Industry
B2B Technology and Services
Challenge
A B2B company had roughly 40,000 contacts in its database but had never run a consistent email program. Sends were sporadic with no cadence or segmentation, meaning the list carried significant deliverability risk, including invalid addresses, hard bounces, and recipients likely to mark messages as spam. The team needed to restart email in a way that protected sender reputation and produced real engagement.
Results
Orange Marketing used ZeroBounce to validate and de-risk the database, then executed a structured warmup and relaunch. The first campaign after cleanup generated a 23% open rate and a 39% click-to-open rate, transforming a neglected list into an active owned channel the team could email with confidence.
Services
Email Deliverability Strategy, ZeroBounce List Validation and Hygiene, Warmup Planning, Segmentation and Send Cadence Guidance, Deliverability Monitoring
A Valuable List With No Safe Way to Use It
The client had built a sizable contact database over time, but had never established a regular email cadence. That left them in a difficult position: they had 40,000 contacts and strong content to share, but no established sender reputation and no way to know how much of the list was still valid.
Attempting to email the full database in that state would have been risky. Years of accumulated contacts without validation meant the list almost certainly contained hard bounces, invalid addresses, and recipients who would mark unsolicited messages as spam. Any one of those problems can damage a sending domain's reputation. Combined, they can trigger spam folder placement, blacklisting, or outright blocks from providers like Gmail and Outlook.
As ZeroBounce COO Brian Minick explained in a joint webinar with Orange Marketing, contacts who are known to mark messages as spam can quickly destroy a sender's reputation, and the penalties from inbox providers keep getting stricter. Removing those contacts before the first send was essential.
The company wasn't starting from zero. They had the contacts and the content. What they needed was a way to clean the list, rebuild trust with inbox providers, and relaunch email as a dependable channel.
The Approach: Clean the List, Earn the Inbox
Orange Marketing took a methodical approach using ZeroBounce's tools, fixing the foundation before sending a single campaign email.
Validation and Risk Removal
Orange ran the full database through validation to remove hard bounces and invalid email addresses. They also used ZeroBounce's activity data to identify and suppress contacts flagged as likely spam complainers.
In the webinar, Rebecca Gonzalez, CEO of Orange Marketing, described how this capability has proven essential across client engagements, noting that ZeroBounce's spam-likely identification has consistently helped uncover contacts that were quietly damaging email reputation behind the scenes.
This wasn't treated as a one-time cleanup. The team established an ongoing hygiene practice so list quality would be maintained as the program scaled.
Controlled Warmup
With the cleaned list ready, Orange ran a one-month warmup, gradually increasing daily send volume. They started at around 100 per day and doubled at intervals. They managed this process by hand using workflows, carefully controlling the ramp rather than relying on automation alone.
During warmup, they utilized a simple executive-style message sent from the client's CEO rather than a heavy marketing template. The content was kept intentionally straightforward: the goal was to generate positive engagement signals (opens, clicks, no spam complaints) so inbox providers would begin to trust the domain as a legitimate sender.
This is the phase where most teams make critical mistakes. They switch platforms, import a large list, and send at full volume on day one. That approach almost always triggers spam placement. As Rebecca emphasized in the webinar, patience during warmup is non-negotiable, even if it means pushing back on internal pressure to send faster.
Deliverability Monitoring
Throughout the process, Orange used inbox placement testing to understand where messages were landing on a per-network basis. As Brian explained in the webinar, email placement isn't binary. A message might land in the inbox on Gmail but hit spam on Yahoo, depending on the sender's reputation with each network independently. Network-level visibility allowed Orange to diagnose and correct issues precisely rather than guessing at what might be going wrong.
The Result: A Dormant List Becomes An Active Channel
After cleanup and warmup, the client sent their first real campaign. They chose content they believed would resonate with the audience: a concise, well-crafted email with a compelling subject line, strong preview text, and an eight-minute read behind the click.
The results on that initial post-warmup send:
- 23% open rate on what was effectively a cold reactivation of a list that had rarely been emailed
- 39% click-to-open rate, reflecting the percentage of people who opened the email and then clicked through to the content (not a 39% click rate on total delivered). The combination of a highly cleaned list, a self-selecting warmup audience, and well-matched content drove unusually high engagement among openers.
- A functioning owned channel. The company now had something it didn't have before: a validated, engaged list it could email consistently and confidently. What had been an ignored database became one of the team's most valuable marketing assets.
Why the Sequence Mattered
No single step produced these results. It was the order that made it work.
Validation removed the risk. ZeroBounce eliminated the contacts that would have caused bounces, spam complaints, and reputation damage on the very first send.
Warmup built trust. A month of gradual, controlled sending established the domain's credibility with inbox providers before any real volume was attempted.
Good content earned the engagement. A simple, relevant, well-targeted email gave the cleaned and warmed audience a reason to open and click.
Skip any one of those steps and the relaunch likely fails. Clean data sent too fast gets spam-foldered. A warmed domain sending to a dirty list triggers spam complaints. A strong reputation wasted on irrelevant content gets ignored.
Have a database you've been afraid to email? Let's talk about how to relaunch it safely.
