Dormant client winback: how the 60/90/120-day flow works

The dormant winback flow pays for the subscription faster than anything else in the product. Industry data is brutal: 30-40% of your active clients silently churn every year, mostly because nobody texted them. The flow handles the texting for you — context-aware, personalized, calibrated for tone.

The default schedule

1. Day 60 silent → friendly check-in. "Hey! Just making sure nothing slipped. Got a Tuesday 3pm if you want it."
2. Day 90 silent → personalized reactivation with their last service + an open slot. "Last time you did a fill — usually 21 days between cycles, so you're well past due. Thursday 11am works?"
3. Day 120 silent → soft offer. A small percentage off, or a free add-on, or a friendly nudge. (You decide what — defaults to a friendly nudge with no discount.)
4. Day 180 silent → final outreach, personally framed. "Maya wanted me to reach out — she's open Thursday if you've been thinking about it."
5. After 240 days no response → move to the quarterly newsletter, stop active outreach.

Each step waits for a response before triggering the next. If the client replies to the day-60 text and books, the rest of the sequence is skipped — they're not dormant anymore.

Why the cadence matters more than the copy

Most operators reach out to dormant clients in bursts ("I should email everyone who hasn't been in for 6 months"). The bursts have terrible conversion (~3%) because they feel like a blast. The drip cadence has 18-31% conversion because each message arrives at a moment when the client is statistically likely to be thinking about you again.

Vertical-tuned defaults: lash uses 21/45/75/120-day intervals (because lash cycles are tight). Med spa uses 60/90/120/180. Dental uses 90/180/270/365. The agent picks the right schedule for your vertical automatically.

How the message is personalized

Each text is generated live, not from a template. The agent looks at:

• The client's last service with you
• The typical cycle length for that service
• Their booking pattern (morning person vs. evening person)
• Open slots that match their pattern
• Their preferred day of week (if they have a pattern)
• Anything they've told you (e.g. "I'm pregnant" notes get the message suppressed for 9 months automatically — see PHI-safe mode)

The output reads like the operator wrote it. Operators routinely tell us clients reply "oh I missed you too!" — they don't realize it's automated.

How to tune it

• Settings > Automations > Dormant winback → toggle on/off (default: on after day 30 of being live)
• Aggressive mode: starts at day 45 instead of 60. Useful for high-cycle verticals (nails, lash).
• Conservative mode: starts at day 90. Useful for high-trust verticals (dental, vet) where premature outreach feels off.
• Exclude tag: any client tagged "do not market" or "deceased" or "moved away" is skipped automatically.

How to size the opportunity on your own numbers

Rather than quoting someone else's results, run it on your own book — the workflow reports this figure before it sends anything. Count clients who are overdue against their own historical visit cadence, multiply by your average ticket, and apply a conversion rate that decays with how long they have been gone. Outreach at day 60 converts far better than at day 180, which is the entire argument for automating it: the window that works is the one nobody has time to catch.

When to be careful

Two cases where you want to tune down: (1) bereavement — if you know a client lost someone, tag them and the agent skips. (2) cultural fit — some markets see frequent outreach as pushy. Conservative mode is the right starting point for those.