Cold email weekly rhythm

Cold Email Weekly Rhythm#

Having 29 cold email skills doesn't help if you don't run them on a schedule. This is that schedule.

This is a pure playbook. No scripts, no automatic reminders. You put the rhythm on your own calendar (Step 1 below) and run the prescribed skill at the prescribed time. That's the entire system.

Step 1 (required before using this skill): Put the rhythm on your calendar#

Open Google Calendar / Outlook / Apple Reminders / whatever you actually look at every day. Create these as recurring events. Copy the titles and cadences exactly.

Do not skip Step 1. The difference between hobbyist and top-1% cold email operators is that the top-1% operators actually run these tasks on their declared cadence, week after week. Your calendar is the accountability system. This skill doesn't have a built-in reminder — intentionally — because if it did and it broke, your ops would silently fail.

Monday — Deliverability audit (15 min)#

Run:

/email-deliverability-audit --days=7

(If using the scoped version: audit-performance.ts --campaign-ids=<active campaign ids> --days=7)

Review:

• Fleet reply rate over last 7 days — must be ≥1% (the 1% rule)
• Flagged campaigns (flag_low_reply = TRUE)
• Flagged inboxes (flag_high_bounce = TRUE)

Action:

• If any campaign failed the 1% rule: run /deliverability-incident-response → triage decision tree
• If bounce rate spiked above 2%: pause the offending campaign immediately, then triage
• If everything clean: log the check in a weekly journal, close the tab

Wednesday — Positive-reply sweep (30-60 min depending on volume)#

Run:

/positive-reply-scoring  # on all campaigns active in the last 7 days

Review:

• Any positive_interested or positive_soft replies — these are leads wanting to engage
• Any positive_referral replies — these are people saying "talk to Jane instead"
• Any negative_hostile replies — red flag, investigate

Action:

• Respond to every positive_interested reply within 30 seconds of seeing it. Do not batch these — a reply feeling like it took minutes to return converts 3× better than one that took hours.
• For referrals: reach out to the referred person within 24h, mention the referrer by name.
• For hostile: apologize, remove from all lists, investigate why they were flagged for hostility (often signals bad targeting).

Time management: if you have >50 positive replies per week, you're at the scale where you should hand off to a dedicated closer/AE. Do that handoff Wednesday morning so they can work replies by Wednesday afternoon.

Friday — Campaign retrospectives (20 min per campaign)#

Identify campaigns hitting their 21-day mark this week. (21 days is the minimum for reply-rate signal to stabilize.)

For each one:

1. Run /positive-reply-scoring --campaign-id=<id>

2. Compare to previous campaigns' positive reply rate baselines

3. Decide:

   • Winner (positive reply rate ≥2×baseline): keep running, consider scaling (clone to more inboxes)
   • Middling (near baseline): iterate on copy or list — run /experiment-design Monday to plan the next variant
   • Loser (<50% of baseline): kill it. Document why in the experiment log.

4. Log the result in profiles/<slug>/experiments/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<campaign>.json:

   • positive_reply_rate, reply_rate, bounce_rate
   • Your decision (keep / iterate / kill) + reasoning
   • Hypothesis for next iteration (if iterating)

Critical: do not skip the log. Over a quarter, these logs become the input for /experiment-design quarterly reviews. Without the history, you can't learn across campaigns.

Every other Monday — Inbox rotation (30 min)#

Run:

# Within /smartlead-inbox-manager skill:
npx tsx scripts/list-health.ts --all --out=health-$(date +%Y-%m-%d).csv

Review the CSV:

• Any inboxes with reputation "bad"?
• Any inboxes with is_warmup_blocked: true?
• Any inboxes with <5 sends/day despite being in active campaigns?

Action:

# Retire failing inboxes
npx tsx scripts/tag-inboxes.ts --ids=X,Y,Z --add-tag=retired --remove-tag=active
npx tsx scripts/set-warmup.ts --mode=disable --ids=X,Y,Z

# Promote insurance inboxes to active
npx tsx scripts/tag-inboxes.ts --ids=A,B,C --add-tag=active --remove-tag=insurance
npx tsx scripts/set-warmup.ts --mode=disable --ids=A,B,C

If insurance pool is getting thin (<5 inboxes available to rotate in): kick off a new domain purchase cycle via /zapmail-domain-setup-public. It takes ~2 weeks from purchase to sendable, so you need to start early.

Monthly (1st of the month) — Spam placement test (25 min active, test runs ~20 min)#

Run: the Smart Delivery spam placement test from /email-deliverability-audit:

npx tsx scripts/run-spam-test.ts --campaign-id=<highest volume active campaign> --senders=100

(Will use G Suite + Office365 provider pools. 100 senders is a sweet spot — large enough for statistical signal, small enough to avoid API stalls.)

Review:

• Overall inbox placement % — target: ≥85%
• Spam filter triggers — which filters fired, which senders affected

Action:

• ≥90% inbox placement: great. Keep doing what you're doing.
• 80-90%: yellow. Look at spam-filter-details. Start fixing the highest-frequency trigger next week.
• <80%: red. Pause the campaign, run /deliverability-incident-response, fix before sending more.

Quarterly (first Monday of each quarter) — Experiment review (90 min)#

Read all experiments/*.json from the last quarter. Identify patterns:

• Which campaigns had the highest positive reply rate?
• Which list sources produced the best leads?
• Which copy angles resonated (Observation → Implication? Pain? Social proof?)
• Which ICP archetypes converted best?

Output: a 1-page Q<N> retrospective saved to profiles/<slug>/retrospectives/<YYYY>-Q<N>.md with:

• Top 3 campaigns + what made them work
• Bottom 3 campaigns + what to avoid
• 3-5 hypotheses for next quarter's experiments
• Adjust ICP in client-profile.yaml if the data suggests a different segment performs better

Use the retrospective as input to design next quarter's experiments via /experiment-design.

What to skip#

You do NOT need to:

• Check Smartlead every day (Wednesday sweep catches everything important)
• Obsess over daily reply-rate fluctuations (wait for 7-day averages)
• Read every positive reply in real time — set up notifications if you want immediacy, but the Wednesday sweep is the system

Daily pokes at your cold email stack are a procrastination pattern, not a performance pattern.

What to do next#

This skill IS the loop. Your next action is the next calendar event on your list.

Or if you haven't run a campaign yet: skip this skill entirely. Come back after your first campaign hits the 7-day mark.

Related skills#

• /email-deliverability-audit — the Monday and Monthly tasks
• /positive-reply-scoring — the Wednesday and Friday tasks
• /smartlead-inbox-manager — the biweekly inbox rotation
• /deliverability-incident-response — when the Monday audit flags something
• /experiment-design — the quarterly retrospective feeds into this
• /zapmail-domain-setup-public — when insurance pool runs low