How often should I run a re-engagement campaign?

You pick. :) In this article, I'm choosing to use a 90 day timeframe. So, if people haven't opened or clicked on anything in 90 days, they'll hear from me. And I just put it on my calendar to run this campaign every 90 days. You can choose whateve timeframe makes the most sense to you.

Should I purge known bad email addresses from my list first?

Sure. If you haven't run an email re-engagement campaign in awhile and your list is really old and unmaintained, it may be a good idea for you to use a third-party list cleaning service. You can export your list the upload it to one of these services. They'll compare your list to a database of bad email addresses or those known to be bad. You can then filter them off your list before even starting your re-engagement campaign.

Is double-confirmation enough?

No. Double confirmation can help ensure they are valid and intentional subscribers at the start. However, over time, their interest may wane. The reengagement campaign will help you ensure they remain interested.

What should I do with subscribers who are stale and don't respond to reengagement?

In the automation above, we tag them as "Stale". Then, at the least, you exempt those subscribers from future email campaigns. If you choose, you can keep them on your email list and just email them less often. You can also just delete them if you would like. Of course, ensure they are not a customer before you delete them. I've heard of some people who will take their Stale subscribers and move them to another CRM. They think of it a "throw away" CRM where they don't worry as much about the email deliverability reputation. From that CRM, they will continue to occasionally email their stale subscribers and try to reengage them from there. The idea would be to keep your main CRM with the best deliverability rates. You can execute this strategy at your own risk. Not all CRM providers will appreciate it. 😉

Won't this shrink my email list?

Yeah, probably. 😇 But, keep in mind, the only TRUE email list is the list of people who are truly paying attention. For the ones who are not, you're just paying to continue sending to them for no reason. It might make you feel good to have that larger list, but truth is, you're the one wasting resources sending into oblivion. It is up to you if you're OK with that.

Why do you put your emails into the automation versus an email sequence?

With FluentCRM (and most CRMs), you can either send emails directly within an automation or inside of an email series. You certainly can write your reengagement email series within a sequence and then just use an automation to add them to it. The reason I put the emails into the automation itself is so that I can do a check on their engagement status between each email and react accordingly. If they click on something, I don't want the email series to continue anyway. By using an automation, I can insert logic like that in between the emails rather than the system just blindly sending everything.