Re-open the conversation at 90 days dormant

A single well-aimed re-engagement email for users who quietly stopped showing up months ago — led by what's new since they left, not by "we miss you".

When to run it

Your contacts table is full of people who used the product, stopped, and were never spoken to again. They're not in the onboarding flow, they're not in the newsletter segment anyone thinks about, and they're not in a sales pipeline — dormancy is the lifecycle stage nobody owns.

Why it works

A dormant user already crossed your hardest barrier once: they signed up, learned the interface, and had a reason. Winning them back means removing whatever ended that reason — and after 90 days, the most common answer is simply that the product moved on without them. That's why the winback that works leads with what's new since they left, not with "we miss you". The threshold matters too: at 30 days you're interrupting a normal lull; at 90 you're provably re-opening, which keeps the send volume small and the segment honest.

The play

1. Detect dormancy upstream — a nightly job or an analytics cohort that flags a once-active user crossing the 90-day threshold.
2. Send one email: two or three concrete changes since their last login, one link back in. No discount on the first touch — lead with product.
3. Wait two weeks. If they came back, done. If not, one final note — this is where an offer belongs, if you use one at all.
4. Stop the instant they log back in, and never enter someone twice in a quarter.

Ship it with Hogsend

import { days, defineJourney, hours, sendEmail } from "@hogsend/engine";

export const dormantWinback = defineJourney({
  meta: {
    id: "dormant-user-winback",
    trigger: { event: "user.inactive_90d" },
    entryLimit: "once_per_period",
    entryPeriod: days(90),
    suppress: hours(0),
    exitOn: [{ event: "session.started" }],
  },
  run: async (user, ctx) => {
    await sendEmail({
      to: user.email,
      userId: user.id,
      template: "winback/whats-new",
    });
    const back = await ctx.waitForEvent({
      event: "session.started",
      timeout: days(14),
      label: "await-return",
    });
    if (!back.timedOut) return;
    if (!(await ctx.guard.isSubscribed())) return;
    await sendEmail({
      to: user.email,
      userId: user.id,
      template: "winback/final-note",
      idempotencyLabel: "winback-final",
    });
  },
});

The ctx.guard.isSubscribed() re-check after the long wait matters: someone who unsubscribed during the two weeks never gets the second email.

How you'll know

Return sessions within 14 days of the first send — the session.started events are the same ones driving the exit rule, so the funnel costs nothing to build. Watch the reactivated users a month on: a winback that produces one session and a second disappearance moved vanity numbers, not retention.