Prompt · Cold outreach
Cold first-touch email to a business owner
Get a reply, not a meeting. The meeting is the second email.
- Email type
- Cold outreach
- Business
- Agency
- Tone
- Spartan
- Length
- 90-130 words
The cold outreach email prompt
Write a cold email from [WHO YOU ARE] to [WHO THEY ARE]. They have never heard of me. Plain text only — no formatting, no bullet lists, no HTML. The email is built on one thing: [THE OBSERVATION]. Everything else exists to hold it up. The single action this email drives: [THE ASK]. Rules: - 90 to 130 words. Four short paragraphs at most. No paragraph longer than two sentences. - Open on the observation. Not on my name, not on my company, not on how I found them. - Say who I am in one clause, buried mid-email where it belongs. Nobody opens a cold email to learn about the sender. - Make the ask small enough to answer in one line. Ask for a reply, not for thirty minutes. Do not include a booking link. - No compliments that could be pasted into any other email. If the praise would fit a hundred businesses, cut it. - No questions that answer themselves. Skip "are you looking to grow" and anything shaped like it. - Never invent a number, statistic, result or client name. If a figure would help, leave [XX] and I will fill it in or cut it. - No exclamation marks. No emoji. Sentence case. Write a subject line of five words or fewer that reads like a human wrote it to one person. Return the subject line, then the body, then a sign-off.
What to fill in first
[WHO YOU ARE]- One clause. "I run a two-person studio that builds email for shops."
[WHO THEY ARE]- Name, role, company. The more specific, the less it reads as a blast.
[THE OBSERVATION]- Something you actually noticed about their business. This is the whole email. If you cannot fill it in, do not send.
[THE ASK]- The smallest thing they can say yes to. A reply, not a calendar link.
[XX]- Leave as written. A placeholder for a figure you supply yourself, never one the model supplies.
When to send it
First touch, once you have something real to say. This prompt is a bad fit for a list you bought and a good fit for twenty businesses you looked at properly. The observation variable is the gate: if you cannot fill it with something specific to that company, the email should not exist, and no amount of prompt engineering will fix it.
What to change first
[THE OBSERVATION] and [THE ASK], in that order. The observation decides whether the email reads
as addressed or as broadcast. The ask decides whether it gets answered — “worth a reply?” converts
where “do you have 30 minutes on Thursday?” does not, because the first costs the reader one line and
the second costs them a calendar.
What good output looks like
Subject: Your checkout emails
Your order confirmations go out as plain Shopify defaults, but everything else you send is carefully made. That gap is doing you no favours — the receipt is the one email every buyer opens.
I run a two-person studio that builds email for shops. We mostly get called in for exactly this.
Worth a reply, or is it already on the list?
— [WHO YOU ARE]
The prompt writes the words. Bring them here and the studio builds the campaign — branded, dark-mode safe, and ready to import.
Generate your ownIn the studio
A model writes copy. It does not write email.
Production HTML that survives Outlook, dark mode and a Gmail clip is a different job from writing the words. Describe the send once and export it to Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign or MailerLite.