Between 40%-60% of your database is unengaged!

As far as your business and email platform are concerned, these contacts on your database might as well be digitally dead, lying dormant and gathering digital dust.

If you are an event business or a media publisher, this is likely to be your case. It is costing you money and damaging your reputation with sponsors and advertisers.

As crazy as it sounds, it is an uncomfortable reality that for once you and your marketing team has to face. These contacts are not adding any value to your 

Why You Should Care About Re-Engagement

Over time, even the most valuable contact databases lose their edge. People disengage, roles change, and inboxes get cluttered. For event-led businesses and media publishers, a bloated list of inactive contacts drains campaign performance, skews reporting, and harms email deliverability.

A strategic re-engagement campaign helps you:

• Revive dormant interest in your events, subscriptions, or content
• Identify high-value contacts before they churn permanently
• Protect sender reputation and improve future deliverability
  
  

The 6-Step Re-Engagement Playbook

1. Identify Your Unengaged Contacts

In your email marketing tool you should have the possibility to easily isolate in a list the following:

• Contacts that have never opened/clicked on your emails
• Unsubscribed

You can also review and cross reference them with:

• Contacts with no sales activity logged on them
• Contacts that were added to your DB more than 4 years ago
• Lapsed subscribers or members
• Inactive newsletter readers

Segment them into:

• Still subscribed (safe to email)
• Unsubscribed/inactive (use ads or third-party tools)
  
  

2.  Use a Third Party Tool NOT your HubSpot Account

Avoid blasting cold lists from your primary HubSpot portal or your main email tool.

Instead: Use third-party tools like: Overloop , Mailshake, Lemlist. Predominantly you will be using these tools to fire out a key set of emails to potentially a big number of contacts in a cost efficient manner.

It also helps keeping your benchmarks clean and your 

3. Craft the Right Content Series

Do not just send them your usual type of emails. They are not responding to them for a reason. So you will need to think about this a little bit more careful.

Audit your best content, the best event recordings, past events, webinars, videos... etc. Then curate the best of the best that you have ever produced, ensure this is value add. Not sales.

Build between 3–5 emails over 2–3 weeks, here is an example:

• Email 1: "Still with us?" – ask a simple question or offer a valuable resource
• Email 2: Share a trend report or top-performing piece of content
• Email 3: Highlight a relevant event, speaker, or session
• Email 4: Reintroduce your brand’s value proposition
• Email 5: Last chance to stay connected (with a soft opt-in CTA)

4. Build a Re-marketing Campaign with Paid Ads

Use these same lists/segments to build remarketing ads on LinkedIn, search and the tools that apply most to your audience. This is absolutely critical.

These contacts didn't engage with you via email, you MUST try to engage with them through a different channel.

Serve them:

• Event highlight reels
• Your best keynote speaker announcements
• Subscriber-only content promos
• Your most valuable downloadable, and make it free

5. Track, Tag, Test

It is super important that you use UTMs and Campaign Tags to track any behaviour or engagement back into HubSpot. Build lists to tag contacts who re-engage:

• Opened or clicked
• Re-subscribed
• Registered or downloaded

Use this insight to:

• Create warmer lists for future campaigns in your main tool
• Keep a hot remarketing list that you can always use

6. Cull the Truly Disengaged

After 30–45 days, remove or archive contacts who didn’t engage from HubSpot. If you decide to keep them somewhere, ensure you are always excluding them from emails, reports etc.

This isn’t a loss—it’s a reset. You’re improving performance, deliverability, and clarity.

What Success Looks Like

• Re-engagement rate of 1– 3% (Visits, clicks, replies, or conversions)
• Your response rates with go up!! that will be your true metrics
• Healthier sender scores and reduced bounce rates
• Focused, qualified list for future marketing
  
  

Final Tip: Think Like a Publisher

Not everyone will come back—and that’s okay. The goal is to build a responsive, high-value audience who will:

• Attend your next event
• Subscribe to your content
• Buy from your sponsors

Less clutter. More clarity. Better results.

We're here to assist you in planning your re-engagement campaign or building your segment strategy in HubSpot.