How to restart email marketing after a break (without landing in spam)

This is for the Shopify founder who went quiet and now feels weird hitting send. I've walked a brand back from a 57-day gap, so I'll tell you what happened there too.

What happens when you stop emailing your list?

Here's a real one. A brand I work with went 57 days without sending a campaign. The main reason was inventory. Stock was low, and the brand didn't want to push heavy sales on products it couldn't keep on the shelf.

During the gap, campaign revenue dropped dramatically. Essentially nothing came in from campaigns.

When we started sending again, there were few complaints. Click-through rates spiked at first, then settled back to normal over time. And the content did its job: it won back a lot of the audience that had lapsed.

The part I didn't expect: the restart was a chance to reintroduce the brand and its hero products. In effect, the brand got to "rebrand" after the gap. People who'd half-forgotten why they signed up got a fresh look at what the brand was about.

So a break isn't the end of the world. But how you come back matters.

Why is emailing a list you haven't emailed in months risky?

The risk isn't that people forgot your brand. It's that some of them forgot they signed up, and a forgotten subscriber is one tap away from "report spam."

Mailbox providers are strict about that now. Google's sender guidelines tell senders to keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and to avoid ever reaching 0.30%. Yahoo's sender best practices set the line at 0.3%. Both require bulk senders to support one-click unsubscribe, and Yahoo says to honor unsubscribes within 2 days.

Volume matters too. Google specifically warns against sudden volume spikes if you don't have a history of sending large volumes. Going from zero sends to your whole list overnight is exactly that spike. If you're already seeing trouble, start with why Klaviyo emails go to spam before you send anything.

How do you restart email marketing after a break?

Think of it as a ramp, not a relaunch. Here's how I'd set it up in Klaviyo.

1. Start with people who engaged on purpose. Two groups are strong here. The first is people who opened your emails while Apple's privacy feature wasn't doing the opening for them. Those are real opens, from people who chose to read. The second is people who consistently click. Clicks are one of the best engagement signals you have.
2. Then add your regular openers. Once the first sends go well, widen to people who open your emails regularly.
3. Keep widening over a month or two. As you go, keep sending to people who opened in the last 60 or 90 days, and to your all-time openers.
4. Compare the segments. Put the open and click rates of your bigger, longer-standing segments next to the shorter, newer ones. If a bigger segment holds up, keep it. If it falls off, pull back.
5. Let the sunset flow handle the rest. People who still don't engage go into a sunset flow instead of getting campaign after campaign.

If your segments are a mess right now, fix that first. I break down how I build them in email segmentation for ecommerce.

One more thing. Before each send, click every link in the email. A restart is a common time for broken links, old discount codes and dead product pages to sneak through, because nobody's touched the templates in months.

What should the first email back say?

Thank them. Don't apologize.

I wouldn't build the first email around "sorry we've been quiet." It should express gratitude and thank people for sticking around. If they're reading the email, they already stayed with you. That's worth acknowledging.

Then reintroduce yourself. Show your hero products again and remind people why they signed up in the first place. That's what worked after the 57-day gap: the restart became a chance to tell the brand's story again.

It also lines up with what I see in subject lines. Across 7 brands and 2,821 campaigns, news beat brand voice, and vague questions were the worst-performing pattern. So give people something real: a product that's back, what's new, what you've been working on.

What's the biggest mistake founders make when they restart?

Coming back with a huge, flashy offer.

I get the instinct. Revenue was flat during the gap, and a big discount feels like the fastest way to fix it. But discounts are an obvious play to generate revenue, and right after a long silence, that's not what helps.

You want to build a baseline of value first, something people recognize and respond to. Then, when you do run an offer or create urgency, people buy into it and react. Lead with a sale and the comeback feels cheap.

That doesn't mean you can't give anything away. A giveaway or free product that actually benefits your community is a different thing, and I think it can be a great way back in. It's the reflexive percent-off email I'd skip in that first stretch.

Will people unsubscribe when you start sending again?

Some will. That's fine.

An unsubscribe is a clean exit. A spam complaint hurts every future send. If someone's going to leave, you want them using the unsubscribe link, which is one more reason to make it easy to find.

Sending more doesn't automatically mean losing people, either. Across 4 consumable brands, 3 of the 4 saw no rise in unsubscribes when they sent more. Once you're back on a rhythm, here's how many emails per week I'd plan for each segment.

Why engaged-first also makes more money

This isn't only about deliverability. It's about revenue per person.

At a sports training tech brand, an engaged send to 7,145 people earned $0.19 per person. A full-list blast to 49,475 earned $0.04. The engaged send made almost 5x more per person.

That's the real argument for the ramp. You're not holding back revenue by starting small. You're sending to the people who were going to buy anyway, and you're protecting the inbox placement you need for every send after. If you want to see where your numbers sit against other brands, my CPG email marketing benchmarks are a good gut check.

Keep the sunset flow on

A restart is a good time to find out who's really gone. As you widen into older segments, some people won't click no matter what you send.

Don't keep campaigning to them. Route them into a Klaviyo sunset flow: a short check-in, a reason to come back, then a final notice. Anyone who engages stays. Anyone who doesn't gets suppressed. Klaviyo's billing docs say suppressed profiles aren't counted in your active profile count once the suppression is processed, so you stop paying for people who never engage.

What to watch in the first month

• Spam complaints. Check Google Postmaster Tools and your Klaviyo deliverability numbers after each send. If complaints climb, pause the widening and go back a step.
• Click rate. Clicks tell you who actually wants the email. Across 4 consumable brands, click rate tracked revenue about twice as closely as open rate (0.65 vs. 0.32). Expect a spike right after the restart, then a settle back to normal. That's what I saw after the 57-day gap.
• Segment vs. segment. Compare the bigger, older segments to the newer, tighter ones. That tells you how far to widen.
• Clicks with no sales. That usually means something broke: a link, a code, a checkout.

Skip open rate as your main signal. Apple Mail auto-opens pushed open rates past 85% on some segments in my data, so opens will make a cold list look warmer than it is.

Where these numbers come from

The unsubscribe and click-vs-open figures come from 4 consumable brands, 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. The subject line finding comes from 7 brands and 2,821 campaigns. Both are small samples, so treat them as directional. The other figures are single brands, in one month or one send.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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