Cold email that sounds like us.

• 01Smartlead — sending + warmupdaily
• 02Claude — draft per-prospectdaily
• 03Clay — enrichment + triggersweekly
• 04Notion — voice file + target listweekly
• 05Mailtester — deliverability checksmonthly

1. 01prospects · 60 min

   Pick 40 prospects with a real reason.

   By hand. Not from a list-buy. Read their company page, their last blog post, their LinkedIn — find the one specific reason this person needs to hear from you this week. Not "you're a growing startup" — something a stranger couldn't write.

   If you can't find a reason in 90 seconds, skip them. The hit rate on weak reasons is below 5%.

2. 02sample · 20 min

   Write one email by hand.

   Pick the easiest of the 40. Write the whole email yourself — opener, hook, ask, sign-off. Five lines maximum. This is the campaign's voice file.

3. 03draft · 90 min

   Claude drafts the other 39.

   Voice file (your hand-written email) in project context. Drop in each prospect's enrichment data and the one-line reason. Output: 39 emails in your voice.

   Each takes Claude ~10 seconds to draft. Don't read them yet.

4. 04edit · 90 min

   Edit by hand — at least one sentence per email.

   This is the rule. Every email gets a hand-edit. Often it's the opener; sometimes the ask. Without this, the campaign reads like a campaign.

   If you can't think of an edit, the prospect was wrong. Drop them from the list.

5. 05send · midweek

   Send midweek mornings, 9–11am their time.

   Smartlead schedules around the recipient's time zone. Start of the week gets buried. End of the week disappears. Midweek in the recipient's morning is the window.

   Cap at 15 sends per day per domain. Pace beats volume on deliverability.

• ×Subject-line A/B at small volume. Below 500 sends, the data is noise.
• ×Merge fields longer than {{first_name}}. {{company}} fails when their name has an LLC suffix.
• ×"Hope this finds you well." Every recipient knows.
• ×Re-using last quarter's hook. Hooks expire. Refresh quarterly.
• ×Sending start or end of the week. Buried both ends.
• ×"Did this make sense?" follow-ups. If they didn't reply, they didn't owe you an answer.
• ×List buys. Whoever sold you the list also sold it to everyone else.

Cold email is a hand-craft problem disguised as a software problem. 40 a week, one real reason each, send midweek morning. The rest is tooling around the discipline.

Steal one thing: the 90-second reason rule. If you can't find one, the prospect isn't ready.

Export 30 of your sent emails — not cold, real ones. Feed them to Claude as the voice file. The drafts get sharper than the hand-written sample alone can produce, because the model sees how you actually write across contexts.

Clay watches for: job change, funding event, new product launch, leadership hire. The "reason" comes free with the trigger. Reply rate on trigger-based outbound runs ~10 points higher than cold.

Smartlead handles the first two touches with template + variable. The third touch — if it happens — gets your full attention. The third touch is where ~30% of replies actually come in.

Every reply gets classified: positive, neutral, hostile. Hostile replies on a hook mean the hook is wrong — kill it. Two hostile replies in 40 sends is a flashing signal.