what to do when your list goes cold

Happy Wednesday! ✌️

Yesterday, I jumped on a coaching call with one of my ESS AI subscribers.

He’s got a decent sized list...

But hadn't mailed them consistently in months.

So the question came up of how to start emailing again without tanking my deliverability or pissing people off.

Now, the conventional answer is to slowly ramp up.

Start with one email a week.

Then two.

Then three.

Give the list time to "warm up" to you again.

Sounds reasonable, right?

I actually recommend doing the opposite.

Instead of slowly dripping back into people's inboxes and hoping they remember who you are...

Send 3-5 emails over the course of a single week.

But here's the key part:

Make those emails an opt-IN reactivation sequence.

Meaning, you're not just announcing your return and hoping people stick around...

You're asking engaged subscribers to actively click a link to confirm they still want to hear from you.

Anyone who clicks gets tagged as reactivated.

Anyone who doesn't?

You suppress them.

Now, I know what you're thinking...

"Won't I lose a ton of people doing it this way?"

Yeah, probably.

But those people were already gone.

You just didn't know it yet.

And keeping them on your list won’t protect you...

It’ll quietly wreck your deliverability, drag down your open rates, and make every email you send perform worse than it should.

A cold list doesn't need slow warming.

It needs a permission reset.

The subscribers who click back in?

Those are your people.

Mail them daily, sell to them confidently, and watch what happens.

Jim Hamilton