Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

Why Re-Engagement Campaigns Are Hurting Your Email Deliverability

28 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, Speaker A warns that large-scale "we miss you" re‑engagement campaigns targeting subscribers who haven’t opened an email in six months can be counter‑productive, damaging the sender’s reputation. Jimmy Kim, speaking from an email service provider (ESP) viewpoint, explains that inactive recipients usually have changed addresses, lost interest, or never see the messages because they land in spam. Consequently, a re‑engagement email is unlikely to resolve these issues and may further harm deliverability.

Chapters

Be really careful about re-engagement campaigns. I see brands do these massive we miss you campaigns people haven't opened in 6 months, and oftentimes it's counterproductive, right? If people aren't engaging, forcing yourself back into their inbox with a desperate please don't leave us type email usually doesn't work, and it probably causes more harm than good to your sender reputation.
I've been on the ESP side. If someone hasn't opened your email in 6 months, they've either changed their email address, they're not interested anymore, or their emails are going to spam and they're not seeing them anyway. That's the truth of it most of the time. The re-engagement email probably isn't gonna fix any of those scenarios in most cases.