Funnel Notes
One short email a month
A real teardown, a benchmark, and one thing to fix. No fluff, no product news. Past issues live here.
The 38,000 contacts nobody emailed
Why B2B databases go quiet, what a re-permission email looks like, and the one benchmark to check before you send anything to a dormant list.
Read issue 1 →The 38,000 contacts nobody emailed
The teardown. This month's email is the quarterly newsletter: 1,100 words, six images, "Dear Valued Contact", sent to 42,000 people of whom 38,000 hadn't opened anything in a year. Open rate 11%. The fix isn't a better newsletter. It's splitting the list: the engaged 3,800 keep getting content; the dormant 38,000 get a four-email re-permission sequence in plain text, from a real person, asking one question. Full before-and-after here.
The benchmark. On a properly cleaned dormant B2B list, expect 20–35% unique opens and 2–5% engagement across the sequence. If your first send to a dormant segment comes in under 12% opens, stop: you have a deliverability problem, not a copy problem. Check the domain before sending email two.
One thing to fix this week. Look at your DMARC record. If there isn't one, add v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourdomain.com. It takes ten minutes, Gmail and Yahoo require it, and the reports will tell you who else is sending as your domain.
Next issue: what the post-webinar email should say instead of "thanks for attending".