Latest / The Retention Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Email, SMS, and Loyalty for Repeat Customers / How a Skincare Brand Uses SMS to Win Back Lapsed Customers
Transcript
- Lucas: Alright, let's talk about the customer everyone forgets about until it's too late — the lapsed buyer. Luna: The one who just stopped showing up. Lucas: Exactly. And I want to look at a specific brand that did something smart about it — a mid-size skincare company called Nourish & Bloom. They're not a household name, but they've been around for about six years, and they built a decent-sized email list. But like a lot of DTC brands, they had this problem: customers would buy once or twice, then disappear. Luna: Typical for skincare — people try a product, maybe they like it, maybe they switch to something else. The repeat purchase rate is notoriously low. Lucas: Right. So Nourish & Bloom decided to stop just hoping those customers would come back and actually build a win-back sequence. And they chose SMS as the channel — not email. Luna: Why SMS? I feel like most brands default to email for win-back. Lucas: That's exactly why they went the other way. They looked at their data and found that for customers who hadn't purchased in 90 days or more, email open rates had dropped to around 12 percent. But SMS open rates — even for the same lapsed audience — were over 80 percent. So the logic was: if someone's already ignoring your emails, why send another one? Luna: Makes sense. You need a different channel to break through. Lucas: So they designed a three-touch sequence. First message goes out on day 90 of inactivity. It's a simple text — under 160 characters — offering 15 percent off their next purchase. No frills, just a code and a link. Luna: And that converted? Lucas: It did. About 4.2 percent of the people who received that first text ended up making a purchase. That might not sound huge, but when you compare it to the nearly zero percent they were getting from email at that stage, it's meaningful. Luna: Right. And it's a low-cost intervention — 15 percent off is pretty standard. Lucas: Exactly. Then on day 120, if they still haven't purchased, they get a second message. This time it's free shipping — no minimum. Different incentive, same short format. Luna: Why change the incentive? Why not just increase the discount? Lucas: Good question. Nourish & Bloom found that for this audience, the barrier wasn't price — it was the friction of checking out. A lot of lapsed customers mentioned that they just didn't want to go through the process. So free shipping removed that friction. And it converted at about 3.8 percent — slightly lower than the first, but still solid. Luna: So they're testing different hooks, not just stacking discounts. Lucas: Exactly. Then the third message, on day 180 — the last chance before they basically write off that customer. This one offers a free full-size product with any purchase. It's a higher-value incentive, but it's also the smallest audience — only about 30 percent of the original lapsed segment ever even gets to this point. Luna: Because the earlier messages already reactivated some. Lucas: Right. The third message converted at about 5.1 percent — the highest of the three. So the people who made it to 180 days were harder to reach, but once you gave them a compelling reason, they came back. Luna: I'm curious about the segmentation. Did they treat every lapsed customer the same? Lucas: No, and this is key. They segmented by previous spend level. Customers who had spent over $100 in total got the same sequence, but with slightly elevated incentives — the first discount was 20 percent instead of 15, the free shipping was expedited, and the free product was a higher-tier item. The higher-spend segment converted at nearly double the rate of the lower-spend segment. Luna: So the ROI on those bigger offers was actually better because the customers were more valuable. Lucas: Exactly. And they also A/B tested message length. They tried the same offer in two versions — one under 160 characters, one around 300 characters with a bit more context, like 'We miss you! Here's a special offer just for you...' Turns out the shorter messages converted 30 percent better. Luna: Which makes sense for SMS. People scan texts quickly. If they have to read a paragraph, they might just swipe it away. Lucas: Right. So the winning format was: one sentence, one offer, one link. That's it. Luna: What about frequency? Did they worry about annoying people who didn't opt in to SMS? Lucas: They only sent to customers who had previously opted into SMS — usually during checkout. So these were people who had already said yes to texts. And they capped the sequence at three messages total. After the third, if there was no purchase, the customer was moved to a 'long-term lapsed' segment and only got a quarterly email — not another text. Luna: That's a smart way to respect the channel. You don't want to burn your SMS list. Lucas: And the overall results — over a six-month period, this sequence reactivated about 11 percent of the lapsed audience. That might not sound massive, but for a brand with a lapsed base of 50,000 customers, that's 5,500 repeat purchases they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Luna: And the revenue from those purchases more than covered the cost of the incentives, I assume. Lucas: They calculated a 6-to-1 return on ad spend — or rather, return on win-back spend. So every dollar spent on discounts and free shipping brought in six dollars in revenue. Pretty solid. Luna: I think the lesson here is that win-back isn't about nagging — it's about giving the right offer at the right time on the right channel. Lucas: And testing. They tested the timing, the offer, the channel, the message length. They didn't just copy a template. Luna: You know, listening to this, I'm reminded that a lot of the marketing insights we dig into on this show come from real brands trying stuff and sharing what they learned. If these conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work — that's exactly why we do this. Lucas: Yeah, and we keep the show ad-free because we want to focus purely on the strategy, not sell you anything. If you find value in that and want to help keep it going, listeners can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: It genuinely helps us keep producing these deep dives. And now, back to the skincare brand — one more thing I wanted to ask about the timing. Lucas: Sure, what's on your mind? Luna: They chose day 90, day 120, day 180. Why not day 60 or day 365? Was there data behind those specific intervals? Lucas: There was. They looked at their purchase history and found that the average repurchase window for active customers was about 45 days. So by day 90, someone has missed two repurchase cycles. That felt like the right moment to intervene — not too early to be annoying, but not too late that they've forgotten the brand entirely. Luna: And the 180-day mark — that's basically six months. I imagine by then most brands have written them off. Lucas: Exactly. And the data showed that after 180 days, the likelihood of a customer ever coming back organically dropped below 2 percent. So that third message was really the last attempt. After that, they focus on new customer acquisition instead. Luna: So the whole sequence is designed to catch people before they're truly gone. Lucas: Right. And one more detail — they also tracked the incremental lift. They compared customers who received the SMS sequence to a control group who didn't get any win-back communication. The control group had a natural reactivation rate of about 1.5 percent over six months. The SMS group had 11 percent. So the campaign drove almost 10 percentage points of lift. Luna: That's a clear signal that the messages themselves are working, not just coincidence. Lucas: And it's a good reminder that lapsed customers are not a lost cause. They just need a reason to come back — and the right channel to deliver it. Luna: So if you're a brand with a decent-sized lapsed base, what's the one thing you should take away from this? Lucas: Start with your data. Find out when your customers typically lapse, test a short SMS sequence with a clear incentive, and measure the lift against a control group. Don't try to do everything at once — just three texts, 160 characters each, spaced out over a few months. Luna: And don't forget to segment by spend. That made a big difference for Nourish & Bloom. Lucas: Absolutely. Alright, that's our episode. Thanks for listening.