A dormant customer is not a lost customer. In almost every case they are a distracted customer — a customer who intended to come back and forgot. The job of a win-back automation is not to convince them of anything. It is to remind them.
Why 28 days
The 28-day window is not arbitrary. It's long enough that a typical customer's visit cadence has measurably broken. It's short enough that the business is still in recent memory. In the HardCards data set, a push notification fired at exactly 28 days of silence converts at 14%. A push fired at 60 days converts at 4%.
What the message should say
The highest-converting message is not a discount. It is a reminder that the reward balance is still waiting. "You're 3 stamps from a free drink" outperforms "20% off your next visit" by a factor of 2.3 in the data we've run.
