The list is not the problem. The domain you send it from is.
A list nobody has emailed in a year always has a block of addresses that died in the meantime. Send it from the domain the client uses for ordinary business mail and the bounces set their sender reputation before a single person reads anything. Google and Yahoo hold bulk senders to a complaint rate under 0.3%, and a dormant list is exactly the kind that trips it on the first send rather than the fifth.
So the campaign gets its own authenticated sending subdomain, and it goes out on a ramp that starts at a couple of hundred a day off the warmest end of the list and widens only while the bounces stay clean. Slower. They still have a domain when it is finished.
The First Batch
Everything stood up and the first tranche sent, inside your own sub-account, so you can watch it land rather than take a report on faith.
- A dedicated sending subdomain on the client's own domain, authenticated, with the SPF lookup count proved under the RFC limit of ten and the DNS records handed over as text to paste
- The list segmented by last engagement, with the suppression list built: prior hard bounces, role addresses, typo domains, anyone already unsubscribed or marked DND
- A three-message sequence built in a published workflow, with a branch that pulls anyone who replies straight out of it
- The first 500 contacts sent off the most recently engaged end, on a published day-by-day ramp
- A one-page written record of what went out, what bounced, what opened, what replied, and the ramp table for the rest of the list
The Rest of the List
The remaining contacts mailed on the ramp the first batch proved, widened as the bounce rate comes back clean, with the sequence tuned on what the first 500 actually did. You are extending a second payment against a result you watched, not against a promise.
- Ramp widened against live bounce and complaint numbers, not a schedule decided in advance
- Sequence copy and timing adjusted on the first batch's open, reply and unsubscribe behaviour
- The 12-month-plus and unknown-provenance segments mailed last, or not at all if the numbers say not at all
- Same written record at the end, same stop conditions throughout
The Follow-Up Rail
Every automated send attached to one lead path, built and proved end to end in a client sub-account. This is the one to buy if the problem is not a dormant list but that nothing fires reliably after a form submission.
- Form to contact create to tag to pipeline stage to owner assignment to internal notification to the email follow-up sequence
- Sending subdomain authenticated, the same way as above
- A tagged test contact pushed through the live workflow and the Execution Log captured, then the test contact deleted
- Written documentation your next hire or your VA can read without asking anyone
The rules, before you ask.
You add an Ironwood user to the one sub-account in scope at User role, not Admin, and it is removed in writing when the job is done. No shared credentials, no agency admin.
Scope, findings and handover are always in writing, so you can forward it, search it and hand it to your next hire. Once there is a written exchange and a scope on the table, a call is available.
Your clients are yours. The written non-solicit is in the client services agreement, not just on this page.
Everything here is email. Carrier filings are submitted by you or your client from your own account.
The account gets snapshotted as we found it, so anything done can be undone.
The work is under your login, on a workflow you can open and read. Opens, bounces and replies land in your dashboard, not only in our summary.