Aesthetex Studio — Cut customer-acquisition cost 38% by reactivating dormant buyers

THE CHALLENGE

What was breaking before InboxChange

Highly seasonal product mix (face masks spike in summer, balms in winter) meant 60% of customers bought once and disappeared.
Performance marketing CPL on Meta and Google was rising every quarter. They were paying ₹420 to acquire a customer who'd buy once.
Email reactivation campaigns had a 2.4% click-through rate. Most dormant customers had gmail filters that buried promotional emails.
Their tech team was 2 people. They couldn't build a custom WhatsApp reactivation pipeline themselves; off-the-shelf tools wanted ₹40K/month minimum.

WHAT WE BUILT

The fix, deployed in 8 months

Defined a 'dormant' audience in InboxChange: customers whose last_purchase_at was 60+ days ago AND last_inbound_at was 30+ days ago.
Built a 3-step sequence: Day 0 'we miss you' with a 15% off code, Day 4 'last-call' urgency, Day 10 'one final 25% off' for non-responders.
Layered the seasonal product catalog into the sequence so summer-buyers got summer-product nudges in the right month.
Used InboxChange's link tracking to attribute every order back to the exact reactivation step that won them — letting the founder kill the worst-performing variant after 3 weeks.

"The reactivation sequence is now our highest-ROI marketing line. It pays for the agency, the tools, and a third of our team. We didn't add an ad-budget rupee for that lift."

AE

Karthik Iyer

Co-founder, Aesthetex Studio

TAKEAWAYS

Lessons for other operators in the same situation

Reactivation beats acquisition every time once you've crossed 10K customers — your dormant list is your best ad audience
WhatsApp click-through rates are 10-15× email for the SAME message — you don't need new copy, you need a new channel
Don't reactivate with a discount unless you have to — start with a product-fit message first; discounts are the third variant, not the first

See more from the D2C beauty playbook →