What happens when you email the leads you threw away?

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Fri(yay) - and that means it’s time for your Revenue Play - an issue where I share some stories from my own career that just worked.

This week, I’ll share what I did with a client who had 700 contacts just sitting in closed lost. They didn’t convert the first time, and then, they just went into the stage of being forgotten.

But we went back for them - and here’s what $80K+ in closed deals says about where the real money was hiding the whole time.

Let’s dive in.

This story is about a DTC brand that utilized HubSpot for the sales pipeline. But everyone who came through the pipeline either went through closed won (yay!) or closed lost (boo!).

And with a closed-lost status, every lead just went to die in that stage. No one remembered that they sat there and did nothing with it. The marketing budget went to new acquisitions only.

Meanwhile, nearly 700 contacts - some dormant for close to a year - were just sitting there.

The thing is - HubSpot has a lot of fields that get auto-populated with information, including time stamps.

So, while there was no re-engagement strategy or budget in place to start talking to these leads, not all was lost.

Closed-lost was being treated like a graveyard by sales, but HubSpot’s fields presented an opportunity instead by using field segmentation.

Marketing costs money - either through time or salary. So part of the discussion was how we’d allocate spend to push on some of these contacts.

We reallocated a portion of the budget toward email marketing and built a reactivation campaign targeting both dormant prospects and lapsed customers.

The key move was setting up campaign tracking inside HubSpot so we could actually measure deal influence from the emails - not just opens and clicks, but revenue tied back to the campaign. There’s a nice feature in HubSpot called Campaigns that lets you do just this.

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Reactivating dormant and cold leads takes time. It took close to a year before we started to see any movement. However, within the first year, we produced $20K in closed deals directly influenced by email marketing.

In addition, what followed was $60K+ in additional closed deals from the continued lifetime value of those same contacts.

That's $80K+ from a pool of leads the business had already written off. These leads were already acquired over a year ago, so the email marketing did the rest.

Before you put more budget into acquiring new leads, look at what's already in your CRM. If closed-lost is where contacts go to disappear, you're leaving a reactivation pipeline sitting idle. Set up a re-engagement sequence, build in campaign tracking so you can show ROI, and treat dormant contacts like the warm audience they actually are.

And don’t be afraid to provide a value grab or an offer to entice a conversation.

TL;DR

Here’s the thing - the budget was never the problem. Paid acquisition was working for some prospects, but the pipeline architecture was a huge problem in converting already-acquired leads that had gone to die.

And good news - you can do this too!