Cold email sequence builder

How the timeline gets generated

Three controls drive the output: how many steps you want, how many days sit between them, and which of the four channels are in play. The first touch is day zero and each one after it lands a fixed gap later, so a five-step cadence spaced two days apart runs on days zero, two, four, six and eight. Nothing is randomised — the same settings always produce the same plan.

Channels are assigned by rotation rather than by rule. With email and LinkedIn both switched on, odd steps go to email and even steps to LinkedIn; add SMS and the cycle becomes three long. Turn everything off and the builder falls back to email so the timeline is never empty.

Each step arrives carrying two things: the job that step is doing, and a copy angle written for the channel it happened to land on. The angle is channel-specific on purpose, because a nudge over SMS reads nothing like a nudge over email, so the same rung of the ladder yields different suggested copy depending on where the rotation put it.

The purpose ladder, rung by rung

The order of the purposes is fixed, and it is the most opinionated part of the tool. Steps are not the same appeal repeated at rising volume; each one changes what it is asking for, which is what makes a sequence feel like a person following up rather than a machine retrying.

Open the loop

Relevance plus one low-friction ask. The only job of the first touch is to earn a reply, not to explain the product.

Add value with no ask

A proof point, a resource or an observation with nothing attached, which resets the exchange from request to contribution.

Bump

A short nudge that refers back to the first message. Brevity is the entire point of this rung.

New angle

The same problem framed from a different stakeholder's position, in case the original framing simply missed the person reading it.

Social proof

A comparable team and what changed for them, picked so the reader recognises their own situation in it.

Direct ask

A specific next step at a named time, shaped so that agreeing takes less effort than declining.

Break-up

A graceful close that ends the sequence and leaves the door open rather than slamming it.

Choosing your step count and spacing

The two sliders are independent, but what an inbox experiences is the product of them — the elapsed span of the whole cadence. Seven steps a day apart and four steps five days apart both look sensible while you drag the controls and feel entirely different to the person on the other end: one is a week of daily contact, the other a fortnight of light taps on the shoulder.

Wider gaps buy patience, tighter gaps buy compression at the cost of pressure. Choose by the buying cycle you are entering rather than by what fits neatly inside your reporting month. Spreading the touches across channels also lowers the pressure any single inbox feels, which is part of why a mixed cadence can carry more steps without reading as pestering.

A shorter run simply uses the earlier rungs: a three-step cadence gives you the opener, the value touch and the bump, and stops there. Whatever length you pick, the timeline is a ceiling and not a checklist. Every step is conditional on no reply having arrived, and a sequence that keeps firing after somebody has answered is the quickest way to undo whatever goodwill the first message earned.

From an outline to a cadence you can actually run

A plan is roughly half the job. Running it means reply detection that halts the remaining steps for that person, quiet hours so a call or a text never lands at an unreasonable local time, per-step reporting so you can see which rung is doing the work, and the discipline to keep making the non-email touches when the week gets busy. Those are the parts that decay first when a cadence is kept in a spreadsheet.

The copy angles are prompts, never templates. A line such as one observation about their company plus a single question describes a shape you fill with something only you know about that account. Pasted unchanged across a list it becomes exactly the generic outreach the ladder exists to avoid. Keep the structure, write the specifics per account, and the sequence does the job it was designed for.