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.
One thing worth knowing: this page dispatches through the same generic send endpoint the rest of the app uses (message.send), and that endpoint routes by the customer's most recent conversation channel, not strictly by what Win-back asks for. In the normal case that means Twilio SMS. But if a recipient's last conversation with the shop happened over the website chat widget, Facebook Messenger, or Instagram DM, the send is silently rerouted through that same channel instead — a shared rule that keeps replies on whatever thread the customer last used, not something Win-back does on purpose. Nothing on this page flags when that happens, so "sent" in the table doesn't always mean "sent by SMS."
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 page sends one message at a time in sequence (not in bulk or in the background) and tracks sent/failed counts live, both in a summary line and per-row in the table below. There's no persisted campaign record behind this — it's a live loop in your browser tab, so navigating away or refreshing mid-send stops it where it is, with no resume.
How this differs from Campaigns and 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, and — as of this writing — isn't restricted by plan tier or a separate permission check on the send action itself, so any team member with access to Growth & Marketing can trigger it. 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 manual, cohort-based tool, with no email option in its own UI (though, as noted above, an individual send can still be silently carried over web chat, Facebook, or Instagram instead of SMS if that's where the customer's last conversation happened).