Win-back campaigns automatically reach out to subscribers who have cancelled, offering a personalized incentive to come back. When a customer cancels a subscription, Subi sends them a follow-up email after a delay you choose. The email includes a one-click reactivation link that takes them to a dedicated landing page where they can resubscribe with the offer applied — no login, no portal navigation, no payment-method hunting.

This article walks through creating your first campaign, the offer and timing options available, what your customers will see, and how to read the results.

Win-back targets voluntary cancellations — subscribers who chose to cancel from the customer portal. It is the right feature to use when:

Involuntary churn from failed payments is handled by a separate feature — see Payment recovery.

From the Subi admin sidebar, click Retention. You'll see the Win-back campaigns card alongside Payment recovery, Cancellation flow, Auto product swap, and Loyalty program. Click Manage campaigns to open the win-back list.

From the Win-back campaigns list, click Create campaign in the top right. If you already have campaigns, they appear here filterable by All / Active / Inactive, with at-a-glance numbers for emails sent and reactivations recovered.

The campaign form has three sections. You'll fill them out top to bottom and click Save.

A short label only your team sees — something like "Price-sensitive customers" or "Lapsed annual subscribers". Customers never see this name; it just helps you tell campaigns apart on the list page.

Choose which cancellation reasons should trigger this campaign. Leave the dropdown on All cancellation reasons and the campaign matches every voluntary cancellation. Pick specific reasons to run different campaigns for different reasons — for example, one campaign with a 20% discount for "Too expensive" and a different campaign with a free gift for "Not using enough".

Note: the reasons you can target come from your own cancellation flow. A customer portal cancellation that records no reason from your flow — because your store has no cancellation flow of its own, or the customer cancelled through the cancel link in a Subi email — still matches a campaign set to All cancellation reasons, but never a campaign that targets specific reasons. Cancellations made directly from the Shopify admin, rather than the customer portal, do not start a win-back campaign.

Each campaign has one or more email steps. The form shows each step as a row in the Offer emails table — Send after (delay), Subject, and Offer.

For each row you can configure:

Use Add follow-up email to chain more steps. A common pattern: a 10% discount at day 7, then a 20% discount or a free gift at day 30 if the customer hasn't reactivated. You can mix offer types across steps — many merchants escalate.

When you're done, click Save. Active campaigns start matching new cancellations right away.

Can a win-back campaign reach subscribers who cancelled before you created it? Yes. On a campaign set to All cancellation reasons, switch on Also send to customers who already cancelled, just under Target cancellation reasons, and choose how far back to go: Last month, Last 3 months, Last 6 months or Last 12 months. The switch is off until you turn it on, and it is not available on a campaign that targets specific reasons.

Under the window, Subi shows how many customers that is — for example, "231 customers. They get only the first email below, timed from the day you save, not the day they cancelled." Only customers subscribed to email marketing get the first email, so the number who receive it can be lower than the count.

When you save an active campaign with the switch on, each counted customer is enrolled that day and gets one email: your campaign's first email, timed as if they had cancelled today. If your first email is set to send 7 days after cancellation, they receive it 7 days after you save. They don't get your follow-up emails; customers who cancel from now on still get the whole sequence. Each customer is enrolled once, on their most recently cancelled subscription.

If you save the campaign while it is inactive, nobody is enrolled yet; customers are enrolled on the day you activate it. If you later choose a longer window and save again, only the customers newly included are added — nobody gets the email twice.

Before sending it, Subi checks with Shopify that the customer is subscribed to email marketing. A customer who isn't gets no email from the campaign.

The count is of customers, not subscriptions: a customer with several cancelled subscriptions counts once. A customer is counted when all of these are true:

When some of your past subscribers from the last 12 months can still be reached, Subi shows a card titled Offer a restart to followed by how many there are, with what they were paying each billing cycle and a line saying that only customers subscribed to email marketing get the offer. You'll find it at the top of the Win-Back Campaigns page, at the top of the Retention page, as a one-line Recommended strip on your subscriptions list, and as Offer this customer a restart on a cancelled subscription whose customer is one of them.

Click Send restart offer to open your campaign form with the switch already on and the window set to Last 12 months: the edit form of your active all-reasons campaign, or a new campaign if you don't have one. Nothing is sent until you click Save. Click Preview email to see the email first. A campaign for all reasons can't run beside campaigns that target specific reasons; if those are active, the card says to turn them off first.

Once everyone on the card has been enrolled, the card disappears. If you saved a shorter window, it keeps showing the customers who are left. To hide it on one page for your store, close it with its X.

When a customer cancels and a campaign matches, Subi schedules the email step according to the delay you configured. At the scheduled time, the customer receives the email with the offer details and a Resubscribe button.

Clicking the button takes them to a one-page reactivation landing page that shows the product they cancelled, the offer applied (for example, "15% off for the next 5 cycles"), the new price after the discount, and the offer expiration date. One more click and the subscription is reinstated. If Shopify has invalidated the original payment method (which happens when a customer cancels their last active subscription), the landing page asks for a new card before confirming.

The campaign list shows headline numbers at a glance — Status, Offer, total emails Sent, and total Reactivations. Click into a campaign to see a richer Analytics page with open rate, click rate, recovered revenue, and a per-step breakdown showing which step is doing the heavy lifting.

Use these numbers to iterate. If step 1's discount isn't converting, try a different offer or a different delay. Once you've validated the format, add a second campaign for a different reason or a different offer.

You can pause a campaign at any time — it stops matching new cancellations but won't interrupt emails already scheduled to customers from earlier matches. Reactivate the campaign to resume matching new cancellations.

Deleting a campaign removes it from your dashboard. Customers who have already received an email and clicked through to the landing page can still complete their reactivation.

Start with a single campaign targeting your most common cancellation reason. Use a modest discount (10-20%) in step 1, give it 30 days of data, and iterate from there. Once you've validated the format, add a second campaign for a different reason or a different offer.

If you have questions or need help designing your first campaign, reach out to [email protected] and we'll walk you through it.