Cohort notes before you rewrite a win-back path
Re-engagement work fails early when every quiet contact is treated as the same kind of silence. A shopper quiet for forty days after a purchase is not the same as someone silent for nine months after a single browse.
Write cohort rules before drafting prompts. Define dormant windows, prior purchase depth, and last meaningful reply. Those rules decide whether a prompt should remind, invite preference updates, or offer a clean exit.
Measure response inside each cohort rather than across the whole dormant pool. A modest reply rate in a deep-dormant group can still be a strong result if unsubscribes stay contained.
Keep one control group that receives no prompt for the same window. Without that comparison, seasonal return traffic gets credited to the message path by accident.
After the cycle, retire prompts that mainly produce unsubscribes and keep the ones that earn preference updates even when purchases stay flat. Preference updates often precede later purchase returns by several weeks.
Tags: re-engagement, cohorts