From “dead list” to $342,791 in 90 days

Hey, Michael from AdSumo Digital here.

“Should we just delete the cold subscribers?”

That’s what a lot of brands ask me during audits.

It usually comes after they’ve been told:

• “They’ll hurt your deliverability.”

• “They’re not worth emailing.”

• “You should suppress them and move on.”

And look, I get the fear.
Emailing a cold list is like walking a tightrope. One wrong move and you tank your domain.

But here’s the thing:
Your cold subscribers are assets, not liabilities.

Over the past 6 months, I’ve reviewed multiple Klaviyo accounts with 30,000+ subscribers who hadn’t been emailed in months...

Despite the fact that 50–70% had made a purchase before. (health niche so they had good customer LTV potential too!)

That’s wild.

You’re literally paying to store thousands of people who already voted with their wallet and then ghosting them.

So today, I want to walk you through the exact 3-phase process we’ve used (and are currently using) to safely wake these lists up…

And how it’s already brought in over $100K in recovered revenue across a few brands.

Phase 1: The Strategic Heartbeat (Days 1–14)

Step one is not blasting your full cold list.

Instead, we build a small test segment (about 1,000-2,500 subscribers) who:

• Opened an email in the past 180 days

• Purchased in the last 12 months

• Are mostly on Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook (easier to inbox)

Then we send a plain-text, no-fluff email like:

• Subject Example: “Quick question about your order”

• Sent Tuesday at 10am

• No images, no buttons, no sales push — just a real, reply-worthy note

Why? Because it feels like a human, not like marketing.

In most accounts, we see 65–75% open rates and reply rates around 2–3%.

That’s our “heartbeat.” If we get that, we move on.

Phase 2: Careful Expansion (Days 15–45)

If the small batch responds well, we scale up in chunks:

• Add 5,000 subscribers per batch

• Wait 3–4 days between sends

• Only expand if open rates stay above 35%

• Same minimal email format

We monitor:

• Open rate (goal: stay above 35%)

• Spam rate (stay below 0.3%)

• Unsubscribes (watch for spikes)

Across one account, we went from 2,500 to 52,000 cold subscribers re-engaged within 4 weeks.

That alone generated $119,000+ in recovered revenue.

Phase 3: Full List Pulses (Days 46–90)

At this point, most brands either:

• Stop because they’re afraid

• Or YOLO-send for weeks in a row and blow everything up

We do neither.

Instead, we run strategic pulses to the full list:

• One send per month to all remaining cold subscribers

• Great subject lines plus actual offers (not just “we miss you”)

• Clean design, strong CTA

• Sunset flows built in to auto-remove dead weight

In one case, the third pulse outperformed the first because we cleaned the list as we scaled.

Here’s the punchline:

Your “dead list” isn’t dead.
It’s just been ignored.

Every time we revive one, the brand says the same thing:

“I feel like we’ve been sitting on a gold mine and had no clue.”

Exactly.

Talk soon,
Michael

P.S. If you’ve got 10,000+ subscribers you haven’t emailed in months, let’s talk.
We’ve built a reactivation framework that protects deliverability and drives revenue.
Just hit reply and I’ll walk you through it.

P.P.S - If you run an Ecom brand and want to have a 15 minute strategy session with me, book a call here »