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Case Study · Retail Technology
From cold list to $300K+ retail pipeline
ATI sells electronic shelf label systems to multi-location retail chains across Canada and the US. In April 2025 they had no outbound function. Thirteen months later, cold email is a steady source of quoted deals, in two languages, across five retail verticals.
78,122
Emails sent, all time
29,900
Businesses contacted
1,187
Unique replies
224
Interested leads
37%
Positive reply rate, April 2026 benchmark
$300K+
CAD quoted pipeline by month six
The challenge
A great product nobody was asking about.
Electronic shelf labels save retail chains real money: less labor on price changes, fewer pricing errors, faster response to competitors. But store operations leaders weren't searching for them. The market needed to be told, store by store, chain by chain.
ATI's buyers are operational: VPs of store operations, pricing directors, owners of independent chains. They don't attend martech webinars and they don't click ads. Cold email, framed around labor savings rather than technology, was the only channel that put the message directly in front of them.
The strategy
Vertical by vertical, in two languages.
Vertical-specific campaignsGrocery, pharmacy, hardware, pet retail and convenience, each with its own copy, proof points and objections. No generic blasts.
Directory-based list buildingTrueValue, Ace Hardware, Home Hardware, Guardian and PharmaChoice directories scraped and enriched into precise chain-level lists.
Bilingual outreachFull French sequences for Quebec grocery, pharmacy and hardware. The 40% positive reply rate on Quebec French grocery validated the investment.
Operational framingLabor savings, pricing accuracy and competitive response. Never technology novelty. The framing came from ICP interviews and got sharper every month.
Pipedrive integrationTwo-way sync with automatic deal creation on positive replies. ATI's team works leads from their own CRM, not from our tooling.
Slack reply routingEvery reply lands in the shared #ati channel with an AI-drafted response for the team to approve and send.
Re-engagement cyclesNon-responders recycled with fresh angles on a six-week cadence. Several interested leads came from the second or third touch cycle.
Weekly reporting, monthly strategyA Looker Studio dashboard updated weekly, plus a monthly working session where copy and segments get adjusted on real data.
Results
Thirteen months, compounding.
Monthly sending volume and interested replies from the Email Bison workspace, June 2025 through June 2026. The first closed deal came from the pharmacy vertical within six months.
Emails sent per monthInterested replies
| Top campaigns by interested leads | Emails sent | Replies | Interested | Positive share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supermarkets CA | 4,208 | 87 | 27 | 31% |
| Holiday Reengagement | 8,418 | 108 | 20 | 19% |
| Pharmacy Stores CA | 4,055 | 49 | 18 | 37% |
| TrueValue Directory | 3,232 | 48 | 17 | 35% |
| Ace Hardware Store Directory | 6,676 | 64 | 15 | 23% |
How it unfolded
Three phases over thirteen months.
Phase 1
Months 1–2
Validate
An ethnic grocery pilot produced 15 interested leads in the first week and validated the model. Core verticals were chosen on that evidence, not guesses.
15 interested in week onePhase 2
Months 3–6
Verticalize
Grocery, pharmacy and hardware campaigns scaled up. Quebec French campaigns opened a second market. The first deal closed, in pharmacy.
First closed dealPhase 3
Months 7+
Operationalize
Pipedrive automation, re-engagement cycles, and US expansion through hardware directories. Positive reply rate climbed to 37% by April 2026.
37% positive repliesIn their words
“Daniel and his team have run our campaigns for over 10 months at reply rates as high as 8%, with several converting into closed deals.”
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