Re-engagement Campaign for a Dormant List
A 4-email re-engagement campaign for a productized operations consultancy with a 40,000-subscriber dormant list — recovering 8,200 active contacts and generating £31K in pipeline within 30 days.
Client: Clarity Ops
20.5%
Re-engagement Rate
8,200 of 40,000 subscribers reactivated
34%
Open Rate (post)
Up from 4% pre-campaign
47
Inbound Inquiries
Generated within 30 days
£31K
Influenced Pipeline
First 30 days post-campaign
Clarity Ops had built a list of 40,000 subscribers over three years through content and webinar promotion. The problem: they had not sent a consistent email in 14 months. The list had gone completely cold. Open rates on the few sends they did attempt had dropped below 4%, spam complaint rates were rising, and their email platform was flagging deliverability issues.
They needed to clean the list and reactivate what they could — but they were afraid of the wrong approach making things worse. A badly executed re-engagement campaign could accelerate unsubscribes, compound deliverability problems, and damage the domain reputation they had spent years building.
We designed a 4-email re-engagement sequence built around honesty, not hype. The first email opened with a direct acknowledgement of the silence — no pretence that they had been in regular contact. It explained why they were back, what had changed, and what subscribers could expect going forward. It also made opting out genuinely easy. This transparency was strategic: it built immediate trust with re-engaging subscribers and ensured the opt-outs were clean.
Emails 2 and 3 delivered immediate value — a practical guide on operations scaling and a case study that was the most-shared piece of content Clarity Ops had ever produced. Email 4 was the sunset email: a final, gracious message to non-openers giving them one last chance to stay, with a clear explanation that they would be removed from active sends if they did not click through.
We also built a segmentation strategy that matched send volume to platform warmth — starting with their most engaged historical segment and expanding carefully to protect deliverability throughout.
Of the 40,000 subscribers, 8,200 re-engaged through the sequence — a 20.5% re-engagement rate, well above the industry average of 8–12%. The remaining 31,800 were sunset cleanly, improving their overall list quality metric significantly.
Post-campaign, open rates on subsequent sends averaged 34% — up from the 4% they had been seeing before. The re-engagement itself generated 47 inbound inquiries and £31K in influenced pipeline within the first 30 days, from a list they had essentially written off.
We had a list of 40,000 cold subscribers and no idea how to approach them. The re-engagement campaign recovered over 8,000 active contacts and cleaned the rest. Better deliverability overnight.
Sophia Okafor
Co-Founder · Clarity Ops
Project Details
- Client
- Clarity Ops
- Industry
- Productized Services / Operations Consulting
- Service
- Re-engagement
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