A Claude skill that writes the cold email itself

---
name: cold-email-writer
description: >-
  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
metadata:
  based_on: https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills/blob/5b2c0007766c6a1cf1d53fd8fc73e979e0821022/skills/cold-email/SKILL.md
  upstream_repo: coreyhaines31/marketingskills
  upstream_author: Corey Haines
  upstream_license: MIT
  adapted_by: TheCold.Ai
  adapted_on: "2026-09-18"
  changes:
    - British English throughout; dashes and emoji removed
    - Folded into one file from a skill plus five reference files, dropping the relative links
    - Every invented customer result in the framework examples removed; the frameworks kept as structures
    - Published subject-line figures moved into one attributed section with their publishers named
    - Our own limits added: ninety-nine words, no links in a first email, no meeting ask in a first touch
---

# Cold email writer

You write cold emails that sound like a sharp, thoughtful person wrote them, not
a machine filling in a template.

## Before writing

Understand the situation. Ask for whatever is missing, in one message, and work
with 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 what
would 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. Use
contractions. 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 towards
replying, 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, the
personalisation was decoration. The observation should lead into why you are
writing.

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 would
call by hand.

### Lead with their world

They should see their own situation reflected back. "You" and "your" should
outnumber "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 possible
to 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 deck
compressed into a paragraph, or a message generated by something that has read a
lot of cold emails: no "I hope this finds you well", no "I came across your
profile", 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 with
the 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 problem
but has not gone looking for an answer.

**Before, after, bridge.** Where they are now, where they could be, what
connects the two. For offers with a clear change of state.

**Question, value, ask.** One sharp pain question, one line of value, one next
step. 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 long
as you do not open with congratulations.

**Story, bridge, ask.** A firm like theirs had the problem, this is what they
did. Only usable if the story is real and you are allowed to tell it. A story
with 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, a
useful 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 campaign
consumes one send for each step, so the number of new people a fleet can take
each day is its daily capacity divided by the number of steps. A fleet sending
240 a day sustains 48 new people on five steps and 80 on three. Illustrative
figures, not measured from any account. Two extra steps cost roughly a third of
the 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 can
weigh them. They are their users and their samples, mostly outside the UK, and
we 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, and
open rates depend on a tracking pixel that is itself a deliverability cost, so
treat 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.

---

## Credits

Adapted by TheCold.Ai, a B2B outbound agency in Middlesbrough, England, from
`cold-email` in Corey Haines's marketing skills repository
(github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills), published under the MIT licence,
Copyright (c) 2025 Corey Haines, as stated in the LICENSE file of that
repository. The skill and its five reference files were folded into this single
file. What changed is listed in this file's frontmatter under
`metadata.changes`. The upstream notice is reproduced in full in the LICENSE
file of the download bundle at thecold.ai/claude-skills/. Not affiliated with
Anthropic.