Pre-flight deliverability, 50 subject lines, and 12 templates that land in inbox and get replies. Written for B2B founders and outbound teams running cold campaigns at small-to-mid volume.
Sent to your inbox as a PDF. Plus one tactical email every few days for two weeks, operator notes, no fluff. Unsubscribe with one click.
Pre-flight deliverability, 50 subject lines, and 12 templates that land in inbox and get replies.
Most cold email guides are written by people who don't run cold email. You can tell because they say "personalize at scale" without flagging the contradiction. This playbook is the opposite.
Every section ends with something you can do today, a DNS record, a subject line to copy, a template to test. No "best practices" framing.
We tell you what we don't know, where the techniques fail, and which tools to skip. No fake testing data, no inflated case studies.
Calibrated for SMB founders and outbound teams. Not for enterprise sales orgs with dedicated deliverability engineers, they don't need a playbook.
19 pages. Roughly 25 minutes of reading. Plus reference material you'll come back to.
Six tactical steps before your first send: dedicated sending domain, SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup, 14-21 day warmup, sending caps, address verification, and inbox placement testing. Skip any of these and the rest of the playbook is useless.
50 subject lines across 8 categories, curiosity, specific & numbered, question, casual, pain-point, mutual reference, bait-and-tease, follow-up. Plus the five non-negotiable rules that apply across every category.
Four cold intros (pain-point, curiosity, case-study, value-first), three follow-ups (gentle, value-add, breakup), four reply-handlers (more-info, not-now, wrong-person, interested), and one re-engagement template. Each with when-to-use, why-it-works, and variation notes.
The shortlist after researching the cold email stack, for sending, finding, warming, and deliverability testing. Affiliate links are disclosed inline; the picks are the ones we'd make either way.
Yes. No paywall, no upsell. You give us your email and we send the PDF plus a five-email welcome sequence over two weeks. After that, you'll hear from us occasionally when there's a new review or take worth sending, usually every couple of weeks. Unsubscribe is one click at the bottom of every email.
The catch is that we earn affiliate commissions when readers sign up for some of the tools we recommend (Hunter, Instantly, Snov.io). That's how the lights stay on. It's disclosed inline throughout the playbook and the emails. The recommendations are the ones we'd make either way, if we lose the affiliate relationship tomorrow, the picks don't change.
Best fit: B2B founders, solo operators, and small outbound teams (2-10 people) sending under 5,000 cold emails per month. The playbook assumes you're new-ish to cold email or you've been doing it but the deliverability keeps biting you.
Not for: enterprise sales orgs with dedicated deliverability engineers, or for B2C cold marketing (the playbook is built around the B2B regulatory and trust context).
19 pages including cover, table of contents, and colophon. About 3,600 words of actual content. Reading time: 20-25 minutes for the whole thing. The subject line vault and templates sections work as reference material, most people come back to those multiple times.
PDF only. The format is intentional, cold email is one of those subjects where readable, copy-pasteable templates work better than video for getting things done. Video would mostly be us reading the PDF out loud.
Honest answer: you shouldn't trust any of us blindly, including us. Read the deliverability section first, if the SPF/DKIM/DMARC explanation matches what you find in independent sources (Google's Postmaster Tools docs are the gold standard), the rest is probably trustworthy too.
What we won't do: claim things we haven't verified. The playbook flags every uncertainty, every "in our view" opinion, and every affiliate relationship. If you read it and find a claim you think is wrong, hit reply on any email and tell us, we'll correct it.
If you're already past the point where this playbook helps, running 10k+/month in cold volume with a real deliverability engineer, the reviews on the site are still worth bookmarking. Otherwise, drop your email below and we'll send the PDF.
Sent to your inbox as a PDF. Five tactical emails over two weeks. Unsubscribe with one click.