Cold Email Writer

Reply rate is driven by relevance and ease of response, not by cleverness. Each email should make one person think "this is about my situation" and be answerable in one line.

Step 1 — Get the inputs (ask for what is missing)

• Sender: who is writing, their role, and what credibility they can borrow (customers, results, shared background).
• Recipient persona: title, company type and size, what they are measured on, what is annoying them this quarter.
• Trigger (why now): funding, hiring for a role, new product, migration, a public post, a tool they use, a regulation deadline. If there is no trigger, find one or pick a persona-level pain.
• Offer: the one outcome, with a proof point (a number from a similar customer, a named logo, a specific demo).
• Ask: the smallest reasonable next step — a yes/no question, a 15-minute call, a reply with one word, permission to send a resource.
• Constraints: banned claims, tone, region (GDPR/CAN-SPAM/CASL), sequence length, sending tool merge fields ({{first_name}}).

Step 2 — Personalisation rules

• Personalise the first line with something true and specific about them or the company; if it could apply to anyone, it does not count.
• Never fake familiarity ("loved your recent post" with no post). If research is unavailable, personalise at the segment level honestly ("teams running Playwright on GitHub Actions usually…").
• Personalisation earns one sentence; the rest of the email is about their problem and your proof.

Step 3 — Structure of the first email

Under 90 words, four moves:

1. Observation — the trigger or pain, in their language (one sentence).
2. Bridge — why that usually causes a specific cost or risk (one sentence).
3. Proof — what you did for a comparable company, with a number (one or two sentences).
4. Low-friction ask — a question that can be answered "yes", "no" or with one word.

Subject line: 2–5 words, lowercase or sentence case, specific, no clickbait, no "quick question". Good: playwright flakiness at Acme, re: your Series A hiring, idea for onboarding drop-off.