15+ Customer Winback Email Examples For E-Commerce (2025)

This post about customer winback email examples first appeared in my newsletter. Want to be the first to receive these articles? Subscribe and get access to weekly email breakdowns, campaign ideas, templates, and insights.

Imagine this:

You’re running an e-commerce brand selling productivity drinks.

There’s a customer named Will who is a big fan of your products.

Thanks to you, Will’s mind is sharper. He’s more productive and is consistently hitting the gym.

The other day, he even left you a review, saying that he’s been trying different solutions for years, but nothing quite hits the spot like savoring your drink.

Will is a customer for life.

Then, one day, you log in to your CRM system…

What you see on the screen leaves you in awe:

Will hasn’t placed an order in nearly two months.

Racing thoughts enter your mind:

“Did Will find another solution?”

“Has he stopped seeing the benefits?”

“Did we just lose a loyal customer?”

Curious to know what happened, you send Will an email to check in with him.

You mention that you’re currently working on another flavor of drinks. In the meantime, you offer him 10% off his next order.

A couple of hours go by…

*PING*

Your phone vibrates.

It’s Shopify.

Will has placed another order.

This time, he didn’t just buy one drink.

He bought a whole carton of drinks.

You breathe a huge sigh of relief.

If this situation sounds familiar to you, chances are you’ve sent a winback email before.

Unfortunately, that’s NOT how most brands approach winback campaigns.

The number one mistake brands make with winback emails

… is targeting everyone who’s bought before.

Brands think customers only come back to buy from them BECAUSE of their email marketing efforts.

It makes sense at first glance — the ROI of a winback email often appears to be a no-brainer.

But in reality, that’s not always the case (and really, the problem with last click attribution).

Most people who regularly buy from you would order again even if you sent them zero emails.

You could send zero marketing messages to these people, and they’d continue ordering.

Yet, when you continue to *bribe* them with discounts, you’re destroying a lot of value that email marketing offers.

So, what should you do?

If you’re serious about growing your business profitably, you’d figure out the type of people who do NOT make regular purchases.

And you ONLY target them with winback campaigns.

In Klaviyo, you can easily do this by creating a segment of buyers:

What someone has done (or not done) > Placed Order > At least once > in the last 12 months

You can then filter those who haven’t bought recently:

What someone has done (or not done) > Placed Order > zero times > in the last 90 days

The timeframe depends on what you sell (you wouldn’t expect someone to buy another car in 3 months), but for most e-commerce brands, the sweet spot is the 30-90 days after a new customer’s last purchase.

How to know your winback emails are paying off: holdout test

How do you know your winback campaigns are actually driving profits?

You conduct a customer holdout test.

A holdout test is a technique where you deliberately prevent a small group of users from seeing your email campaign.

A holdout test will help you measure your winback campaign effectiveness.

In this context, you’d take 10-20% of the buyers segment you created before, and exclude them from your winback campaigns.

That means these people won’t receive any offers or winback emails (even if they’re on your list).

The rest of the group, you continue to send winback campaigns (preferably offering the same incentive).

After the test, you should be left with something like this:

We see that sending winback campaigns resulted in a slight uplift in conversion rates (from 4.2% to 5.4%).

Customer spend also increased slightly, but the 20% discount applied cut into profit margins, which impacted total revenue.

Now, to calculate incremental revenue, let’s focus on the number of customers converted:

Expected revenue without winback campaign: 2,100 conversions × $110 spend = $231,000
Actual revenue with campaign: $248,400

Incremental revenue = $248,400 − $231,000 = $17,400

In this case, the higher conversion rate means the winback campaign generated a positive revenue gain, but it’s only about $17k.

One last note: to ensure your test results are reliable, you need enough data to achieve statistical significance. Aim for at least a couple of hundred conversions in each group.

Top-performing winback email campaigns

Let’s look at some examples.

After analyzing dozens of winback emails across different brands, I noticed a pattern. The best-performing ones tend to share these traits:

1. Persuasive copy

2. A human tone

3. Non-corporate

4. A compelling offer

5. A strong guarantee

6. Conversational

7. A clear call to action

8. Focused on the reader

You see most of these qualities in action below:

#1 Nodpod

What stands out about this email?

Too many brands focus on the “we” when explaining the why behind their brand.

“We’re passionate about…”

“We got inspired…”

We, we, we.

Allan Dib has a great take on this in his Lean Marketing book:

“Only your mother and best friend buy your stuff because of why you do it. The rest of us buy what you do.”

Meaning, every time you explain your why, you have to make it about them.

This sales email is effective because it answers the question “What can your products do for me?”

In this case, Nodpod promises the reader better sleep.

One thing I would do to increase click rates for this email is hyperlink to the recommended product.

#2 Eight Sleep

What stands out about this email?

If you haven’t heard of Eight Sleep, it’s a hi-tech mattress that helps you sleep better.

It’s worth mentioning that I’ve been on their email list for over a year, and I haven’t made a single purchase.

Yet, they still send me emails like this every week. I love it!

This email is effective because it turns product features into benefits:

Custom temperature control —> stay in deep sleep longer

Gentle vibration and thermal alarm —> wake up energized

Advanced sleep tracking —> optimized recovery

Writing a plain-text winback campaign like this is smart because it forces you to write strong direct response copy.

I also love the guarantee in the end. When you take away the risk of buying from you (especially if you sell a high-ticket product), you’re more likely to get the customer to at least try your product.

#3 Olipop

What stands out about this email?

This email is all about the discount offer. Ideally, you only want to send these to people who are at risk of churning. If you send these offers to regular customers, you’re destroying a lot of value.

#4 Dollar Shave Club