From 34% open rate to 61%: a D2C brand's email hygiene story

A direct-to-consumer fashion brand was sending to a list of 220,000 contacts with a 34% open rate and rising unsubscribes. After a full validation pass and re-engagement campaign, open rates almost doubled.

Meridian Apparel (name changed) had been collecting email addresses since 2019 — through website sign-ups, checkout flows, pop-ups, giveaway campaigns, and a co-registration partnership that had since been discontinued. By mid-2025, their list had grown to 220,000 contacts and their performance had quietly declined.

The problem

Their open rate had been 34% twelve months earlier and was now sitting at 22%. Unsubscribes were up 40% year-over-year. Their email manager attributed it to 'audience fatigue' and proposed sending less frequently. A closer look revealed a different problem: the list had never been cleaned.

The audit

We ran their full 220,000-address list through a bulk validation job. Results: 31,000 INVALID addresses (14%), 18,000 DISPOSABLE (8%), 24,000 CATCH_ALL (11%), and 19,000 with no engagement in over 18 months. Combined, that's over 40% of their list that was either invalid or functionally dead.

The re-engagement campaign

Before suppressing the unengaged addresses, we ran a re-engagement campaign to the 19,000 long-dormant contacts. Two emails over 10 days with a simple subject line: 'Still interested in hearing from us?' 2,200 contacts re-engaged and clicked through. The remaining 16,800 were suppressed.

The re-engagement campaign recovered 2,200 contacts who still wanted to hear from them. That's 2,200 people they would have lost by skipping the step.

The result

After removing invalids, disposables, and long-term unengaged contacts, the list shrank from 220,000 to 128,000. The next campaign, sent to this clean list, achieved a 61% open rate — up from 22% on the previous send. Unsubscribes dropped to 0.4%. They maintained an open rate above 55% for the following three months.