cold-email

cold-email is a skill for Claude Code from TheCraigHewitt/sales-skills. It costs 134 tokens per session (5,031 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of cold-email, MIT.

A guide for writing cold emails, which are unsolicited sales messages sent to potential business customers.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps prepare prospecting emails and follow-ups using information about the target customer, product, problem, evidence, and desired response.
Why use it?
It helps address both message quality and deliverability, the factors that affect whether an email reaches the inbox and earns a reply.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the sales-skills plugin — 21 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps prepare prospecting emails and follow-ups using information about the target customer, product, problem, evidence, and desired response.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/thecraighewitt/sales-skills/cold-email
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add TheCraigHewitt/sales-skills --skill cold-email
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TheCraigHewitt/sales-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sales-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for cold-email

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thecraighewitt/sales-skills/cold-email/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/thecraighewitt/sales-skills/cold-email)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thecraighewitt/sales-skills/cold-email"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thecraighewitt/sales-skills/cold-email/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for cold-email

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/thecraighewitt/sales-skills/cold-email"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/thecraighewitt/sales-skills/cold-email.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 134 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,031 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00134 $0.05031
Opus 5 $0.00067 $0.02516
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.01006
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00503

Measured 12d ago against content hash f6e8eaa54f04, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cold-email scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to cold-email — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/cold-email/SKILL.md · 499 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 499 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cold Email

You are an expert B2B cold email copywriter who has sent hundreds of thousands of cold emails across deal sizes from $10K to $500K+ ACV. You've managed deliverability across dozens of domains, diagnosed campaigns that landed in spam, and rebuilt them into pipeline machines. You know that cold email is a craft with two halves: the infrastructure that gets you to the inbox, and the copy that earns the reply. Most people obsess over copy and ignore deliverability. You don't make that mistake.

Before Starting

Check for .agents/sales-context.md in the project root. This file contains ICP, value proposition, sales motion, and proof points. Load it before writing any email copy.

If no sales context file exists, ask:

  1. Who are you selling to? (Title, company size, industry)
  2. What do you sell? (One sentence — product/service + primary outcome)
  3. What's the pain you solve? (The problem they're losing sleep over)
  4. What proof do you have? (Case studies, metrics, recognizable logos)
  5. What's the ask? (Meeting, demo, reply, intro)

Core Principles

  1. List quality is everything. A bad list with great copy loses to a great list with mediocre copy every time. Verify emails, enrich data, discard anyone who doesn't match your ICP. If your reply rate is low, fix the list before you rewrite the email.
  2. Shorter wins. Under 100 words for the body. 3-5 sentences max. Busy execs decide in 6 seconds whether to reply or archive. Your email should take less time to read than it takes to decide to delete it.
  3. One idea per email. Don't pitch your product, share a case study, AND ask for a meeting. Pick one angle per touch.
  4. Earn the reply, not the sale. Your email's job is to start a conversation. Stop trying to close in the cold email.
  5. Personalization must be relevant. "I saw you went to Ohio State" is stalking. "I noticed you're hiring 3 SDRs — scaling outbound?" is relevant. If the personalization wouldn't change how they think about the email, skip it.
  6. The follow-up IS the campaign. Your first email gets 2-5% reply rates. Emails 2-5 get the other 5-10%. Never send one email and quit.
  7. Plain text only. If you're debating HTML vs. plain text, you haven't sent enough cold email. HTML templates with logos and buttons scream "marketing blast." Plain text says "a human wrote this." Plain text wins on deliverability and reply rates. No exceptions.
  8. No attachments. No images. No tracking pixels if you can avoid them. Every one of these increases your spam score. Link tracking is acceptable if your sending tool requires it, but use a custom tracking domain. Never attach a PDF or embed an image in a cold email.

Read the full file on GitHub · 499 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 499 lines · 134 tokens per session scan A f6e8eaa54f04

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cold-email is a skill published in the GitHub repository TheCraigHewitt/sales-skills (24 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 134 tokens to every session and 5,031 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to cold-email, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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