Watch: How to win back dormant customers by cohort in SalesThumb (0:43)
Where to find it and what it's for
Win-back lives inside the Growth & Marketing hub, not on its own rail item. From the left nav, open Run the shop → Growth & Marketing, then click the Win-back card ("Find dormant customers and bring them back").
That takes you to /app/growth/winback — a dedicated page for one job: finding customers who've gone quiet and getting a templated SMS in front of them. The {firstName} placeholder in your text gets swapped for each recipient's actual first name right before it sends.
Sends go out by SMS through Twilio, from the server in one batch.
The three cohorts
The page always shows three fixed dormancy buckets, built from how many days it's been since each customer's most recent appointment: Drifting (90-180 days) — described in-app as "Customers about to forget you exist. Cheap to reactivate.";
Lapsed (6-12 months), where the copy suggests you'll need a real discount or scarcity angle to bring them back; and Churned (12+ months) — a longer shot, but the app notes these customers tend to have higher LTV when they do return.
Clicking a cohort card both filters the recipient table below and pulls in that cohort's suggested message —
each cohort has a different pre-written template and offer baked in (a complimentary inspection + discounted windshield strip for Drifting, $50 off for Lapsed, 20% off for Churned), all ending in "Reply STOP to opt out."
Who gets left out automatically
The recipient list isn't just "everyone with an old last-visit date." Before a customer lands in any cohort, they need a phone number on file, no SMS opt-out flag set, no open invoice balance, and at least one paid invoice in their history (zero-LTV customers are excluded entirely).
One side effect worth knowing: a customer needs an actual appointment record to be bucketed at all — someone with paid invoices but no appointment history won't show up in any cohort, since the "days dormant" calculation is driven off their latest appointment date.
Each cohort is also capped at 200 customers for the table and for sending; if a cohort has more than 100, the on-screen table only renders the first 100 rows, with a note that "all will be messaged on send" —
the cap that matters for sending is 200, not the 100 you can see.
One more wrinkle: the count shown on each cohort's selector card at the top of the page is the true, uncapped total of qualifying customers —
if a cohort actually has 350 people in it, the card shows 350, but only the first 200 ever load into the table or get messaged on send.
The button label and the "Showing X of Y" note both reflect that capped 200, so the number on the card and the number you'll actually reach can quietly diverge.
Editing and sending
The message box shows a live character count and estimated SMS-segment count (anything over 320 characters spills into a third segment), but that count is measured against the raw template text —
including the literal {firstName} placeholder — not the actual name that gets substituted in, so a shop with longer customer names can run slightly longer than the counter suggests.
A more important gotcha: switching cohort cards reloads that cohort's suggested template into the box automatically, overwriting anything you'd already typed.
Pick your cohort first, then customize the copy — don't write your message and then click over to a different cohort card to compare offers, or you'll lose the edit.
When you hit "Send to N customers," the whole batch is sent from the server, and the sent/failed result shows in a summary line and per-row in the table below.
Each customer is recorded as sent, so retrying a batch won't text the same customer twice. That record doesn't expire: a customer already messaged from a cohort is skipped on every later send to that cohort, and still shows as sent.
Getting AI ideas for the message
Above the message box there's a Get AI ideas button and an optional one-line Angle box. Click the button and you get up to three short, different message ideas for the cohort you have selected. Click one to drop it into the message box, then edit it however you like. Nothing is sent until you press "Send to N customers" yourself. Click More ideas for three new ones (they won't repeat the ones you've already seen). Switching cohort cards clears the ideas.
The ideas are written from your shop's real details only: your shop name, your active services and packages with their catalog prices, the services this cohort bought most, how long it's been since they visited, and the current month and season in your shop's time zone. Type an Angle like "holiday", "ceramic upgrade" or "windshield special" to steer them.
Every idea is checked before you see it, and any idea that fails is fixed or left out:
- It fits two text segments as your customers receive it (306 characters, including your shop name and the opt-out line).
- It has the {firstName} placeholder and ends with "Reply STOP to opt out."
- It only names services from your catalog, and only uses their catalog prices.
- It offers no discount, percentage off or free item unless you typed that offer in the Angle (for example "$25 off tint this month").
- It makes no warranty or guarantee claims, uses no ALL-CAPS shouting, and has no links or phone numbers. Emoji only appear if your own message templates already use them.
AI ideas are a Growth-plan feature, need the same "Manage automations & campaigns" permission as sending, and are limited to 20 runs per person per hour. They count against your shop's monthly AI allowance and never use prepaid AI Booster credits. If your shop has used most of its AI allowance, AI ideas pause so your AI receptionist keeps running, and come back as your 30-day usage rolls off.
How this differs from Bulk Blast
It's easy to lump this in with the other cards on the Growth & Marketing hub, but the segment logic is genuinely different.
Bulk Blast supports a much wider segment menu (all customers, new customers, high-LTV, custom lists, and more — dormancy cohorts are just one option among several) and includes a preview/dry-run step; it's also gated behind a paid plan tier plus a "manage automations" permission check before anyone can send.
Win-back, by contrast, is narrowly built around exactly these three dormancy cohorts with no dry-run step. It's a Growth-plan feature, and loading the cohorts or sending requires the "Manage automations & campaigns" permission (Owner, Admin, and Manager by default).
If you're looking for AI-drafted win-back-style texts tied to old quotes or deferred inspection work, that's a different, separately-gated feature under Re-engagement in the AI tools —
this page is the cohort-based, SMS-only tool, where AI only suggests the wording and you always send.