Latest / The Retention Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Email, SMS, and Loyalty for Repeat Customers / How a Supplement Brand Uses Email to Recover Lapsed Customers
Transcript
- Lucas: So we're going to talk about re-engaging customers who've gone quiet. And not with a generic 'we miss you' blast — I mean a proper, timed, multi-step email sequence. Luna: I feel like every brand talks about re-engagement, but very few actually show the numbers. Do we have a specific case today? Lucas: Yeah. Vital Nutrients — a mid-size supplement brand, not a household name, but they run a tight operation. They had about 40,000 lapsed customers — people who hadn't purchased in 90 days or more. And they designed a three-email sequence to bring some of them back. Luna: Three emails. So not a one-and-done. What was the first one? Lucas: First email went out at day 90 of inactivity. Subject line: 'We've noticed you haven't reordered.' Clean, direct, no discount. Just a reminder that their previous subscription had paused and a link to reorder. Open rate was 22 percent, click-through rate about 3 percent. Luna: Three percent is not huge. But I guess that's the filter — only the most engaged click through. Lucas: Exactly. They didn't expect that first email to convert many. It's a gentle nudge. The real work starts with email two, which went out on day 100. Subject line: 'Here's 15 percent off your next order.' Now you've got an offer. Luna: Fifteen percent — that's enough to feel like an incentive but not so deep that it trains people to wait for discounts. Luna: Nice. And the third email? Lucas: Day 120. This one was a 'last chance' style — subject line: 'Your 15 percent off expires soon.' But they also included a testimonial from a customer who had come back after a long gap. Open rate 25 percent, click-through 5 percent, conversion 3.2 percent. Luna: So total recovery rate across the three emails? Lucas: About 12 percent of the lapsed base. Roughly 4,800 customers came back within 60 days. And the average order value was actually 8 percent higher than their typical returning customer — because many of them had been buying a single product before, but the re-engagement email featured a bundle. Luna: That's smart — they didn't just offer a discount, they upsold. Did they segment at all, or was this a blanket send to everyone over 90 days? Lucas: They segmented by previous purchase frequency. Customers who had ordered three or more times in the past got a slightly different version of email two — 15 percent off but with a free shipping threshold. One-time purchasers got the straight 15 percent. The multi-purchase segment converted at 6 percent versus 3 percent for one-timers. Luna: So past behavior really predicts response. Makes sense. Lucas: Absolutely. And the interesting thing is they tested SMS for this same audience in a separate cohort. SMS had higher open rates — like 80 percent — but the conversion rate was lower, around 2.5 percent. And the cost per message added up. They decided email was the better channel for re-engagement, at least for this brand. Luna: I wonder if that's because supplement buyers are often older and more email-comfortable. Or maybe the discount felt more legitimate in an email than a text. Lucas: Probably both. But the key takeaway for me is the structure: three touches over 30 days, increasing specificity, a clear offer, and segmentation by loyalty. That's a repeatable framework. Luna: And you're not just recovering a sale — you're resetting the clock on their customer lifetime value. Lucas: Exactly. If the average customer's lifetime value is $200, and you recover 12 percent of a 40,000-person lapsed base, that's potentially $960,000 in recovered revenue. Luna: And that's not counting the word of mouth or future repeat purchases from those re-engaged customers. Lucas: Right. So the math works. But I want to push back on something — offering a discount to lapsed customers. Doesn't that condition them to wait for the next re-engagement email? Luna: I think that's a real risk. But Vital Nutrients mitigated it by only sending the re-engagement sequence once. They didn't make it a recurring thing. And they set a clear expiration on the offer. Lucas: Yeah, the expiration is critical. And they suppressed anyone who redeemed from future re-engagement campaigns for at least six months. So you don't get re-targeted again next quarter. Luna: That's disciplined. A lot of brands would just keep hammering the same list every 90 days. Lucas: And then you train people to lapse on purpose. So the smart play is to treat re-engagement as a one-time reset, not a permanent channel. Luna: So what's the one thing a smaller brand with a lapsed list of, say, 1,000 customers should take from this? Lucas: I'd say: start with a simple two-email sequence. First email, no offer, just a reminder. Second email, a modest discount with a deadline. Measure the recovery rate. If it's above 5 percent, you're doing well. Then gradually add a third email or introduce segmentation. Luna: That feels actionable. And it doesn't require expensive tools — most email platforms can handle that. Lucas: Exactly. And honestly, if you're not re-engaging lapsed customers, you're leaving money on the table. They already know your brand. They just need a reason to come back. Luna: I think that's a great place to leave it. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna. And if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, a few listeners help keep this show ad-free through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small thing that makes a big difference. Back to the topic — one last thought on Vital Nutrients: they also tracked the average order value of re-engaged customers six months later, and it was 90 percent of their original average. So these customers didn't just come back for one discounted order — they stuck around. Luna: That's the real win. Not just the re-engagement, but the long-term retention. Lucas: Exactly. That's the metric that matters.