How to measure reactivation success?
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A re-engagement campaign that "worked" means something specific: a subscriber who was inactive is now doing something again. The question is which signals actually confirm that, and over what time window.
The primary signals
Clicks in the re-engagement email itself. This is the clearest confirmation. They read it, they decided to stay, they proved it by clicking. Track click-through rate on your re-engagement send separately from your regular campaigns.
Continued engagement in the following 30 to 60 days. A click on the re-engagement email is encouraging, but the real question is whether they stay active. Check whether subscribers who clicked the re-engagement email are still opening or clicking in subsequent sends. If they clicked once and went dark again, you've bought a little time but haven't really reactivated them.
Opens (with caveats). Don't rely on opens alone, especially with Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflating tracking. A subscriber who only shows opens and never clicks is not confidently reactivated.
Benchmarks to compare against
Compare your reactivation campaign performance against your active list baseline. If your active subscribers click at 2.5% and your re-engagement campaign clicked at 0.8%, roughly 0.8% of your inactive segment is actually reactivated. The rest should go to suppression.
Also track your list size before and after. Suppressing non-responders will shrink your list. That's fine. A smaller, more engaged list almost always delivers better inbox placement than a large, partially-disengaged one.
The suppression decision
Set a clear rule before you run the campaign: subscribers who don't open or click the re-engagement email (or the sequence, if you send two or three) will be suppressed. Stick to it. The goal isn't to keep as many people as possible. The goal is to keep the ones who want to hear from you.
From there, monitor your deliverability metrics over the next 60 days after suppressing. Inbox placement rates and spam complaint rates should improve once the disengaged weight is off your list. If they don't, there may be other issues at play.
If you want help reading the numbers or setting up the suppression workflow, the Review My Emails SOS line is free: reviewmyemails.com/sos.
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