Marketing Strategy
Winning Back Customers: A Re-engagement Success Story
Winning customers is hard; keeping them is harder. Skincare brand Crabtree & Evelyn used one "We Miss You" email to wake dormant subscribers and won back 1,054 contacts — showing how email opens, builds, maintains and restores relationships.
Winning a new customer is hard; keeping one is harder. Acquiring a new customer often costs several times more than retaining an existing one. So when subscribers stop opening your emails, don't let them slip away quietly — wake them up. Here is a real success story.
The case: how a skincare brand re-engaged dormant subscribers
Skincare brand Crabtree & Evelyn noticed a group of customers who hadn't engaged with its emails for two straight months (April and May). The company decided to re-activate these dormant contacts — while cleaning the unresponsive list to protect its sender reputation.
One "We Miss You" email
- A hero visual reading "IS THIS GOODBYE?" over a soft lavender background — gentle, but it lands
- Warm copy that apologises for the emails they hadn't been able to open
- No pressure, no hard sell — just handing the choice back to the customer
Three simple choices
- Stay subscribed
- Visit the site to update their details
- Shop now, with free shipping
The result
This single email won back 1,054 contacts.
Cleaning the dormant list didn't just recover customers — it kept the sender reputation healthy, so future emails land in the inbox more reliably.
The takeaway
Email marketing isn't just a promotion tool; it can open, build, maintain and restore customer relationships. Retention is harder than acquisition — but with the right message at the right moment, sleeping customers will come back.