You have 400 customers on file. Over the past twelve months, 90 of them bought something. The other 310 are asleep. They trusted you once, sometimes three times, then nothing. No complaint, no cancellation: just silence.
This is the most poorly used asset in Swiss SMEs. A dormant customer already knows you, has already cleared the trust barrier, and has already given you their contact details. Winning them back costs far less than acquiring a stranger. Yet many companies would rather increase their advertising budget than write four emails to their own database.
Here is the complete method, step by step: identify the dormant accounts, build the win-back sequence, calibrate the return offer, and above all know when to stop.
1. Identify your inactive customers without guessing
"Inactive" is not a feeling, it is a calculation. And that calculation depends entirely on your purchase cycle.
Find your median purchase interval
Take every customer who has bought at least twice. Measure the number of days between each order, then take the median (not the average: two atypical large accounts will distort it). A Geneva accounting firm will find 365 days. A Lausanne beauty salon, 45 days. A van rental company, 120 days.
Working rule: a customer becomes dormant at 2 times the median interval, and is considered lost at 3 times. The beauty salon therefore triggers its win-back after 90 days without a visit. The accounting firm, after 24 months. Applying the same blanket "six months" rule to every industry is a very common mistake.
Segment before writing a single line
Sending the same message to your whole dormant base means burning your best resource. Split it into four groups:
- High-value dormant customers: more than CHF 2,000 in lifetime revenue, or three orders and up. These are the ones who fund the whole operation. Near-personal treatment.
- Regular dormant customers: two orders, average basket in line with your norm. The core target for an automated sequence.
- One-time buyers: a single order, often driven by a promotion. Real potential, but lower yield.
- False dormants: invalid address, duplicate record, someone who changed employer. Clean these out before any send, otherwise your bounce rate drags down the deliverability of every email you send.
Add a "likely reason for leaving" column whenever you know it: price, a delivery incident, a change of contact person, a completed project. That column determines the message.
2. The win-back sequence: four messages over twenty-eight days
A one-off reminder almost never works. What works is a short, well-spaced sequence with a logical progression. Here is the skeleton to follow.
Message 1 (day 0): checking in, no selling
Short subject line, human tone, zero promotion. "It has been a while, how are things on your end?" You remind them what they bought, share one useful piece of information, and ask an open question. The goal is to reopen the conversation. On a clean database, it is often the most opened message of the sequence.
Message 2 (day 7): what is new
What has changed since their last visit: a new service, new opening hours, a new range, a new team. Fictional example: a cleaning SME that contacts its dormant customers simply to announce an end-of-financial-year service for offices can win back some of those bookings within a few weeks.
Message 3 (day 17): the dated return offer
This is where, and only where, an incentive appears. It must be time-limited (10 to 14 days) and justified: "because you were a customer in 2024". A discount without a reason devalues your price; a discount with a reason protects your positioning.
Message 4 (day 28): the exit door
A short message announcing the end of the sequence and offering three choices: get back in touch, receive fewer messages, or unsubscribe. Counter-intuitively, this message often produces the best reply rate of the whole sequence, because it makes the decision easy.
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3. The return offer: incentivise without breaking your price
The temptation is to fire off a "30% off" and hope. Bad reflex: you buy back customers who would have returned at full price, and you train your database to buy only on promotion.
Rank your offers from the cheapest to the most expensive in terms of margin:
- The added service: an hour of consulting, free delivery, a free assessment. Low real cost, high perceived value. Always the first choice.
- The credit note: CHF 80 usable on any service from CHF 400. The customer has to spend to benefit, so your average basket stays protected.
- Priority access: a reserved slot, an early batch, a trial of a new service. Zero cost, strong status effect on high-value customers.
- The straight discount: 15 to 20% maximum, only on the first returning order, never on a subscription.
A useful benchmark: if your gross margin is 55% and your average basket CHF 600, a 20% discount costs you CHF 120 for a customer who may bring you CHF 2,400 over three years. The calculation is always made on lifetime value, never on the isolated order. If you are unsure about your thresholds, compare with the structure of our marketing support quotes: the logic is identical, you pay for a cycle, not for a transaction.
4. The right channels, in the right order
Email remains the foundation: almost zero cost, fully trackable, non-intrusive. On a properly segmented dormant base, expect decent open rates but modest reactivation: winning back a few customers is often enough to make the operation pay.
WhatsApp comes second, and only for customers who have already written to you through that channel. Very high read rates, but very low tolerance for persistence: one message, never two.
The phone is still unbeatable above CHF 3,000 in customer value. Ten well-prepared calls beat 500 generic emails. And social media acts as a passive reminder: your dormant customers should see your name again without you contacting them, which is exactly what consistent content production in Geneva makes possible.
5. Knowing when to stop
This is the part almost nobody applies, and it is the one that protects your sender reputation.
- After the full sequence with not a single open: remove the contact from your commercial sends. A base of 300 engaged contacts is worth more than 2,000 ghosts pushing you into spam folders.
- After three annual sequences with no purchase: archive. The probability of conversion becomes very low.
- At the first negative signal: unsubscribe, complaint, curt reply. You stop immediately, on every channel.
- When the cost exceeds the return: if reactivating a one-time buyer costs you CHF 90 for CHF 60 of margin, that segment is not profitable. Move the budget to your high-value dormant customers.
Stopping is not a failure, it is a management decision. An archived contact can always come back on their own; a harassed contact never will.
What it actually returns
Fictional example: take a Swiss services SME with 520 customers, of which 340 are dormant, an average basket of CHF 640 and a gross margin of 55%.
- Database cleaning: 40 invalid contacts removed, leaving 300 targets.
- Four-email sequence, 3.2% reactivation rate: 10 customers back.
- Immediate revenue: 10 × 640 = CHF 6,400, or CHF 3,520 in margin.
- Cost: roughly CHF 40 of sending tool plus half a day of setup.
- Deferred effect: of those 10 customers, 6 buy again within the year, adding close to CHF 3,800.
This kind of operation is built once, then runs by itself. The trigger ("X days without an order") launches the sequence automatically, and you no longer have to think about it. That is precisely the territory of AI automation for your customer follow-ups: the system handles detection and sending, you keep the high-value calls.
Where to start this week
Do not try to build everything at once. Export your customer file, calculate your median interval, isolate the 50 highest-value dormant accounts, and write message 1 to them by hand. You will get replies before you have automated anything, and those replies will tell you exactly what to write in the full sequence.
Win-back is not a campaign, it is a habit. A quarterly review of your database, a sequence running in the background, and a clear rule for stopping: that is all it takes to recover, every year, a share of revenue your competitors leave sleeping.