B2B Cold Email Sequence Template

Start by writing down what makes a company a fit: industry, size, and a sign that it's facing the problem you solve. If you haven't pinned that down, build an ideal customer profile first. At each company, email the person who owns the problem day to day, not just the most senior title.

Then count the companies that match, segment by segment. That count is your ceiling. If 400 companies fit and you contact 25 a week, you have 16 weeks of market. Track what each meeting costs, too: if two meetings came from 200 companies, each one cost you 100 of them.

Personalization isn't a merge field that drops in the company name. A real opening line names something this company did, says where you saw it, and is recent enough to matter. Good sources: their job postings, press releases, filings and talks by the person you're writing to.

The account research brief gathers sourced, dated details like these for one company. If you find nothing specific, hold that company back rather than spend it on a generic email.

Give every step its own job, and send each follow-up as a reply in the same thread. Ask for one small thing per email: a question someone can answer in a line is easier to say yes to than a 30-minute call.

When anyone replies, cancel every queued step for that person. A scheduled follow-up that lands after "we just signed with someone else" can cost you the account for years.

In the US, the FTC's guide to the CAN-SPAM Act says the law makes no exception for business-to-business email¹. Every sales email needs an honest sender and subject line, a clear sign that it's an ad, your postal address and an easy way to opt out. Honor opt-outs within 10 business days.

Inbox providers judge you too. Google's sender guidelines for mail to Gmail addresses require SPF or DKIM authentication on your sending domain², settings that prove your mail comes from you. They also ask senders to keep their spam rate below 0.1% and never reach 0.3%. Treat that as the bar everywhere, and build volume slowly.

Before you trust your reply rate, check how your tool counts. Automatic replies should not count: RFC 3834, the standard for them, says each should carry an Auto-Submitted header⁵ so software can filter them out. Bounced addresses never got your email, so take them out of the total sent. Each bounce carries a status code naming the failure⁶.

• 5.1.1 means the mailbox doesn't exist. Remove the address and find the right one.
• 5.2.1 means the mailbox is disabled, which can mean the person has left. Look for their successor.
• 5.7.1 means the receiving server refused you. Don't keep retrying from the same domain.

Your real reply rate is human replies divided by the people who received your emails. Compare it across your own segments and months, not against outside benchmarks. And don't A/B test subject lines on a small list: one version will still come out ahead, often by chance alone.

Even 30 replies can't separate two subject lines, but they can tell you what's wrong. Code each human reply the day it arrives, with the person's own words beside the code. Each kind points to a different fix.

• Wrong person ("talk to our site managers"): fix the contact list, not the copy.
• Not now, with a date ("after January"): schedule a callback. It isn't an opt-out.
• Already have a supplier: note when their contract renews, if they say.
• Don't have the problem: if several come from one segment, question the segment.
• Stop emailing me: add them to your do-not-contact list at once.
• Yes to a meeting: book it and end the sequence.

When replies turn into meetings, prepare with the discovery call questions template. Once a company becomes a customer worth growing, plan its year with the strategic account plan template. The template here has the sequence, the reply codes and a sheet for each count above. River can fill them from your list and your sending tool's export.