Template
Win-back email
Two emails to an account that has gone quiet, and a check between them so the second never reaches somebody who already came back.
Your Product <[email protected]>
Still worth keeping your account open?
Two months quiet. One question, one answer either way.
Your Product
Still worth keeping this open?
Your account has been quiet since April. That is usually one of two things: the product did not fit, or the person who set it up moved on and nobody picked it back up.
Either is fine, and you do not owe us an explanation. But if it was the second one, the workspace is still there with your data in it, and it takes about a minute to pick it up.
Open your workspace
If it was the first, reply with one word about what was missing. That is more useful to us than the account is, and we will close it for you.
Alex, Your Product
If you would rather hear nothing at all, unsubscribe below and this is the last one.
Your Product Inc, 1 Example Street
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The blueprint
Rebuild it anywhere
Subject lines (5 options)
- Still worth keeping your account open?shown above
- Your workspace is still here
- Two months quiet. Should we close it?
- Did we lose you somewhere?
- One question about your account
When it fires
- Trigger
- Fires on a tag your backend adds when an account crosses your definition of quiet: no session, no API call, or no send for a period you choose.
- Timing
- Sixty to ninety days of inactivity for a weekly-use product, longer for something seasonal. Send the second email eight to ten days after the first, and never more than two.
- Conditions
- Before step two, check whether they came back. Any session, any click, or a re-subscribe means the sequence ends there, and sending the second email anyway is the mistake that makes a win-back read as a machine.
- Anybody who has already unsubscribed, bounced or complained is out of the sequence entirely, before the first email, not after it.
- If neither email is opened, stop mailing that address on marketing streams rather than trying a third angle.
The body, block by block
The observation, stated plainly
Name the gap. "Quiet since April" is a fact the reader can check, and it makes the email obviously about their account rather than a campaign that happened to reach them.
Two explanations, both acceptable
Offer the reasons out loud, including the one where the product was wrong for them. A win-back that assumes the reader wants to come back reads as not listening, and it is the assumption that makes these emails feel desperate.
What still exists
The account, the data, the settings. Most quiet accounts are not decisions, they are interruptions, and the cost of restarting is the thing the reader is overestimating.
One low-effort action
Straight back into the workspace, signed in. Not a survey, not a call, not a discount. Effort is what stopped them, so the ask has to be smaller than the thing they abandoned.
An honest exit
Offer to close the account or to stop emailing. It costs you the addresses that were never coming back and keeps the reputation of the ones that were, which is the trade this email exists to make.
A visible unsubscribe
Not the footer link, an actual sentence. This audience has the highest complaint rate of anything you send, and a complaint costs more than an unsubscribe does.
The rest of the sequence
Day 0
The email above. One question, two acceptable answers, one link.
Subject Still worth keeping your account open?
Day 8, only if they have not come back
The closing note. Say the account will be archived or that this is the last email, then do what you said.
Subject Last one, then we will leave it
When to use it
When an account has been quiet long enough that the silence means something, and you have a definition of quiet that is specific to your product. Sixty days of inactivity is a reasonable default for something used weekly and completely wrong for a tool people open at quarter end.
There is a second reason to run it, and it is the one that pays for itself: a win-back is how you find out which addresses are dead. Every list accumulates people who left the company, changed roles, or stopped caring, and continuing to send to them is what drags open rates down and sender reputation with them. The sequence gives those addresses one clear chance to respond and then takes them out of the marketing stream. Trimming a list feels like losing something. Sending to an address that has ignored ninety emails is the thing that actually costs you, because mailbox providers read it.
SendHeron runs a win-back on its own list, and the re-engagement check between the two steps is in it for the reason above: the first version did not have one.
What kills this email
Sending step two to somebody who already came back
They logged in the day after the first email, and the second one arrives asking why they have been quiet. One condition between the steps prevents it, and without that condition the sequence undoes its own result.
Leading with a discount
A discount answers a price objection, and inactivity is almost never a price objection. It also teaches the part of your list that pays attention that going quiet is how you get a better rate.
Writing it as though they owe you something
"We miss you" and "you have not been around" put the reader in the wrong. The two-explanations opening does the same job without it, and it gets replies from people who would otherwise have said nothing.
Running four emails at a disengaged list
This is the most complaint-prone mail you send, to the audience least likely to want it. Two is the ceiling. A third one buys almost nothing and costs the deliverability of everything else you send.
When not to send it
Do not send it to an address that unsubscribed, bounced or complained. Re-engaging a suppressed address is the clearest possible signal to a mailbox provider that a sender does not respect its own list, and it is worth checking the suppression state before the send rather than trusting the segment.
Do not send it as the first thing after a long silence of your own. If you have not emailed a list in a year, the win-back is a volume spike on a cold list, and it will land in spam whatever it says. Warm the engaged part of the list first.
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Private beta
Win-back email, drafted from your website
SendHeron reads your website and drafts a suite like this one, in your product's own words, ready to edit. Private beta, and we onboard a few teams at a time.