The Digikart blog · 16 September 2026 · 6 min read
They came every week, then nothing. They said nothing, asked for nothing, they simply stopped walking through the door. Here is how to spot these customers in time, when to write to them, and what to say so they drop by again.
An unhappy customer, you can see. They grumble, they ask for a gesture, sometimes they leave a review. The one who leaves without a word is more dangerous: they space out their visits, then they stop. No incident, so nothing to fix on the day.
The real problem is how long it takes to notice. Behind the counter, you see the people who are there, never the ones who are missing. A familiar face that disappears gets noticed months later, often when someone lets slip “funny, we haven't seen them in a long time”. By then, they have already picked up another habit, and it will take much more than a free coffee to undo it.
The good news is that most of these customers are not upset. They changed their working hours, moved three streets away, found the door shut on a closing day, or quite simply forgot. An offended customer is hard to win back. A distracted one is not: all they lack is a reminder at the right moment.
The word “inactive” means nothing in absolute terms. At a bakery, a regular who has not come in for three weeks has dropped out of circulation. At a wine merchant's, three weeks is a perfectly normal customer. The same delay cannot serve both.
The method fits in one sentence: take the usual interval between two visits of a good customer at your place, double it, and do not go below one week. That is your starting threshold, to be adjusted afterwards. A few orders of magnitude to place yours:
This threshold is not set in stone. You test it, you watch who responds, and you correct it. On the Pro plan, the dashboard already shows this average delay between two visits, under “Return rhythm”. What matters is that it exists: as long as no delay is set, nobody is ever officially absent, so nobody ever gets a reminder.
Following up too early means chasing someone who has simply gone on holiday. The message misses the mark, it annoys, and it damages the credit you had with that customer. Following up too late means writing to someone who has already found somewhere better placed on their new route.
Because a habit does not evaporate: it moves. Your Tuesday-lunchtime customer still has lunch on Tuesdays, elsewhere. The useful window opens the day their absence becomes abnormal, and closes the day someone else has taken your place. In between, you have a few weeks, rarely more.
The sending time matters as much as the delay. A message must arrive when the customer can still act. A reminder on Thursday morning for a Friday lunch has a chance; the same one on Sunday at 9 pm is read, forgotten, and never opened again. Time your win-back messages to your service hours, not to the moment you have five minutes.
An effective win-back message fits in three lines, because it is read on a locked screen, between two notifications. It contains three things, and nothing else:
A few examples that fit in a notification:
The tone is the tone of the counter: direct, without emphasis, as if you bumped into them in the street. You don't beg and you don't guilt-trip. “We miss you” puts the customer in the wrong; “the Beaujolais has arrived” gives them a reason to come.
Four mistakes come up again and again, and they cost more than sending nothing at all:
That last mistake is the most common, and the easiest to avoid: a win-back message only goes to customers who are genuinely absent, never to the entire list. Other traps of the same kind are covered in our article on the 10 mistakes of loyalty programmes.
One last point: a win-back is not a weekly campaign. An absent customer gets one message, not a series. If they don't come back, insisting will only push them to delete their card.
Everything above can be done by hand. In practice, it lasts two weeks: sorting out the absent customers, writing, sending, nobody does it on a busy Saturday. That is exactly the work the Pro plan automates.
You set two things, once, from your dashboard: the inactivity delay that triggers the win-back, and the message sent. After that, a customer who has not come back for that long receives your message on their card, automatically, with no action on your part. The win-back only goes out if the customer is genuinely inactive, and it does not repeat.
Two details make all the difference day to day. The message arrives on the loyalty card already in the customer's phone, so with no billed SMS: notifications are unlimited, whatever the number of customers. And the Pro plan statistics show retention, your best days and customer value, which lets you correct a threshold that is too short or too long instead of guessing it. The win-back of inactive customers sits there alongside two other automations: the birthday reward and Google review collection.
As for the rules, Digikart's win-back uses neither email nor SMS: it appears on the card that the customer added to their phone themselves, and that they remove whenever they like. Reminding them of a balance and giving them a reason to drop by again is part of the programme they signed up to. If you back up the win-back with an email or an SMS, however, you enter the field of commercial prospecting: the CNIL (France's data protection authority) only exempts it from prior consent if a sale or a service has already taken place, if the message concerns similar products or services, and if the customer was informed when their contact details were collected while being able to object simply and free of charge, at that collection and then with every message sent.
Before automating anything, you need to be able to count. As long as visits are recorded nowhere, there are no dormant customers to spot: there are only impressions, and they are often wrong. That is the limit of the cardboard card, which never tells you who has dropped off.
Digikart's free plan is enough for this first step: the card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, an unlimited number of customers, visit scanning and the dashboard, with no bank card. After a few weeks, you finally have an observed visit rhythm, and therefore a credible threshold to set. The automatic win-back, for its part, belongs to the Pro plan (€49 per month, 14-day trial, details on the pricing page).
In the meantime, do the exercise once, by hand. Pick out three customers you have not seen for longer than your threshold, write them three lines with a real reason to come back, and see who drops by. It takes ten minutes, it is worth all the theories, and it will tell you which message deserves to be automated next. The FAQ answers the rest of the counter questions.
Loyalty card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, unlimited customers, no bank card, ready in 15 minutes.