A saved behavioral segment — "hasn't opened anything in 90 days" — feeds a journey's segment-entered trigger directly, so a scratch-off win-back offer goes out the moment someone actually goes quiet, with nobody remembering to pull a list.
Re-engagement campaigns usually run on a human's memory: someone periodically exports a "hasn't opened in N days" list and sends a one-off email to it. Behavioral segments and journeys remove the periodic part. A segment is a saved rule, continuously matched against your contacts; a journey's segment-entered trigger enrolls a contact the instant they start matching it — not on whatever cadence someone remembers to run the export.
Building the inactivity rule
The audience filter builder has Behavior and Commerce groups alongside the ordinary field conditions. Between them: seven metrics in total (opened, clicked, submitted, RSVP'd, and engagement score under Behavior; purchased and total revenue under Commerce), each with an optional "within the last N days" window. The classic win-back rule is one line: opened is empty, within the last 90 days. Save it under a name from the Segment picker above the filter, and it's reusable everywhere an audience filter already shows up.
What "saved" actually means
A segment is a snapshot of the rule, not a live query — the same "copy, not a link" behavior as saving a project as a template. Editing the rule later doesn't retroactively change a send that already used the old version. What is live is membership: the segment-entered trigger re-evaluates who currently matches on every processing tick, so newly-inactive contacts keep flowing into the journey without you touching the segment again.
The email itself: a reveal, not a banner
The starter version of this journey pairs the segment with a single send step mailing a Scratch-off card — "we miss you" as a tap-to-reveal prize rather than another flat discount-code line. Every scratch gesture has an always-visible fallback for any client that can't render the CSS technique behind it, so the offer itself never depends on the animation working.
Beyond the 90-day-open rule
The same mechanism works for any behavioral condition, not just opens. A repeat-buyer segment ("purchased more than once in the last 90 days") can trigger a loyalty-style journey instead. A "hasn't purchased in 90 days but used to" segment is a different kind of win-back than "never opens," and worth a different offer — a lapsed buyer already trusts your checkout, but a never-opener might not.
Cost of evaluating a behavioral segment
A segment built on contact fields alone costs exactly what an ordinary filter always did. A behavioral condition adds one extra read per contact at evaluation time — negligible for a manual send, and only paid by a schedule or journey sweep when the filter it's evaluating actually uses a behavioral rule in the first place.
Pair with the Automated Sunset Engine
A win-back journey catches inactive subscribers and gives them one last chance to re-engage. The Automated Sunset Engine is the next step after that: contacts who received the win-back offer but still didn't engage are automatically suppressed with reason "sunset", protecting your domain reputation without manual list cleaning.
The two features work together: set your win-back journey as the re-engagement journey in Settings → Deliverability → Sunset Policy. The engine enrolls newly-inactive contacts into that journey; those who still don't engage within the threshold window are suppressed automatically. See Automated Sunset Engine for the full configuration reference.
Getting started
Install the Re-engagement starter from the Journeys list page for the segment and email built together in one step. Or build your own: save a behavioral segment with an "opened, empty, 90 days" rule, then point a new journey's trigger at segment entered and add a send step for your win-back email. See Journeys for the full trigger and step reference.