Write short, personalized B2B cold emails and follow-up copy – under 90 words, one ask, personalization in the first line – with good/bad contrast pairs to calibrate.
Write short, personalized B2B cold emails and follow-up copy - under 90 words, one ask, personalization in the first line - with good/bad contrast pairs to calibrate. Use when someone asks "write a cold email", "why is nobody replying to my outreach", "draft a follow-up sequence", "make this email shorter", or is starting founder-led outbound. Do NOT use for sending infrastructure, domains, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, warmup, or spam placement - use cold-email-deliverability instead; for multi-channel cadence architecture use outreach-sequence-designer; for building and verifying the list use prospect-list-builder.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
cold-email-craft/SKILL.md
---
name: Cold Email Craft
description: Write short, personalized B2B cold emails and follow-up copy - under 90 words, one ask, personalization in the first line - with good/bad contrast pairs to calibrate. Use when someone asks "write a cold email", "why is nobody replying to my outreach", "draft a follow-up sequence", "make this email shorter", or is starting founder-led outbound. Do NOT use for sending infrastructure, domains, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, warmup, or spam placement - use cold-email-deliverability instead; for multi-channel cadence architecture use outreach-sequence-designer; for building and verifying the list use prospect-list-builder.
---
# Cold Email Craft
A cold email earns a reply by respecting the reader's time and making the next step trivial. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the 200-word "quick question" pitch that reads as mail-merge, burns the prospect, and teaches the founder that outbound doesn't work. Short beats clever; this skill owns the words. If the words are good but nothing lands in the inbox, the problem is infrastructure - route to cold-email-deliverability.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather inputs
1. Who is being emailed: role, company profile, and one concrete reason this person, now (a launch, a hire, a post, a funding event). If no reason exists, the list is not ready - route to prospect-list-builder.
2. The offer and the one result it produces, with a number from a comparable company. Default: if no customer result exists yet, use the founder's own before/after and label it as such.
3. The lowest-friction ask the sender can honor ("15-min call", "2-min Loom", "reply with yes/no").
4. Sequence length and channel mix already planned, if any (architecture belongs to outreach-sequence-designer; copy for each step belongs here).
### Step 2: Write the first line - personalization first
The first line is about them, specific and true: a launch, a hire, a post, a talk. Never "I hope this finds you well," and never open with the sender's name or company. Test: could this line be pasted into an email to anyone else? If yes, it is not personalization. A merge tag that says {{first_name}} only is not personalization either. This line is 80% of the reply-rate difference; spend the research minutes here.
### Step 3: Build the body in four moves, under 90 words total
1. Opener - the specific, true observation about them (Step 2).Click to play with sound.