Three emails that ask a cold list an honest question — the check-in, the best-of, and the plain “should I stop emailing you?” with a one-click stay — plus the sunset policy that decides when silence means remove. Complete copy, the reason behind each send, and the pressure tactics to refuse.
A re-engagement campaign is three emails and one decision, and the decision is worth more than the copy: who counts as cold, and what happens to the people who never answer. Write that down first or the campaign quietly becomes a broadcast to everybody.
You are not trying to trick a disengaged person into one more click. You are asking whether they still want this, making it easy to say yes, and making it easy to say nothing — because nothing is also an answer and you have agreed in advance to respect it.
A win-back run because revenue is down is not a win-back. It is a broadcast to the people least likely to want it, sent at the moment you can least afford the complaints, and it is why the policy below puts the campaign on a schedule.
Everything in [brackets] is yours to replace, including every window in the sunset policy. The numbers in it are starting points chosen so the document reads as a document — they are not benchmarks and there is no correct value for a business other than yours. Swap the brackets for your tool’s merge fields where a merge field exists.
Day counters from the moment somebody enters the cold segment. The two rows at the ends are the ones people skip, and they are the ones that make the middle three work: the segment build before day 0, and the actual removal after day 15.
| When | What runs |
|---|---|
| Before day 0 | Build the segmentBehavioural definition, exemptions applied, complaints and bounces suppressed. |
| Day 0 | The honest check-inNames the silence and offers three answers, including “less often”. |
| Day 4 | The best of what they missedArgues by demonstrating. No question, no pressure. |
| Day 8 | Should I stop emailing you?A real removal date and a one-click stay. Says what is not affected. |
| Day 15 | The sunsetRemoved from active marketing. Record, purchases and access retained. |
| Day 15 → | The cadence resetEveryone who stayed gets a short re-orientation, not the launch in progress. |
Three emails, eight days, and each one does something the other two cannot. The first names the silence and offers a middle option that most campaigns leave out. The second argues by being useful. The third asks the question directly and gives a real answer to doing nothing.
Anyone who opens, clicks, replies, registers or buys during those eight days comes out immediately and goes back to the normal cadence. That exit has to be automatic — somebody who replied to the check-in on Tuesday and receives “should I stop emailing you” on Friday has been told, accurately, that nobody read the reply.
[First name] — You signed up for [what they actually signed up for] around [approximately when, if you know it], and you have not opened anything from me in a while. That is information, so I would rather ask than guess. Three ways this usually goes: 1. Still useful, just busy. Nothing to do — I will keep sending. 2. Useful, but too much. Reply with the word “less” and I will move you to [the lower-frequency option you genuinely have]. 3. Not useful any more. [Unsubscribe link], no hard feelings. It genuinely helps me to have an accurate list. If you tell me what you are working on at the moment, I will point you at whichever of my [articles, sessions, tools] is closest to it. [Your name]
Opens the campaign by naming the situation rather than pretending nothing happened. The three options matter: most re-engagement emails offer stay or leave, when the real answer for a large share of a cold list is “too often, wrong topic.” Option two only belongs in the email if the lower-frequency option actually exists — if you cannot deliver it, cut the line rather than promise it.
[First name] — No question in this one. Three things from the last [period] that were worth the time, in case any of them are relevant now. 1. [Title] — [one line on the problem it solves] [Link] 2. [Title] — [one line on the problem it solves] [Link] 3. [Title] — [one line on the problem it solves] [Link] That is the whole email. If none of them are useful, that is a fair answer too and [unsubscribe link] is right there. [Your name]
The only email in the three that argues for staying by demonstrating rather than asking, which is why it sits in the middle. Choose the three by what produced replies, questions and purchases — not by open rate. The segment you are mailing did not open anything, so opens cannot rank content for these people; the things that made your engaged readers respond are the best available proxy.
[First name] — This is the last email I will send unless you want more. You have not opened anything from me since [month], so on [date] I am taking you off my marketing list. Nothing dramatic. It keeps my emails landing for the people who do read them, and it keeps me from paying to email an empty room. If you want to stay, one click and you are back in: [Stay-subscribed link — one click, no form, no login, no survey] If you do nothing, you will not hear from me again after [date]. To be clear about what this does not touch: [your purchases, your course access, your account, your login] are not affected in any way. This is only about marketing email. Thanks for the time you did give me. [Your name]
The stop question works for one reason: it is true. The removal date is real, the one-click stay is genuinely one click, and the paragraph naming what is not affected is what separates a legitimate sunset notice from the account-deletion theatre covered further down. Send it, then honour it — a “final email” followed by more email is the fastest way to teach a list that nothing you write means anything.
The three emails only work because something happens at the end of them. Without a sunset, the stop question is a bluff, the removal date is decoration, and the campaign is one more broadcast to people who stopped reading — which is the exact problem it was supposed to solve.
Mailbox providers decide where your mail lands using how the people you send to behave. Continuing to send to a large group who never open, never click and never reply teaches the providers that your mail can safely be ignored, and that judgement is then applied to everybody — including the readers who would have opened. Removing the silent contacts is not a punishment for them. It is protection for the relationship you still have with everyone else. Deliverability basics covers the sending domain, authentication and complaint side of the same problem.
There is a second reason, and it is the one that makes the decision concrete rather than theoretical: an inactive contact is not free. Marketing platforms price on the number of people you can market to, so a third of a list that stopped reading two years ago is a third of a bill paid every month for silence.
The objection to sunsetting is almost always the same: these are people who bought from us, attended something, sat in a course. The answer is that removing somebody from active marketing does not have to remove them from the business. The customer record, the purchase history, the course access and the receipts all stay. What stops is marketing email — and the policy below says that explicitly so nobody has to relitigate it next quarter.
SUNSET POLICY — [Business name] Owner: [name] · Reviewed: [date] · Next review: [date] 1. WHAT COLD MEANS A marketing contact is cold when there has been no open, click, reply, purchase, login, event registration or form submission for [N] days. [N] must be longer than the longest normal gap between purchases in this business. Starting points to change, not benchmarks: — Audience that buys monthly or subscribes: [90] days — Audience that buys a few times a year: [180] days — Seasonal, annual or high-ticket audience: [365] days 2. NEVER COLD Exempt regardless of engagement: — Purchased anything in the last [12] months — Active subscription, membership or course access — Registered for something that has not happened yet — [Any other exemption that is true for this business] 3. THE WIN-BACK A contact that goes cold enters the three-email win-back: Day 0 the honest check-in Day 4 the best of what they missed Day 8 the stop question, with a one-click stay Any open, click, reply, registration or purchase during those eight days ends the win-back immediately and returns the contact to the normal cadence. 4. THE SUNSET [7] days after the stop question with no response, the contact is removed from active marketing. Customer history, purchases, course access and receipts are retained. Only marketing sending stops. 5. PERMANENT SUPPRESSION Spam complaints and hard bounces are suppressed permanently and are never entered into a win-back. They are removed ahead of everything above. 6. RE-ENTRY A sunset contact returns to active marketing only through a new deliberate action by that person — a new form submission, a registration, or a purchase. Not by import, not by list merge, not because a launch is coming. 7. WHEN THIS RUNS The win-back runs [monthly / quarterly] on a schedule. It is not run because revenue is down and it is not run in the two weeks before a launch. 8. REVIEW Reviewed [quarterly] by the owner named above. Change the windows if the data says so. Do not change them for one campaign.
A sunset rule that lives in somebody’s head is not a policy — it is an intention that gets overruled the first quarter a launch is coming and removing people feels expensive. Written down, with an owner and a review date, it survives that conversation. Clause 7 is the one people delete and the one that matters most: the campaign has to run on a schedule, because a win-back sent the week before a launch is not a win-back.
On a stitched stack the marketing list is the customer list, so taking somebody off the list means discarding what they bought and attended — and the policy gets overruled every time. Agorix separates the two: plan limits apply to the contacts you actively market to, while the CRM keeps the history for buyers, attendees and students. Stop the sending, keep the customer — see how marketing works.
Win-back campaigns attract manipulation because the audience is unresponsive and the temptation is to escalate. Every tactic below produces clicks. Each one also produces the thing you cannot afford from this segment, which is complaints.
It is the most common manipulation in this genre and it is simply a lie: no account exists, nothing is being deleted, and the sentence is there to manufacture a fear response that produces a click. It works in the sense that people click. It also converts a quiet unsubscribe into a spam complaint — the reader who feels tricked does not press unsubscribe, they press the button that reports you — and complaints follow your sending domain around long after the campaign is forgotten.
If there genuinely is an account and it genuinely is being closed, that is a different email: a real product notice, with a real date, sent because it is true. The test is simple. Would you be comfortable if the reader forwarded your email to somebody who could check whether the claim was accurate.
Less dramatic, more corrosive. Sending “this is the last email you will get from me” and then sending four more teaches your entire list that your words do not describe your actions — including the deadlines on your offers, which is where it eventually costs money. If you publish a removal date, remove people on it.
A win-back asks “do you still want this,” which quietly assumes you had permission and could show it. Re-permission asks “did you ever agree to this,” and it is the honest question for a list that arrived by import, acquisition, badge scan, or a form nobody remembers building.
The mechanics are the same as the stop question with one difference that decides everything: silence means no. In a win-back, doing nothing removes somebody from a list they once joined. In a re-permission campaign, doing nothing means they never confirmed, and confirming on their behalf is the failure that turns a hygiene project into a complaint problem.
Rules on consent and marketing email differ by where your subscribers live, and they change. Confirm what applies to your list before you send rather than assuming this block covers it — it is written to be honest, not to be legal advice.
RE-PERMISSION — [Campaign name]
WHEN THIS APPLIES
Use it when the list was imported from another system, collected for a
different purpose, inherited with a business, or is old enough that you
cannot show when and how each contact opted in. Do not use it as a
routine win-back — that is the three-email sequence, not this.
THE BLOCK, AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL
You are getting this because you [the specific thing they did] on
or around [approximate date]. I am rebuilding my list from scratch
and only keeping people who say yes.
Yes, keep sending: [one-click confirm link]
What you would get: [topic], [frequency, stated exactly].
Do nothing and this is the last marketing email you receive from
me.
THE RULES THAT MAKE IT REAL
— Silence means no. Nobody is confirmed who did not click.
— Record the confirmation on the contact: date, campaign, link.
— Say what they will get and how often here, not later.
— Send it once, or at most twice. A re-permission campaign that
runs four times is not asking, it is insisting.
— Re-permission cleans up a weak record. It does not manufacture
consent that never existed — if there is no lawful basis to email
these people at all, this campaign is not the fix.
— Confirm the rules that apply in the places your subscribers
actually live before you send. They are not the same everywhere.Re-permission answers a different question from a win-back. A win-back asks “do you still want this,” which assumes you had permission and can prove it. Re-permission asks “did you ever agree to this,” which is the honest question for an inherited or imported list. Treating silence as a yes is the failure mode, and it is the one that turns a list-hygiene project into a complaint problem.
Somebody who clicked the stay link has done one thing: agreed to keep hearing from you. Treating that as recovered demand — and dropping them straight back into whatever the list is currently receiving — undoes the campaign in a fortnight.
The most useful thing a win-back produces is rarely the reactivated contacts. It is the answer to why they went quiet — and if the replies say “too often,” the campaign has found a cadence problem that no amount of win-back copy will fix. Email frequency and the newsletter system are where that fix lives.
This is the riskiest campaign on your calendar: it goes to your least engaged addresses, all at once, on purpose. The copy matters less than the list you send it to and the pace you send it at.
Everything else on this page is downstream of that sentence. A business with a written cold rule and no templates will run a better campaign than one with perfect copy and a segment assembled the morning it sends, because the second one always ends up mailing everybody.
Three: the honest check-in, a best-of that argues by demonstrating rather than asking, and a plain stop question with a one-click stay. Longer sequences do not persuade a cold contact — they simply take longer to arrive at the removal, which is the actual point of the campaign. If somebody has ignored eight emails, the ninth is not the one.
When there has been no open, click, reply, purchase, login, registration or form submission for a period longer than the longest normal gap between purchases in your business. Ninety days can be right for a monthly-purchase audience and badly wrong for one that buys once a year. Write the window down, apply it by rule rather than by feel, and exempt recent buyers and active students explicitly — the lead scoring guide covers building the behavioural definition on a small list.
Remove them from marketing sending, not from your records. Continuing to mail people who never engage teaches mailbox providers that your mail can safely be ignored, and that judgement is applied to the people who do read you. Deliverability basics covers the mechanics. The customer record, the purchase history and any course or account access stay exactly where they are — sunsetting is a sending decision, not a deletion.
Only if it is true and it is actually happening. On a marketing list where nothing is being deleted, that line is a lie told to produce a click. It converts a quiet unsubscribe into a spam complaint, and complaints follow your sending domain around for a long time afterwards. Say what you are really doing — removing them from marketing email on a stated date — and say plainly what is not affected.
The removal helps. The sending is the risk. This campaign goes to your least engaged addresses, which makes it the most dangerous send on your calendar: suppress complaints and hard bounces before you start, send in batches, and look at the first slice before you continue. A win-back that damages your domain has cost you more than the contacts it saved.
Reset their engagement date first, so they are not marked cold again next month by an accounting error. Then send a short re-orientation — what you cover now, how often, and one genuinely useful thing — before anything else. It is an abbreviated welcome sequence, and it works for the same reason. Do not land them in the middle of a launch: they have agreed to hear from you, not to buy from you.
Audiences that build the cold segment from real behaviour, a win-back that exits the moment somebody replies, and a sunset that stops marketing to someone without discarding what they bought, attended or completed.
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