A subscriber who stopped opening your emails six months ago is not gone yet, but they're not free to keep on your list either. Research popularized by HubSpot, tracing back to MarketingSherpa, puts natural email list decay at roughly 22.5% a year, around 2.1% a month, as people change jobs, switch inboxes, or simply lose interest. That erosion happens whether you address it or not; a win-back sequence is what decides whether you notice and act, or just watch engagement drift down.

Who counts as gone quiet

60 to 90 days without an open or a click is the common line small senders draw. Pick a number and apply it consistently rather than eyeballing it campaign by campaign.

The win-back sequence

  • Email 1, the value reminder. No guilt-tripping. Remind them what you're about and what they signed up for in the first place, with your best recent content or product.
  • Email 2, a reason to come back. A genuinely useful update, a changed offer, or new stock since they last opened anything from you.
  • Email 3, the direct ask. 'Should we keep sending these?' with one click to stay subscribed and one to opt out. This is the email that does the real sorting.

Why this protects deliverability, not just your list size

Gmail and Yahoo's sender rules require a spam complaint rate under 0.3%, and inactive subscribers are disproportionately likely to mark mail as spam rather than scroll past it or unsubscribe properly. A list full of people who haven't opened anything in a year is also a list of people mailbox providers are watching closely: low engagement across a big share of sends is one of the signals that pushes a sender into the spam folder for everyone else on the list too, including the people who do read every email.

When to actually remove them

After the sequence runs its course, suppress anyone who didn't open or click any of the three. Keeping them 'just in case' protects nothing: it drags down your engagement rate, inflates your subscriber count against your plan's limit for no real benefit, and keeps exposing you to the spam-complaint risk the sequence was meant to resolve.

SendMerlin doesn't trigger this sequence automatically based on inactivity yet, build the three drafts in the campaign builder, export or filter your gone-quiet list from your existing subscriber data, and send the sequence manually on whatever cadence suits your list size. One flat price either way, so cleaning the list costs nothing extra, and a smaller, healthier list is one of the few maintenance tasks that actually lowers your risk rather than your reach.

Frequently asked questions

How long of a silence counts as 'gone quiet'?

60 to 90 days with no open or click is the common threshold small senders use. Shorter than that catches people who are simply between purchases; longer than that means you're mailing dead weight for months before doing anything about it.

Should I just delete inactive subscribers instead of running a sequence?

Run the sequence first. A short win-back series gives genuinely interested people a last chance to say so, and it gives you a clean reason to remove the rest: they were asked directly and still didn't respond.