The problem
A mailing list for a medtech regulatory affairs organisation in the APAC region had gone quiet. Contacts who hadn’t opened an email in months were still counted as active, which pushes up sending costs and drags down deliverability for everyone else on the list.
The fix isn’t to keep emailing everyone the same way. It’s to find out who is still interested, and stop paying to reach the people who aren’t.
What I built
I built a sunset workflow for the client’s mailing list. It filtered out the inactive leads and sent them a single re-engagement email, then split the list by what happened next.
Anyone who opened, clicked or otherwise responded stayed on the active list. Everyone else moved into an archiving segment, ready for list cleanup instead of continuing to sit on an active send.
How it works
Mailchimp segmentation did the filtering. Everyone who hadn’t engaged in a set window landed in the dormant segment — 821 contacts in total — and the re-engagement email went out to that whole group.
800 emails delivered, a 2.6% bounce rate. Of those, 96 recipients opened the email (a 12% open rate, 107 opens counting repeats), and 20 clicked through, a 5.38% click-through rate. Those 20 are the re-engaged subscribers the workflow was built to find.
The other 725 didn’t respond. They moved to an archiving segment for list cleanup rather than staying billed as active. Two people unsubscribed, and there were zero abuse complaints — a clean result for a list-hygiene send.