Win-back Campaign

A win-back campaign is a targeted effort to bring back users who have been inactive for a defined period or who have already left the product.

It runs in four steps: set the threshold that marks a user as lapsed, build the list from that threshold, reach out by email, SMS or push, and measure the return. The critical mistake happens at the last step, because a share of lapsed users come back on their own; crediting every returner to the campaign reports the product's natural resurrection as a campaign result. The honest approach is holding back a control group from the same list and comparing the two return rates. The second point is that audience size and quality depend far more on the threshold than on the message, since a short threshold fills the list with people who had not actually left.