The Win-Back Campaign You Never Have to Build
Ask a small-business owner about win-back marketing and most of them describe the same unfinished project: a list of lapsed customers sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere, a vague plan to "send something" to people who haven't been in for a while, and month after month where it never actually gets built. That's not a discipline problem. Writing the copy, deciding who qualifies, picking a discount, and remembering to schedule the send is real work stacked on top of running the business, and it keeps losing to whatever is on fire that week. Ruffus runs two specific re-engagement nudges automatically, with no campaign to write and no list to build — and it's worth being precise about what each one actually does, because they solve different problems.
Two different problems, one label
"Win-back" usually gets used as a single catch-all, but a customer who's stopped visiting and a customer who earned a reward and forgot to claim it aren't in the same situation, and a message written for one is wrong for the other. Ruffus treats them as two separate mechanics with different triggers, different timing, and different copy, rather than one generic "haven't seen you lately" blast aimed at everyone.
When a customer goes quiet
A weekly scan looks for customers who haven't visited in 30 or more days. It's filtered before anything gets sent: only customers who've given marketing consent, who hold an active card at the merchant, and whose merchant has an active subscription actually qualify — a lapsed subscription or a customer who opted out simply doesn't produce a message. What goes out is an email and a push notification, "we miss you, come back" copy personalized with the merchant's own name, not a generic Ruffus notice. And a customer who was already nudged in the last 60 days is skipped automatically, so the same person doesn't get "we miss you" every single week they stay away.
When a reward goes unclaimed
The second mechanic is separate and easy to miss if you're only thinking about lapsed visits: a customer who filled their stamp card and earned the reward, but never actually came in to redeem it. After that reward has sat unclaimed for 14 or more days, they get a reminder, with a 7-day cooldown between reminders so it doesn't repeat every few days. The message is deliberately narrow — it says the reward is waiting and points them straight to their wallet card so redeeming it is a tap away, nothing stacked on top. No extra discount gets added to sweeten it; the point isn't to manufacture a new incentive, it's to prompt someone to collect something they already earned. That distinction matters for the business too: a reward reminder doesn't cost anything beyond what was already promised on the card.
Same guardrails under both
Both mechanics run in the customer's own locale — French, English, or Spanish — with nothing for the merchant to translate or configure. There's no template to write and no send to schedule; a merchant only needs marketing and campaigns enabled on their plan (see pricing for what that includes), and both nudges run in the background from there. There's also a cross-merchant cooldown on the email side, so a customer who holds cards at several different Ruffus merchants — a café down the street and a barbershop across town, say — doesn't get hit by every one of those merchants' win-back jobs landing in their inbox on the same day. Each merchant's targeting is scoped to their own customers, but the delivery itself respects what that person is already receiving elsewhere.
What you don't have to build
Contrast that with a generic email-blast tool: it can technically send a "come back" message, but the merchant still has to write the subject line and body, decide the inactivity threshold, build the segment, avoid re-sending to someone who got the last one, and remember to keep the campaign running instead of letting it quietly expire. That's the gap between having the capability and actually using it — most small merchants have the former and never get around to the latter. Ruffus's version is correctly targeted by default: it only reaches consented customers with something real to come back for, on a schedule that won't turn into spam, without a marketer's time going into it. It sits alongside the other automatic nudges Ruffus runs the same way — birthday messages tied to a date the customer already gave, and slow-day promotions tied to when the shop is actually quiet — all built on the same idea that re-engagement shouldn't depend on someone remembering to run it.
The short version
A quiet customer and an unclaimed reward are different problems, and Ruffus runs a distinct, automated nudge for each: a 30-day inactivity email and push with a 60-day cooldown, and a 14-day unclaimed-reward reminder with a 7-day cooldown, both personalized with the merchant's name and sent in the customer's own locale. Nothing to write, nothing to schedule, no cross-merchant pile-up in one inbox — just the reminder that was already worth sending, sent on its own. That leaves the merchant free to think about the business itself instead of the mechanics of a digital loyalty card that runs whether or not anyone remembers to check on it.