How do re-permission campaigns work?

You've got 30,000 subscribers and half of them haven't clicked anything in over a year. You could quietly suppress them, keep mailing and watch deliverability degrade, or send one more targeted email asking them to confirm they still want to hear from you. That last option is a re-permission campaign, and it's usually the right move before a large suppression or list cleanup.

Build a segment of subscribers who haven't clicked in 90 to 180 days (use clicks, not opens, since Apple Mail Privacy Protection has inflated open counts since iOS 15). Then send a short, plain email with a single CTA like "Yes, keep me subscribed." The subject line should make the stakes clear without being dramatic: something like "Should we keep in touch?" or "Are you still interested in hearing from us?" A plainer design tends to outperform a heavily branded template here because it reads like a personal message rather than a campaign.

Set a deadline of 7 to 14 days and say so in the email. Anyone who doesn't click by then gets suppressed or deleted when the window closes. Removing non-responders feels uncomfortable, but it's the point: contacts who don't re-engage aren't going to become customers, and they're dragging down your sender reputation and skewing your click rate numbers. Removing them typically improves inbox placement within a few sending cycles.

Before you launch, validate your list to remove hard bounces and known invalid addresses. Sending a re-permission campaign to dead addresses wastes volume and can spike your bounce rate right when you're trying to look healthy to inbox providers. Consider using a list validation service to clean the segment first. Once the campaign wraps, the contacts who re-engaged are your highest-quality segment: they've actively said they want your emails, which is as close to fresh consent as a dormant list gets. Next, look at your re-engagement sequences to keep those reactivated subscribers from going cold again.