Who is Grind?
Grind is one of the UK's most recognised specialty coffee brands, built on a simple belief: great coffee shouldn't require barista-level knowledge or a complicated setup. Founded in 2011, Grind started as a collection of much-loved coffee shops across London before evolving into a subscription-first ecommerce business, delivering freshly roasted beans, ground coffee, and their iconic pods to homes across the country.
What sets Grind apart isn't just the quality of the roast. It's their commitment to making coffee culture genuinely accessible, without dumbing it down. Their subscription model turned a daily purchase into a daily ritual, and that ritual is exactly what makes their customers so valuable. When it sticks, it really sticks.
When Unsubscribe Means Goodbye
For a subscription brand like Grind, a cancellation isn't just lost revenue. It's a broken habit. Once a customer's morning routine moves on, it can be hard to win back.
Grind's CRM team know the playbook well: winback emails, re-engagement offers, retargeting ads. But digital channels can be saturated. Many Cancelled subscribers aren't just ignoring Grind's messages, they're tuning out the entire channel. Inboxes are noisy. SMS can feel intrusive. Ads blur into the background. Digital was doing its job, but not well enough for many customers bombarded with brands' communications.
Grind needed a way to show up somewhere unexpected, in a moment that felt personal.
The Drip that brought them back
Grind launched a cancelled subscriber winback flow through Paper Run, sending personalised postcards at a precise window after cancellation. No batch sends, no manual uploads. When a cancellation event triggers in Grind's system, the flow fires automatically. The postcard prints, ships, and lands, without anyone on the team lifting a finger.
The format does work that digital simply can't. A postcard sits on a kitchen counter or gets stuck to a fridge. It isn't competing with forty other notifications. It has space to breathe, and so does the message. For a brand built around a daily ritual, this physical presence is exactly the kind of nudge that prompts someone to reconsider.
The flow continues to run today, printing daily and converting cancelled subscribers back into loyal customers on autopilot.
Ground for Celebration
5.6x
3.5%
A 3.5% conversion rate on a winback audience is a strong result in any channel. These are customers who actively chose to cancel, not lapsed buyers who drifted away passively. Getting them back requires something that earns attention rather than just demands it.
The 5.6× LTV ROAS reflects not just the reactivation, but the quality of the customers returning. Cancelled subscribers who come back tend to have a proven track record of loyalty. They're not testing the product for the first time. They already know it works.
The flow keeps running quietly in the background, compounding returns every day without any ongoing effort from the team.
CRM Lead
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