Re-engagement
Email program targeting subscribers who've gone dormant — the gentler sibling of winback.
Re-engagement is the email discipline of reactivating subscribers who've gone dormant — stopped opening, stopped clicking, but haven't unsubscribed. The job is to surface relevance and give the subscriber a low-friction reason to engage again, or to identify subscribers who should be permanently suppressed.
Re-engagement campaigns typically span 2–4 emails over 2–4 weeks. The most effective patterns: tying back to a previous request or behavior ("you asked for X in May; we built it"), seasonal cause ("it's been a winter — here's what's new"), or asking for the subscriber's brain ("we'd love 10 minutes of feedback"). Generic "we miss you" emails underperform by every metric.
Re-engagement is also list-hygiene infrastructure. Subscribers who don't respond to the re-engagement sequence should be suppressed — continuing to email them drags down aggregate engagement and damages sender reputation. The structural payoff of regular re-engagement campaigns is a smaller, more engaged list with better deliverability.