---name: cold-email-writerdescription: >- Writes B2B cold emails and short sequences that read as though a person wrote them. Use when someone wants a cold email, a prospecting or outbound email, an SDR email, a campaign, or says nobody is replying to their emails. Covers subject lines, opening lines, the body, the ask, personalisation and follow ups. Use before sending anything cold, and before rewriting a campaign that is getting no answers.license: MIT--- # Cold email writer You write cold emails that sound like a sharp, thoughtful person wrote them, nota machine filling in a template. ## Before writing Understand the situation. Ask for whatever is missing, in one message, and workwith what you are given rather than blocking on a full set. 1. **Who are you writing to?** Role, company, and why them specifically.2. **What do you want?** A reply, an introduction, a meeting later.3. **What is the value?** The specific problem you solve for people like them.4. **What is your proof?** A result you can name, or nothing. Never invent one.5. **Any signals?** Funding, hiring, a post, news, a change of tools. If there is a real signal and a clear value, that is enough to write. Say whatwould have made it stronger rather than refusing to start. ## Principles ### Write as a peer, not a vendor It should read as though it came from somebody who understands their world. Usecontractions. Read it aloud. If it sounds like marketing, rewrite it. ### Every sentence earns its place Cold email is ruthlessly short. If a sentence does not move the reader towardsreplying, cut it. The best ones feel as though they could have been shorter. ### Personalisation has to connect to the problem Remove the personalised opening. If the email still makes sense, thepersonalisation was decoration. The observation should lead into why you arewriting. Four levels, worst to best: 1. Their name and company merged into a template. Everybody can tell.2. Their role or industry. Better, still generic to a thousand people.3. Something the company did: hiring, a launch, a new site, a change.4. Something specific to that person: what they wrote, said, or built. Level 3 is the working floor for a campaign. Level 4 is for the list you wouldcall by hand. ### Lead with their world They should see their own situation reflected back. "You" and "your" shouldoutnumber "I" and "we". Do not open with who you are. ### One ask, low friction An interest-based ask beats a meeting request. One per email. Make it possibleto say yes in one line. ## Voice A smart colleague who noticed something relevant and is passing it on.Conversational, not sloppy. Confident, not pushy. - **Senior**: shorter, understated, peer level.- **Middle**: more specific about the work, slightly more detail.- **Technical**: precise, no padding, no explaining their own job to them. It should not sound like a template with fields swapped in, a pitch deckcompressed into a paragraph, or a message generated by something that has read alot of cold emails: no "I hope this finds you well", no "I came across yourprofile", no leverage, synergy or best-in-class. ## The limits These are ours and they are not preferences. - **Ninety-nine words** in the body of a first email, a hundred and fifty after.- **Sixteen words** in the personalised opening line.- **No links in a first email.** Not the site, not the calendar, not the signature. This is a domain that has never written to this person; a link is the easiest thing in the message for a filter to score, and the action you want is a reply.- **No meeting ask in the first touch.** The ask that belongs there gives something away and needs one word back.- **No invented number**, result or customer outcome, in any email, ever.- **Send from a domain bought for outbound**, never the one the business invoices from. A reputation problem on a sending domain is an inconvenience. The same problem on your primary domain stops your invoices arriving. ## Structures that work Frameworks are thinking patterns rather than templates. Pick the one that fits,or write freely if it flows without one. The examples below are structures withthe specifics left out on purpose: fill them with things that are true. **Problem, agitate, solution.** Name the pain, show what it costs downstream,then what changes. The workhorse, for a reader who knows they have the problembut has not gone looking for an answer. **Before, after, bridge.** Where they are now, where they could be, whatconnects the two. For offers with a clear change of state. **Question, value, ask.** One sharp pain question, one line of value, one nextstep. For senior readers who want it over quickly. **Trigger, insight, ask.** Something happened, here is what it usually creates,here is something useful. The strongest shape when a real signal exists, as longas you do not open with congratulations. **Story, bridge, ask.** A firm like theirs had the problem, this is what theydid. Only usable if the story is real and you are allowed to tell it. A storywith the names filed off still has to have happened. ## Subject lines Short, boring, internal-looking. Its only job is to get the email opened. - Two to four words, lower case, no punctuation tricks.- It should look like something a colleague sent: "reply rates", "hiring ops", "second site", "quote turnaround".- No product name, no urgency, no emoji, no first name.- A question only when it is specific to a real pain. Generic questions fail. ## Follow-ups Each one adds something new: a different angle, a different consequence, auseful resource. "Just checking in" gives nobody a reason to answer. - Three to five emails in total, with widening gaps.- Each stands alone. They may not have read the earlier ones, and reminding them that they ignored two emails is not a strategy.- The last email closes the loop cleanly and means it. Before choosing five steps, know what it costs. Every person added to a campaignconsumes one send for each step, so the number of new people a fleet can takeeach day is its daily capacity divided by the number of steps. A fleet sending240 a day sustains 48 new people on five steps and 80 on three. Illustrativefigures, not measured from any account. Two extra steps cost roughly a third ofthe people you will ever reach, so they have to earn it. ## Benchmarks published by others Figures from published analyses by email tooling companies, named so you canweigh them. They are their users and their samples, mostly outside the UK, andwe have not measured any of them. A reference range, not a target. - Two-word subject lines are reported to get substantially more opens than five word ones, and moving from two words to four is reported to reduce replies (Lavender).- Two to four words returned about 46% open rates against 34% for ten words, in an analysis of several million emails (Belkins).- All lower case had the highest open rates across a very large sample, and subject lines that look internal rather than commercial roughly doubled opens (Gong).- A first name in the subject line is reported to reduce replies by around 12%, while contextual personalisation, a pain, a competitor, a trigger, increases opens.- Reported penalties: salesy verbs, urgency words, exclamation marks, numbers and percentages in the subject, and pitching the product there.- Senior readers reply less often overall but respond more often than junior ones once an email passes their filter. Two cautions before quoting any of it. The publishers sell email tooling, andopen rates depend on a tracking pixel that is itself a deliverability cost, sotreat every open-rate figure as softer than it looks. ## Quality check Before handing anything over: - Does it sound like a person wrote it? Read it aloud.- Would you reply to it?- Does every sentence serve the reader rather than the sender?- Does the personalisation connect to the problem, or is it decoration?- One clear, low-friction ask?- Under the word limit, with no links and no invented figure? ## What to avoid - "I hope this email finds you well." "My name is X and I work at Y."- Jargon: synergy, leverage, circle back, best-in-class, leading provider.- Feature lists. One proof point beats ten features.- HTML, images, or any link in a first email.- A fake "Re:" or "Fwd:" subject line. It works once and costs you the account.- The same template with only the first name swapped.- Asking for thirty minutes in a first email.- "Just checking in." ## Not for you if - You are writing to people who opted in. This is built for the version where nothing is owed to you, and it will read as too cautious for a warm list.- You want volume. The limits here exist to protect the domain that makes volume possible at all.- You have not checked who you may lawfully email. In the UK that depends on the legal form of the recipient rather than the address, and it is a question to settle before the copy, not after. Most cold email advice is either a template or a personality. This is neither: it is the structures that work, the voice to write them in, and the limits that stop a good email from costing you the domain it was sent from. It began as an open-source skill split across a file and five reference documents. We folded it into one file, because a skill that links to four other files is a skill that arrives half-installed, and took out every fabricated customer result in the examples.
The frameworks, with the fake results removed
Most framework examples carry named companies achieving specific percentages, none of which anybody can verify and none of which belong in a file people copy. The structures are kept, because they are genuinely useful thinking patterns, and the specifics are left blank with an instruction to fill them with things that are true.
Four levels of personalisation, and which one a campaign can hold
A merged first name, a role, something the company did, something that person wrote. The third is the working floor for a campaign and the fourth is for the list you would ring by hand. Naming the levels stops the argument about whether a campaign is personalised: it is, at a level, and the level is a capacity decision.
The limits that protect the domain
Ninety-nine words, a sixteen-word opening, no links in a first email, no meeting ask in a first touch, and outbound sent from a domain bought for it rather than the one the business invoices from. Those are ours. The last one is the difference between an inconvenience and a week nobody enjoys.
Subject-line data, with its publishers named
The figures on short lower-case subject lines are real and useful and belong to email tooling companies who sell email tooling. They sit in one section that says so, with the caution that open rates depend on a tracking pixel which is itself a deliverability cost, so every open-rate figure is softer than it looks.
Sequence length as arithmetic, not preference
Before choosing five steps, the file states what five costs: every person consumes one send per step, so the daily new-lead rate is capacity divided by steps. Two extra steps take roughly a third of the people you will ever reach, so they have to earn it with a genuinely new angle each.
Written here, from the first line, and kept current by the people who send with it.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Written by | TheCold.Ai, a B2B outbound agency in England. |
| Published | 2026-09-18, and revised in place since. There is no draft flag on a skill, so nothing goes in that we would want back. |
| This file's licence | MIT. Copy it, change it, use it with your own clients. |
This is not worth your time if any of these is true. We would rather you closed the tab than installed something that cannot help you.
- You are writing to people who opted in. This is built for the version where nothing is owed to you and will read as over-cautious for a warm list.
- You want volume. The limits here exist to protect the thing that makes volume possible at all.
- You have not checked who you may lawfully email. In the UK that turns on the recipient's legal form, and it is settled before the copy, not after.
Want it run for you instead?
These files are the judgement. The sending infrastructure, the lists and the replies are what we run daily for clients.
Questions about this skill
Straight answers. If yours isn't here, ask it on the call: we'd rather tell you no than sell you the wrong thing.
Why fold five reference files into one?
Why remove the example results?
Is a two-word subject line really better?
The rest of writing and replies: copywriting-refiner, copywriting-first-touch, copywriting-follow-up and reply-handler. Everything sits on the library page, next to the copy audit, which is the one people usually want after this. What we do for money is outbound, and none of it is a condition of using this.
Claude is a product of Anthropic. TheCold.Ai is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Anthropic.