Win back lapsed customers

Kite defines "lapsed" from how often your own customers buy, not from a generic rule like 90 days. A customer is lapsed when they've gone noticeably longer than usual without ordering, and "usual" is very different for a coffee roaster than for a furniture store.

Kite reads your order history in Shopify, or your subscriptions and payments in Stripe, and works out how long your repeat customers typically wait between purchases. A common starting line is about twice that gap. Say your repeat coffee buyers reorder roughly every five weeks. A customer who hasn't ordered in ten weeks has missed two orders and is lapsed. A customer who hasn't ordered in a year is a different case, and Kite treats them as one.

For a subscription business, the line is clearer. A canceled subscription is a lapsed customer. Kite searches your Stripe subscriptions by when they were canceled, so it can tell a customer who left last week from one who left last spring.

Kite proposes the line, shows you how many customers fall on each side of it, and lets you adjust it before anything else happens.

Kite pulls the list of lapsed customers from your store or billing records and splits it into groups that need different messages. A customer who bought once and never returned needs a different email from a loyal buyer who ordered a dozen times and then went quiet.

The groups usually come from three things your records already hold:

• How long they've been gone. Recently lapsed customers still remember you, and long-gone customers need more of a reason to look again.
• What they bought. Someone who bought your dark roast cares about what's new in dark roasts, not about your tea line.
• What they were worth. A customer who spent $600 over two years justifies more effort, and possibly a better offer, than one who spent $25 once.

Kite then marks each group where your campaign can find it. In Shopify, it tags the customers, so a group like last winter's holiday-blend buyers stays visible in your store and any email app that reads Shopify tags can reach them. In Mailchimp, it can tag contacts or build a segment. In Resend, it groups contacts into a segment, and in HubSpot it reads the lists and segments your team already keeps.

Before any group is final, Kite removes the people who shouldn't get the email. It leaves out anyone your email tool marks as unsubscribed or suppressed, anyone your CRM marks that way, and anyone who asked in an earlier reply to stop hearing from you.

The best offer for a lapsed customer is a good reason to come back, and that's often not a discount. Many customers drifted away for an ordinary reason: they got busy, they found a substitute, or the product didn't quite fit. A discount doesn't answer any of those. A new product, a fixed problem, or a reminder of what they liked often does.

Kite chooses the reason from what it knows about your business and about each group:

• Something new. If you've launched products since they last ordered, that's the first thing they haven't seen.
• A fixed complaint. If customers used to complain about slow shipping and you've switched carriers, say so plainly.
• What they liked. For a loyal buyer, a reminder of the product they reordered most can be enough.
• An offer. A discount or credit makes sense for customers who were worth a lot, or as a final email after the first ones go unanswered.

When an offer is right, Kite sets it up in the tool where customers redeem it. In Shopify, it adds unique codes to a discount you've already created, up to 100 at a time, so each lapsed customer gets their own code and you can see exactly which ones were used. It can also issue a gift card to a specific customer, which reads more like a thank-you than a sale for your best past buyers. In Stripe, Kite reads your existing coupons and promotion codes and how often each one has been redeemed, so it can tell you which past offers actually brought people back.

Kite only offers what you've approved, and it gives the offer a true reason, such as a new season or the anniversary of a customer's first order. It doesn't invent a deadline to create urgency.

A win-back campaign works best as a short sequence of two or three emails, each with a different job. Kite maps the sequence before it writes: when each email lands, what the reader has or hasn't done by then, and the one thing that email is for.

A typical sequence for a lapsed coffee buyer looks like this:

1. The reminder. Sent when they cross the lapsed line. It opens on what they used to order and what's new since then, and it has one button to shop.
2. The question. Sent about a week later to people who didn't buy. It asks what changed, in a sentence or two, because their answer tells you more than a second sales pitch would.
3. The offer. Sent to the customers worth it, if the first two didn't bring them back. It carries their unique code and a real reason for it.

Each email gives the reader something the one before it didn't. If two emails could swap their bodies without anyone noticing, Kite merges them into one.

Kite writes in your brand voice and often favors a plain email signed by a real person, because a short note from the owner of a small coffee roaster reads like a letter, not an ad. The subject line says plainly what's inside, such as "The dark roast you liked has a new sibling," rather than a vague "We miss you." Every email closes with a clear way to opt out. Kite reviews every draft for wording that sounds machine-written before you see it.

Send the first win-back email shortly after a customer passes the point where they'd normally have bought again. That's when they still remember you and haven't fully settled on a replacement. Waiting a year makes the email easier to ignore.

That's why Kite ties the timing to your customers' own buying rhythm rather than a calendar date. For a coffee subscriber who reorders every five weeks, the first email goes out at around ten weeks. For a skincare customer who restocks every three months, it might go out at five or six months.

Kite can send a one-time campaign to everyone who's already lapsed, and it can also keep the program running. In Resend, it builds an automation that starts the sequence when a contact is marked as lapsed. In Mailchimp, it can start a Customer Journey for a specific contact when the journey begins with an API trigger your team has set up. Kite can also check your orders every week on a schedule, find the customers who crossed the line that week, and bring you the new group to approve.

Kite measures a win-back campaign by how many lapsed customers bought again, not by how many opened the email. Opens tell you whether the subject line worked. Orders tell you whether the campaign worked.

After the campaign goes out, Kite reads the results in two places. From your email tool, it reads opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and, in Mailchimp with a connected store, the orders and revenue each campaign brought in. From Shopify, it reads the orders that came in from the people it emailed, and because each customer had a unique code, it can see which offers were used. For a subscription business, it checks Stripe for customers who started a new subscription after the campaign.

That turns into a recommendation for the next round. If customers who got the "what's new" email came back at twice the rate of those who got the discount, Kite will suggest leading with news next time and saving the discount. Kite records what worked in your knowledge base, so the next win-back campaign starts from your own results.

Kite also tells you who didn't come back. Customers who ignored the whole sequence and haven't opened anything in months are hurting your email deliverability, the measure of how reliably your emails reach inboxes instead of spam. Kite can suggest removing them from your regular sends, and in Resend it can add anyone who asks to stop hearing from you to the suppression list.