How to Set Up a Reactivation Campaign to Win Back Inactive Email Subscribers

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Not all newsletter subscribers are equally valuable. Some readers always open your emails — there’s a fraction of the list that opens just about everything you send them. Some readers open often; some open occasionally. But then there’s one last bucket of subscribers: Those that rarely — or never — open your newsletter.

Some email service providers (ESPs) even assign labels to these low-engaged users, like “Zombies” or “Ghosts.” These subscribers are technically part of your list, but they’re not worth keeping around.

As your list grows, the percentage of readers who aren’t engaged will grow with it. That can become a problem: Inboxes make decisions about where to place your newsletter — in the inbox or in the spam folder — based on a variety of factors. One key factor is how other readers engage with your newsletter. A rapid increase in growth coupled with a decrease in engagement will put your newsletter on the fast track to the spam folder.

It’s not just about staying out of the spam folder, though. A bloated email list also affects your metrics. How often do readers open or click? It’s tough to know if a significant percentage of your list never engages with your emails.

The good news is there are strategies you can use to keep your list clean and stay out of the spam folder — all while converting some of those inactive readers back into active readers. A good reactivation campaign might win back anywhere from 5-15% of your inactive list; a great one might win back as many as 25% of those readers and convince them to start opening your newsletters again.

Let’s talk through each step of the process and help you build a reactivation campaign that works for your newsletter.

What is a reactivation campaign? Why run one?

Whenever I work with a client and tell them that we’re going to need to figure out a strategy to remove inactive readers from their list, the first question is almost always, “Why would we want to get rid of subscribers?”

I get it: They’ve worked hard to grow their email list. They’ve celebrated those growth milestones: Their first thousand readers, their first 10,000 readers, and maybe beyond. They’ve promised advertisers a certain list size. (The sales side of the operation is usually the most resistant to any decrease in list size, and understandably so.)

So for those who might be nervous or skeptical about these campaigns, let’s define what a reactivation campaign — also known as a winback series — is and isn’t:

A reactivation campaign exists to win back inactive readers. These won’t target readers who consistently or occasionally open newsletters. The only readers targeted will be those who rarely or never open your newsletters.

When you run a reactivation campaign, the total size of your list may decrease — you’ll be removing some inactive readers. But the number of readers who open the newsletter will remain steady — in fact, if we put together a good campaign, it should actually increase! Readers who’ve long been inactive will start opening your emails again, and your open and click rates should rise as they do.

Some email platforms automatically put readers into certain buckets based on their level of engagement. Let’s use the tiers set by one ESP, Campaign Monitor, as an example. They put readers into one of six categories:

• Active — Subscribers who last opened or clicked in past 30 days
• Engaged — Subscribers who last opened or clicked between 30 and 90 days ago
• Unengaged — Subscribers who last opened or clicked between 90 and 180 days ago
• Dormant — Subscribers who last opened or clicked between 180 days and 12 months ago
• Zombies — Subscribers who last opened or clicked more than 12 months ago
• Ghosts — Subscribers who never opened or clicked any email, 12 months or more since the first email was sent

If I’m working with a client on Campaign Monitor, I’ll tell them that we won’t touch readers in the Active or Engaged categories. But we’re absolutely going to target readers who are labeled as Unengaged, Dormant, Zombies, or Ghosts.

After all, do you really want Zombies or Ghosts on your email list?

Now, you could go ahead, create a segment of users who meet these criteria, and suppress these users from receiving newsletters, or delete these subscribers from your list. In doing so, you’d achieve two clear goals right away: Keeping your list clean and taking proactive steps to stay out of the spam folder.

But as Yanna-Torry Aspraki wrote in an Ask a Deliverability Expert column, that approach misses the mark:

List hygiene goes beyond blindly deleting undesirable or inactive subscribers. It means taking a look at your entire list to separate active and engaged contacts from ones who aren’t engaging with your emails, which in turn will help you optimize your targeting. Your email strategy will produce better results if you focus on subscribers who are opening, clicking on emails, and performing the actions you want them to perform, such as buying your product, reading your content, or signing up for your next event.

And there’s one more advantage to running a reactivation series: You’ll get the chance to win back some of your inactive readers and get them to start regularly opening your newsletter again.

How do I identify my inactive readers?

Now that we’ve talked through the strategy behind a reactivation series, let’s figure out what an inactive reader means for your newsletter.

I typically advise clients to start with a segment of readers who haven’t opened an email for 90+ days. But that’s not the best practice for everyone.

If you send a weekly or monthly newsletter, you might target readers who’ve been inactive for four to six months, since those readers have only received a handful of emails during a 90-day window.

But if you send a daily newsletter — or multiple times per day —you may want to start your campaign sooner, perhaps at 60 days. If you sign up readers via paid ads, contests, or sweepstakes, where the sign-ups may be far less engaged than your regular reader, you might want to tighten that window even further, up to about 30 days of inactivity.

There’s also no rule that says you have to have a single reactivation series targeting all readers. I work with teams that start winning back certain types of users — like those who signed up for a giveaway — after just 21 days of inactivity. (Those newsletters often have a separate reactivation series targeted to readers who signed up organically on their website, and that series might start after 60 or 90 days.)

Many ESPs can automatically sort readers into engagement buckets — SailThru has user engagement levels, Mailchimp uses star rating, and Ghost lets you sort by percentage of emails opened. Any of these might be good starting points for your next reactivation series.

What emails should I send as part of the reactivation series?

I’ll say this again: The goal of this series isn’t just to remove inactive readers — it’s to win back some of them and get them to start opening your emails.

So let’s walk through the six types of emails you can send to win back readers. You don’t have to send all of these as part of the sequence. Most organizations will send at least two or three of these emails — more sophisticated newsletters may send additional emails.

1.) The Opt-Down email

If you have multiple newsletters — like a daily and a weekly option — your first email might be an invitation to opt down to a newsletter sent less frequently. I’d rather save that user by keeping them on a weekly email than lose them entirely.

I really like the example, below, from Pew Research Center. It does great things: One, they include the call to action to opt down in the button, and two, they include a link to unsubscribe at the very bottom of the email. There’s no harm in encouraging them to do so: You were going to remove them entirely at the end of the series anyway if they didn’t re-engage.

For an email like this, I might try a subject line like, “How often do you want to hear from us?” or “Would you prefer to read our quarterly newsletter?” The more direct the subject line, the likelier they are to open and take the action you want them to take.

2.) The Update Your Preferences email

If you’ve got lots of newsletters, there’s an alternative to the Opt-Down email: Giving readers the chance to go to your preferences center and select new newsletters. There’s some upside here: Readers may not be aware of all the newsletters you offer and may actually sign up for additional products if they see something new that they like.

One caveat: If you deploy this email, make sure you’ve designed your preferences center in a way that is easy for readers to use. Many email platforms automatically create these for you, but you’ll still need to clearly label each newsletter so readers understand what they’re subscribed to.

3.) The Get Us Out of Spam! email

Fast-growing newsletters — especially those that grow via paid acquisition — may want to include an email like this in their series. Not all sources of growth are equally valuable. That reader who comes to your website and signs up is usually a little more likely to engage than the reader who signs up via an ad they saw on their favorite social media platform. Certain tactics, like giveaways, drive lots of growth but minimal engagement.

So if you’re growing fast, but engagement isn’t growing with it, your email may start going to a weird folder or even spam. That makes an email like this pretty valuable — it’s possible that a reader signed up and really did want to read your newsletter but hasn’t been seeing them in that other folder.

I like the example, below, from The Newsette — they offer a simple fix, and link out to a page explaining how to whitelist a newsletter. (I usually encourage clients to send readers to this guide.)

This is also where sending from a different email address plays to your advantage. If a reader’s been missing your emails, they may see this one, then go to the Promotions or Spam folder to whitelist your regular newsletter.

4.) The Evergreen email

With this email, pick a handful of top-performing stories from your newsletter — ideally, stories that stay relevant for a long time. (Hence the “evergreen” nature of the email.) You don’t want to have to update this email every week or month with new content. (But don’t forget about it for too long! Even evergreen content feels stale after a while. You may want to update this email a few times per year.)

Try a straightforward subject line here: “A few stories other GNI readers loved” or “Don’t miss these four great stories!” would have worked well for this email, below, from Girls’ Night In.

5.) The Last Chance email

I call this the Last Chance email for an obvious reason: It’s a reader’s last chance to stay on the list. It’s worth deploying as one of the last emails in a reactivation series — basically, the Hail Mary before you remove the user.

The key with this email is that it’s opt-in, not opt-out — readers need to click the button to stay on the list. I’ve found that this is the friendliest approach, and readers appreciate that you’re respecting their inbox.

When I send an email like this, I always do a few things:

• I use a very direct subject line: “Do you still want emails from us?”
• I don’t include any links other than the opt-in button.
• I always include language making it clear that you don’t have to do anything to opt out — you’ll automatically be removed if you don’t click the button.

This direct approach works well. On a recent reactivation campaign that I ran on my own newsletter list, 64% of readers who opened the Last Chance newsletter clicked on the button. I’ve seen similarly high engagement with clients who send this email.

One last thing you’ll need to do before deploying this email: Create the confirmation page where readers go after clicking. You can create a page on your own site for this or use a landing page tool from your ESP to create this. (If your ESP doesn’t offer this, try a tool like Carrd, which is great for building simple landing pages.) The page should clearly explain that the reader will keep receiving your newsletters and direct them toward a next step, like going back to your website to read more stories.

You can be clever with this page, but you don’t have to. At BuzzFeed, we kept this page on brand — readers were greeted with a .GIF of a cat giving them a high five. (That was very BuzzFeed; whatever you do, lean into your own voice and style.)

6.) The Confirmation email

Some email service providers encourage you to send a confirmation message when you unsubscribe a user. If that’s the case, try sending a straightforward email to readers — “You’ve been unsubscribed from our newsletter” is a good subject line for this — letting them know what’s happened and how to get in touch if this happened by accident.

In my work with clients, I’ve seen that a handful of users do actually resubscribe after receiving this email. (I’m still not sure why a reader would do so after ignoring months of emails and ignoring this winback series, but it does happen.)

How many emails should I send as part of my series?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an organization send all six of these emails to readers; most pick and choose from the ones that align with their goals. My general recommendation: Start with at least three emails sent over the course of two weeks, and see how that performs. Depending on the results, you can always add additional emails to the series.

I usually wait at least five to seven days between emails in a winback series. Why? Maybe a reader is busy that day or on vacation for a week. If the emails aren’t spaced out, you might miss out on the chance to actually win them back.

Can you walk through an example of a series from start to finish?

Sure! Here’s how I set up the winback series for my own newsletter.

For the Not a Newsletter list, I had three goals:

1. Nudge readers to sign up for alerts about topics they care about.
2. Highlight top-performing stories from my website.
3. Get readers to opt back in to my newsletters.

I’m on Mailchimp, so I used their Customer Journeys tool to set up a three-part series, with time delays between emails and If/Else language to move readers out of the journey if they took the desired action in the previous email.

The series, written out, had 11 steps:

1.) I added the list of inactive readers to the automation.

2.) I sent the Update Your Preferences email.

3.) I waited three days.

4.) If a reader opened the previous email, I removed them from the list and added a “Reactivated reader” tag.

5.) If not, I sent them the Evergreen email.

6.) I waited six days.

7.) If a reader opened the previous email, I removed them from the list and added a “Reactivated reader” tag.

8.) If not, I sent them the Last Chance email.

9.) I waited four days.

10.) If a reader clicked the previous email, I removed them from the list and added a “Reactivated reader” tag.

11.) If not, I archived them from the list.

A bit more data about my reactivation series: My three-part series was sent in February 2023 to a group of 1,977 readers who signed up over six months ago but who hadn’t opened anything I’d sent them in the previous 90 days. This netted an 18.3% winback rate, with 361 of these readers engaging with the series. I was very happy with those numbers and will keep tabs moving forward on how readers tagged as “Reactivated reader” engage with my newsletter over the next few months.

What do I do with the readers who don’t engage?

My advice: Unsubscribe them from your list and remove them from your audience.

You might wonder: Why delete these subscribers? Why not keep them in the audience, but suppress them from receiving newsletters?

The reason: Many email service providers charge based on the size of your list. If you keep these inactive readers on your list, you may end up paying far more than you should to your email platform every month. (For a list like mine, the total amount might be about $500 to $1,000 per year. For larger newsletters, the cost might be in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.)

I mentioned it earlier, but I’ll say it again: You may get pushback from others on your team about removing subscribers. This is usually because of fears that a smaller list will mean a decline in ad revenue. But part of the cost-benefit analysis of a reactivation campaign is considering the additional cost of keeping these readers on your email list. Most organizations I work with find that they can save money by cleaning their lists, and if they switch to a sales model based on engagement (either opens or clicks), they see no decline in ad rates. (If anything, they see a larger engaged audience than before due to the winback campaign.)

One more thing: Be careful about how you remove subscribers. Every platform has different rules for this — on Mailchimp, for instance, they’ll charge you for users who are merely on your unsubscribe list. You’ll also want to archive them, which tells Mailchimp to both unsubscribe them and stop counting them towards your total audience size.

How often should I send these campaigns?

It depends on how fast your list is growing and how often you send newsletters. The more you send and the faster you’re growing, the more likely it is that you want to keep the reactivation series turned on at all times to win back readers as soon as they enter your inactive reader segment. If you’re growing slowly or sending less frequently, you might run this once or twice a year.

Three examples for you:

1. At The New Yorker, with our list growing rapidly, our reactivation campaign was set to automatically run every single day, identifying readers who’d fallen into the inactive segment and targeting them with our winback messages. We wanted to reactivate these readers as soon as we could.
2. For many of the local newsrooms I work with, where they might add a few hundred or few thousand readers per month, we might do these less regularly — like once a quarter. The inactive segment is a bit smaller, and doing them less regularly gives these orgs the chance to update emails like the Evergreen email with fresh content.
3. And for my newsletter — which adds a few thousand readers a year but which most readers only receive once or twice per month — I do these campaigns annually. (The other factor for me is: Most readers sign up via a work email. If they leave their job, their email will eventually hard bounce and automatically be removed from my list. So that’s a case where Mailchimp actually takes care of a lot of the work for me.)

One other potential factor: Your line of business. A newsroom is going to be a bit more aggressive at winning back inactive readers since they probably send newsletters daily (or multiple times per day). But if you work for a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand, for instance, you might run this campaign far less frequently, knowing that the audience might only make a purchase once or twice a year. That DTC brand wouldn’t want to miss out on a potential Black Friday sale by cleaning out its list too frequently.

Are there any other best practices I should know about as I plan my series?

There are! I’d start with these three best practices:

1. Send these emails from a different email address than the one you usually send from. 

Inboxes tend to sort newsletters into specific folders based on previous engagement. If they know you always open and engage with a newsletter, it might go into the main inbox. If you rarely open — or always delete an email — it might go elsewhere, like a Promotions folder or spam.

But the first time you get an email from a new email address, the inbox doesn’t have any data about how you’ll engage with that email, so it gives you the benefit of the doubt. You’ll usually show up in the main part of the inbox again.

If you send emails from newsletter@yourbrand.com, and they always go to the Promotions tab, the issue might not be with the quality of your content — it may be that readers don’t always see your newsletter in the place they’d expect. So sending these reactivation emails from a new address, like hello@yourbrand.com, could be a way to get back in front of them again.

2.  A direct subject line always works best. 

Some newsletters try to get a little too cute with their subject lines — I’ve gotten more than a handful of reactivation emails where the subject line is just a winky face emoji or a way-too-personal phrase, like “love you.” Or how about the company that sent me an email titled, “You’ve won!” and which went on to claim that I was a big winner… by reading their emails.

Do those emails get opened? Yes — but users who feel tricked into opening a newsletter often also mark those emails as spam or unsubscribe right away.

Instead, be direct with your readers. At every brand I’ve worked with, I’ve tested out the subject line of the Last Chance email. The winning subject line, every single time: “Do you still want emails from us?” The goal here is to get readers to open and take some sort of action — so make sure you put that action right there in the subject line.

3. Try to send emails at times when you don’t usually send newsletters.

Readers tend to check emails at similar times during the day, like after they wake up or after they start their work day. But there are also moments when readers aren’t checking their inboxes. For instance, maybe a reader drops their child off at school every day at 8 a.m. If your newsletter goes out at that time, it’s possible they frequently miss it — and by the time they next check their email, there are often a bunch of new emails higher up in their inbox.

So try sending at a different time. If you usually send in the morning, try sending in the afternoon. Sometimes, a different send time gets your email noticed, and reminds readers to keep an eye out for future newsletters.

What does success look like for a reactivation campaign?

It really varies based on two factors: Whether you’ve run a campaign like this before and how often you run the campaign.

If you’ve never run a reactivation campaign before and you’ve had an email list for a few years, the winback percentage is going to be far lower. From my experience, if this is your first reactivation campaign, you may be able to win back anywhere from 2 to 5% of your list. (Anything above that is a bonus.)

If you run these campaigns more regularly, then the percentages may be higher. From my work with clients, I can tell you that a winback rate of anywhere between 5 and 15% is good. The highest winback rate I’ve ever seen was 25% — that client was the exception, not the rule.

The other benefit: Done right, these will be a tactic you can use to grow your list of engaged subscribers. Yes, you’ll remove inactive readers. But you’ll also win back some of the inactive readers, and these readers will start opening newsletters again. The overall audience will shrink, but the number of active email subscribers will increase.

And there’s real value you can assign to these users. Here’s a great story from 2021: The American Heart Association was able to win back half a million subscribers and raise more than $250,000 from a reactivation campaign aimed at their inactive readers. (You can see examples of the emails here.)

How does Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection affect these campaigns? 

In 2021, Apple rolled out a new privacy feature for iOS called Mail Privacy Protection, or MPP. It’s enormously popular among users: Some research suggests that 97% of iPhone and iPad users turn MPP on.

The challenge for those of us who send newsletters is that MPP masks certain data. Apple pre-fetches emails — if you don’t open a newsletter, they’ll “open” it for you to try to hide your data from marketers. The end result is that most email service providers show an open rate for your newsletter that’s higher than what it really is.

This creates two complications for anyone running a winback series:

• The good news is that readers who show minimal engagement are truly disengaged — they’re not opening emails, and Apple isn’t even opening emails on their behalf. You should target them with a reactivation campaign.
• The bad news is that some readers are disengaged, but because of Apple’s MPP, they may appear to be highly engaged. Try pulling a list of readers with high open rates who never click. Those readers might be affected by MPP — they seem engaged, but a reader who always opens but never clicks is probably an inactive user disguised as an active one.

Some ESPs do a good job of showing you who might be affected by MPP. If that’s the case, you can be a bit more targeted with your reactivation campaign, only sending to iOS users who you believe aren’t opening newsletters.

But if you don’t have access to this sort of data, you still may want to move forward with a winback campaign. First, target them with in-newsletter messages over the course of a few weeks to see if you can get them to click and prove that they’re still reading. If those don’t work, you may want to move them into a reactivation flow, like the one outlined above. Be cautious with these users, though — it can be tough to tell if a reader is disengaged or just reading without clicking.

What about readers whose emails might bounce?

You may have seen a stat in your email reporting dashboards: The percentage of emails that bounce.

A bounce happens when you try to send a newsletter to someone, but the email can’t be delivered. There are two types of bounces:

• Soft bounces occur when your email platform tries to deliver an email that day but cannot. Oftentimes, the mailbox is full and cannot receive any more email until the user deletes some emails and creates space. Sometimes, a soft bounce is the result of an error from their inbox provider — maybe a server is down, and emails can’t be delivered at that moment.
• Hard bounces occur when the email you’re sending to has been shut down or blocks delivery of all inbound emails. This is particularly common among work email addresses — when someone changes jobs, their former employer usually closes that email account, causing your newsletter to hard bounce.

Good news: Most email platforms handle bounces automatically. The policy varies based on the platform, but almost all automatically remove hard bounces from your list, and some will remove users who soft bounce multiple times.

When you put together a reactivation campaign, you won’t have to worry about those hard bounces — your ESP will take care of that. But you’ll find that soft bounces may still linger in those inactive segments, and you’ll want to target them as part of the series.

Five takeaways for running a reactivation campaign

1.) Start with at least three emails in your series — Don’t just send a single email — you might miss the chance to win back a reader if you only send one campaign. Try a series of at least three emails, spaced out over two weeks, to give yourself a chance to really win back these readers.

2.) Think about what “inactive” means to you — Start by pulling a list of readers who haven’t opened or clicked in at least 90 days. But if you’re growing your list quickly or growing through channels, like contests, where readers are less likely to engage, you may want to narrow that segment down to readers with no activity in the last 30 or 60 days.

3.) Once the campaign’s over, remove your inactive subscribers — Don’t just suppress readers. Remove them, and save yourself some money on your monthly ESP bill.

4.) Make running these reactivation campaigns a regular habit — You don’t have to run these campaigns every day or even every month. But do pick a cadence that makes sense for you. Maybe it’s once a year; maybe it’s once a quarter. Whatever you pick, continue to run these campaigns to keep your lists clean over time.

5.) Pay attention to your campaign results — The first version of your campaign probably isn’t the best version you can run. Look at your data and see where there’s opportunity for improvement. It might mean adding emails to the series, testing new subject lines, or adjusting your CTAs. Even a small improvement in engagement should result in far more active subscribers on your list in the long run.

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