Re-engagement Email Campaigns

Why Re-engagement Matters

Every email list naturally decays. People change jobs, lose interest, or simply forget they subscribed. Inactive subscribers hurt you in two ways: they artificially inflate your list size (costing you money) and they damage your sender reputation when emails go unopened.

Re-engagement campaigns serve two purposes. First, they give genuinely interested subscribers a reason to re-engage. Second, they identify truly inactive subscribers who should be removed from your list. Both outcomes improve your email marketing performance.

Studies show that re-engagement campaigns can recover 10-20% of inactive subscribers while improving overall deliverability and engagement rates for your remaining list.

Identifying Inactive Subscribers

Before you can re-engage subscribers, you need to define what "inactive" means for your business. Common criteria include:

• No email opens: Has not opened any email in 90-180 days
• No clicks: Has not clicked a link in 120+ days
• No site visits: Has not visited your website from email
• No purchases: For e-commerce, no purchase in defined period
• No product usage: For SaaS, no login or product activity

The right definition depends on your email frequency and business model. A weekly newsletter might use 90 days; a monthly digest might use 180 days. Consider what makes sense for your communication cadence.

The Re-engagement Sequence

Email 1: The Soft Touch (Week 1)

Start with a low-pressure email that acknowledges the gap without being desperate. Remind them of the value you provide and give them a reason to re-engage. A compelling subject line is crucial - they have been ignoring your emails, so you need something different.

Subject lines that work: "We miss you," "Still interested in [topic]?", "A lot has changed since you last visited"

Email 2: The Value Reminder (Week 2)

Share your best content or most valuable offer. Give them something genuinely useful that reminds them why they subscribed in the first place. This should not be a sales pitch - it should be pure value delivery.

Consider a roundup of your best content since they went inactive, or exclusive access to something new.

Email 3: The Preference Check (Week 3)

Ask if they want to change their email preferences. Maybe they are getting too many emails, or the content is not relevant. Offer options: different frequency, different topics, pause instead of unsubscribe.

This shows you respect their inbox while gathering useful feedback about what caused disengagement.

Email 4: The Final Notice (Week 4)

Be direct: if they do not respond, you will remove them from your list. Make it clear this is their last chance to stay subscribed. Include a prominent "Keep me subscribed" button and an easy unsubscribe option.

Some marketers add an incentive at this stage (discount, free resource), but test whether this attracts engaged subscribers or just deal-seekers.

Subject Lines That Drive Re-engagement

Your subject line has to break through to people who have been ignoring you. Consider these approaches:

• Direct acknowledgment: "It is been a while..." "We miss you at [Company]"
• Curiosity: "You are missing out on this" "Here is what you missed"
• Question: "Still interested in [topic]?" "Should we part ways?"
• Urgency: "Last chance to stay connected" "We are cleaning our list"
• Value: "Our best [content type] from the past month" "Exclusive for inactive subscribers"

After the Campaign

For Re-engaged Subscribers

When someone re-engages, do not just put them back in your regular flow. Consider a special "welcome back" sequence that eases them back into your content and ensures they stay engaged this time.

For Non-responders

After your final email, remove non-responders from your active list. You can move them to a suppression list (no marketing emails) while keeping them for transactional emails if relevant, or archive them completely.

This feels counterintuitive - why remove potential customers? - but a smaller, engaged list outperforms a larger, disengaged one every time. Your deliverability improves, your engagement metrics rise, and you stop paying to email people who will never convert.

Re-engagement Best Practices

• Timing matters: Send re-engagement emails at different times than your regular emails. If they always ignore your Tuesday morning emails, try Sunday evening.
• Test subject lines aggressively: This is where A/B testing has the highest impact.
• Make unsubscribing easy: A clean unsubscribe is better than a spam complaint.
• Track the right metrics: Re-engaged subscriber retention matters more than initial re-engagement rate.
• Run regularly: Re-engagement should be ongoing, not a one-time cleanup.

Automating Re-engagement

The best re-engagement campaigns run automatically. Set up triggers based on inactivity thresholds, and let your sequences run continuously for anyone who crosses into "inactive" territory.

Sequenzy makes this easy with inactivity-based triggers that automatically start re-engagement sequences when subscribers go cold. No manual list management required.