When you archive inactive contacts, you stop paying for them. But some of them may still come back to your store. The Customer reactivation flow sends archived contacts 2 emails and gives them a chance to return – and meanwhile, you no longer pay for them.
Who has access? The flow is available to all Clients who use the Contact Manager (beta feature). You can read more about the Contact Manager in the article Billed contact base – pay only for contacts that actually work.
How the flow works
When | What happens |
Day 0 | The contact goes to the archive. You stop paying for it right away. |
Day 7 | We send the 1st email: “It's been a while”, with your store's bestsellers. |
Day 30 | We send the 2nd email: a short goodbye with an invitation to come back (“Is this goodbye?”). |
When does a contact become active again? When it opens or clicks an email, visits your store or places an order. Such a contact returns to your active contacts and doesn't get any more emails from this series.
You also don't pay for archived contacts while we're sending them reactivation emails.
Who gets the reactivation emails
The emails go to contacts archived:
in the Contact Manager – with the slider or by archiving a selected segment,
through contact hygienization.
The emails don't go to:
contacts unsubscribed from emails,
contacts with a permanent delivery error (hard bounce),
contacts without an email address,
contacts archived for other reasons, e.g. after a series of delivery errors.
How to turn on Customer reactivation
You can turn on the flow in three ways.
1. While archiving in the Contact Manager
When you archive contacts and the flow is off, you'll see the “Win back some of the customers you're archiving” window. In it, you'll find:
a preview of both emails with their send dates,
an estimate of how many customers may come back and how much revenue they may bring (usually around 10% of archived customers come back, and we calculate revenue based on your store's average order value),
the “Also send them to X contacts archived earlier” option (more below).
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Choose one of the options:
Schedule emails – we archive the contacts and turn on the flow. From now on, every contact archived in the Contact Manager gets 2 emails.
Edit emails – you go to the flow, where you can review and change the email content before turning it on.
Archive without emails – we archive the contacts without sending anything.
After you schedule them, the archive tile shows how many contacts we'll email and when the first email goes out.
Once the flow is on, you won't see this window when you archive contacts again. The confirmation window only shows the message: “These contacts get the reactivation emails”.
2. In automation flows
Go to Ready Flows and open the Customer reactivation flow.
If you have archived contacts that can still get the emails, you'll see their number in a message at the top of the page.
Click Run, then Turn on in the “Turn on Customer reactivation?” window.
Contacts archived earlier
When you turn on the flow, you can also send the emails to contacts you archived before the flow was on. We'll skip:
unsubscribed people,
contacts with a permanent delivery error (hard bounce),
contacts that got emails from this flow in the last 180 days.
These contacts get the same 2 emails – the first 7 days after you turn on the flow, the second after 30 days.
Email content
We prepare both emails automatically for your store:
Email 1 (day 7) – “It's been a while”: shows the products your customers choose most often, and a “Go to the store” button.
Email 2 (day 30) – “Is this goodbye?”: a short, final message without products, with a “Visit the store” button.
You can review and change the content in the Customer reactivation flow in Ready Flows.
Turning off the flow
You can turn off the flow at any time. An email goes out only if the flow is on on the send date – after you turn it off, scheduled emails won't be sent. The contacts stay in the archive.
Frequently asked questions
Do I pay for contacts you send reactivation emails to?
No. You stop paying for a contact the moment it's archived, including while the emails are being sent.
Will archived contacts get my newsletters and other automations?
No. We send archived contacts only the Customer reactivation emails. They'll start getting other messages only once they become active again.
What if I don't want a contact to get the emails?
When archiving, choose Archive without emails. If the flow is already on, turn it off before archiving.
Can I restore a contact manually?
Yes. You can restore an archived contact at any time. Read more in the article Archived status in edrone.
How is this flow different from the earlier version?
The earlier version sent inactive customers 5 emails and only then archived them, so you paid for those contacts the whole time. Now we archive first, and then send 2 emails.