Every marketing list has ‘em:
Contacts who showed up once, downloaded something, maybe opened a few emails, then went quiet.
Most companies have no intentional strategy for what happens next…
So they keep emailing them week after week, hoping something eventually lands… until the list is so bloated it's dragging down deliverability (and making engagement metrics look worse than they are).
Thing is, the contacts who disengage aren't necessarily gone.
Some of them still have the problem your product solves, still might buy… they just didn’t find your emails relevant enough to keep opening. (That's a messaging problem.)
When we build re-engagement sequences for clients, we start with one question: why did they disengage? The answer (usually a hypothesis) shapes everything: what to say, how to say it and when to send it.
Get that right and the sequence does two jobs at once:
Contacts who re-engage get pulled back into the fold.
Contacts who don't re-engage are scrubbed before they do any more damage to your deliverability.*
*Scrubbing is recommended, but it’s also a dirty word for some teams. (It shouldn’t be, but that’s the topic for a different newsletter.)
Re-engagement goes wrong when the goal becomes “save every contact.” Instead, focus on knowing which ones are worth saving. And having something worth saying to them.
'Til next week,
Carolyn
How I can help you:
Boxcar helps marketing leaders at sales-led B2B tech companies fix their messaging. We start with why it's not working and end with copy that actually drives pipeline.
I also work with a small number of clients to operationalize that strategy using AI, building tools their marketing team can actually use to create high-quality, on-brand outputs. (If you’re curious about this, mention it when you reach out.)
Interested in working together? Reach out by filling this form.
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