: greater than 1
Last order date: is more than [your average purchase cycle x 1.5] days ago
Last order date: is less than 365 days ago

Segment 3: Dormant (365+ days)

These contacts are unlikely to convert with a standard win-back email. A small suppression or sunset campaign makes more sense here: offer them one final reason to re-engage, and if they do not, suppress them. This protects your sender reputation and list quality.

What should a win-back email sequence look like?

A three-email win-back sequence is the standard structure. The tone should shift from warm reconnection to clear incentive to final notice.

Email 1: The reconnect (send on day 1 of the sequence)

Subject line approach: "We miss you" style subject lines are overused and often ignored. Instead, reference something specific: the product they bought, a new arrival relevant to their purchase history, or a relevant update from your brand.

Content structure:

Acknowledge the gap without being awkward about it
Remind them of what they bought and why they chose you
Show them what is new or relevant since their last purchase
No hard sell, just a warm nudge back

This email should have no discount. Test the reconnect on its own merit first.

Email 2: The incentive (send 5-7 days after email 1 if no open or purchase)

If email 1 was opened but not converted, or not opened at all, email 2 introduces a concrete reason to return.

Options ranked by effectiveness:

A time-limited discount code (10-15% off, expires in 7 days)
Free shipping on their next order
A free gift with purchase
Loyalty points or credit if you run a loyalty scheme

Keep the copy short. The purpose of this email is the offer, not storytelling. Make the offer the focus and the call to action obvious.

Email 3: The last chance (send 5-7 days after email 2 if no purchase)

This is your final email in the sequence. Frame it as a last chance: the offer from email 2 is expiring, or you are about to clean up your list and you wanted to give them one final chance to stay connected.

A subject line like "Last chance: your discount expires today" consistently outperforms more subtle alternatives at this stage. The customer is either going to re-engage now or they are not going to.

If they do not open or click email 3, move them to a suppression candidate segment and include them in your next list hygiene review.

How do you personalise win-back campaigns beyond "we miss you"?

Personalisation is what separates a win-back campaign that feels like marketing from one that actually resonates.

Product-based personalisation

Reference the specific product category they bought from. If they purchased skincare, show new skincare arrivals. If they bought running shoes, highlight your latest footwear. Klaviyo's dynamic product blocks pull in personalised product recommendations based on purchase history.

Behavioural personalisation

If the customer browsed your site recently but did not purchase, you already know they still have some interest. Reference this: "We noticed you were browsing recently" is more relevant than a cold reconnect.

LTV-based personalisation

Your highest-value lapsed customers deserve more investment. Segment your win-back by historical spend and offer a more generous incentive to your top 20% of lapsed customers. The economics support it: if a customer historically spent £500, a £30 incentive to win them back is a rational investment.

How do you avoid damaging deliverability with win-back campaigns?

Lapsed customers are more likely to ignore emails, mark them as spam, or have invalid addresses. All of these behaviours hurt your sender reputation if you send at volume.

Send in batches, not a blast

Avoid sending your entire lapsed segment in one go. Stagger sends across several days. This reduces the impact of a high ignore or spam rate on any single day's sending.

Use a subdomain for re-engagement

Some advanced senders use a separate subdomain (such as reactivate.yourbrand.com) for win-back campaigns to isolate the deliverability impact from their main sending domain. This is worth considering if your lapsed segment is very large (10,000+ contacts).

Monitor complaint and open rates closely

After each win-back send, check your spam complaint rate in Klaviyo. If it exceeds 0.08%, pause the campaign and review the segment composition. You may have too many very old contacts in the audience.

Sunset before you suppress

A sunset policy means you give dormant contacts a final opportunity to re-engage before suppressing them permanently. A two-email sunset sequence with a subject line asking "Should we remove you from our list?" often gets a small but meaningful re-engagement rate, because the prospect of losing access prompts action in a way that promotional emails do not.

How do win-back campaigns connect to customer lifetime value?

Every customer you win back increases their lifetime value to your business. If your average repeat customer makes 4 purchases over their lifetime, winning back a lapsed one-time buyer and getting a second purchase puts them on the path to that higher LTV bracket.

The compounding effect is significant. A store doing £500,000 in annual revenue with a 20% repeat purchase rate and a successful win-back campaign that lifts that to 25% adds £25,000 in incremental revenue annually from a single automation.

For a broader look at building LTV, read How to Increase Customer Lifetime Value on Shopify.

Win-back campaigns also feed directly into your email flows for existing customers. For more on the full email automation stack, see Shopify Email Flows That Actually Drive Revenue.

Key actions to take now

Calculate your average time between first and second purchase in Klaviyo to define your lapsed threshold
Build three segments: at-risk single-purchase, at-risk multi-purchase, and dormant (365+ days)
Build a three-email win-back flow for at-risk segments: reconnect email (no discount), incentive email (time-limited offer), last chance email (expiry reminder)
Add product recommendation blocks personalised by purchase category to emails 1 and 2
Create a separate sunset sequence for dormant contacts before suppressing them
Monitor complaint rates after the first batch send and adjust segment composition if needed
Review win-back performance monthly and adjust the incentive amount based on conversion rate versus discount cost

Frequently Asked Questions

How long after a last purchase should you start a win-back campaign?

It depends on your purchase cycle, but as a general rule, start the sequence when a customer reaches 1.5 times their expected repurchase window. For most consumer goods stores, that is around 90-120 days after the last order. Starting too early means messaging people who were never lapsed. Starting too late means lower brand recall and worse conversion rates.

Should you always include a discount in a win-back campaign?

Not necessarily, especially in email 1. Test a reconnect email with no discount first. If your brand and products are strong, some lapsed customers will return without an incentive. Offering a discount to everyone trains customers to wait for one and erodes margin. Use discounts strategically, primarily in emails 2 and 3 for contacts who did not respond to the first email.

What is a good conversion rate for win-back campaigns?

Industry benchmarks vary widely by category, but a well-configured win-back flow typically converts 5-15% of the lapsed segment into a purchase over the full sequence. Single-purchase at-risk customers convert at the lower end; multi-purchase customers with a longer history convert at the higher end. Even a 5% conversion rate is significant when your lapsed segment is large.

Should you suppress customers who do not respond to a win-back campaign?

Yes. Contacts who do not open or click any email in your win-back sequence or sunset campaign should be suppressed from your main list. Continuing to send to them damages your deliverability, inflates your subscriber count (and your platform costs), and skews your analytics. Suppression is not deletion: the contact record remains in Klaviyo, but they will not receive further marketing emails.

Win-Back Campaigns for Shopify: Recovering Lapsed Customers