Keeping your email list clean and full of engaged contacts is critical to maintaining strong deliverability and accurate reporting. One important way to accomplish this is by running regular re-engagement campaigns. These campaigns help identify subscribers who are no longer active and give them a chance to re-opt in — or be removed — helping you protect your sender reputation and keep your marketing insights meaningful.

What Is a Re-Engagement Campaign?

A re-engagement campaign is an automated email, or series of emails, sent to contacts who have shown little or no interaction with your messages over time. The goal is simple: encourage those contacts to either reaffirm their interest or opt out of further communications.

Sometimes incentives like discounts, exclusive content, or free resources are offered to entice subscribers to stay engaged. Even if contacts choose not to re-engage, the act of cleaning your list improves your overall email performance and saves your marketing resources.

Why Are Re-Engagement Campaigns Necessary?

Email service providers (ESPs) such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo monitor how recipients interact with your emails. Continuously sending to unengaged contacts can damage your sender reputation, making it harder for your emails to reach inboxes — even among your interested subscribers.

Re-engagement campaigns protect your sender health and deliverability by:

• Reducing the number of unresponsive recipients on your list.
• Providing more accurate open and click rate reporting.
• Improving overall engagement metrics, which boosts your visibility with ESPs.

We recommend running a re-engagement campaign at least once a year to maintain a healthy and effective contact list.

How to Set Up a Re-Engagement Campaign in Delivra

Setting up a re-engagement campaign in Delivra is straightforward with our Visual Automation Builder. Here is a general approach to getting started:

1. Identify Unengaged Contacts

Use segmentation tools to find contacts who have not opened or clicked any of your emails within a specific time period (for example, the past 6 months).

2. Plan Your Campaign

Decide how many touchpoints you want in your re-engagement series. Many successful campaigns send two or three emails spaced several days apart, with messaging that increases in urgency.

Tip: Consider offering an incentive in one of your messages to encourage contacts to stay subscribed.

3. Build the Automation

In the Automation Builder:

• Start with your re-engagement segment as the entry point.
• Add an email step to send the first re-engagement message.
• Insert wait steps (e.g., 3–5 days) between messages.
• Add conditional branches to monitor engagement (opens or clicks).
• If a contact engages, you can move them back into your active list. If they do not, you can mark them for removal or opt them out automatically.

4. Launch and Monitor

Once your automation is live, monitor engagement closely. After the campaign finishes, remove or suppress unresponsive contacts to maintain a clean, engaged list.

Best Practices and Tips

• Stay Positive: Frame your messaging around the benefits of staying subscribed rather than focusing only on unsubscribing.
• Make It Easy: Include clear and simple options for subscribers to either confirm their interest or opt out.
• Test and Learn: Experiment with different subject lines, incentives, and timing to optimize your results.
• Document Your Policy: Keep an internal schedule for regular re-engagement campaigns to make them a routine part of your strategy.

Practical Use Cases

• Annual List Clean-Up: Run a re-engagement campaign once a year to preserve your sender reputation.
• Before Major Campaigns: Clean your list ahead of important promotional periods, like holidays or product launches.
• Triggered by Engagement Drop: If you notice a sharp decrease in open rates, it may be time to re-engage.

Key Limitations

• If a contact does not interact with your re-engagement emails, you must manually or programmatically suppress or remove them depending on your process.
• Subscriber incentives should align with your brand and not appear overly aggressive or desperate, which can damage brand perception.

If you have any questions or need help setting up a re-engagement campaign, feel free to reach out to our Support team by emailing us at support@delivra.com.