How to write cold emails that get replies

What you'll have at the end

A cold email written for your own offer, short enough to read on a phone, a list of 10 to 20 real people to send it to, and a three-step follow-up sequence already scheduled. You'll also have a realistic idea of what "working" looks like, so a quiet first day doesn't feel like proof it failed. You will not have a guaranteed reply. You'll have the same email structure and sending habits that show up across large, current studies of cold email performance, sized for someone sending tens of emails a week, not thousands.

Before you start

• One offer you can describe in a sentence (if you haven't done this yet, Sundayclear's offer sharpener task covers it).
• A list of 10 to 20 real people or businesses, with names and email addresses, not a bought list. Quality over quantity matters more here than volume.
• An email account with SPF and DKIM set up (most business email providers, including Google Workspace, do this automatically or with one setup step, check your provider's help pages if you've never sent bulk mail from this address before).
• 40 minutes now, and 10 minutes a day for the next two weeks to send follow-ups and check replies.

Step 1: Pick people, not a list

Before writing a word, choose who you're emailing. Across a 7.5-million-email study, founders and business owners replied at a noticeably higher rate than C-level executives at larger companies, and small companies (0 to 10 employees) replied more than enterprise accounts. If you sell to other small or one-person businesses, you're already emailing the audience that tends to reply most, so lean into it rather than chasing bigger logos.

Separately, an analysis of over 20 million cold emails found campaigns sent to fewer than 50 contacts averaged a notably higher reply rate than campaigns of 500 or more. A tight, well-chosen list of 10 to 20 people beats a scraped list of 500, and it's the realistic size for a one-person business anyway.