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). The same number retires a domain, but only once it clears the floors: 200+ sends and 30+ days of age. See /inbox-lifecycle-manager.
• 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 is above 2%: triage via /deliverability-incident-response. Above 3% (the autopause line): 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 lifecycle (30 min)

The rotation decision — what to cancel, what to promote, what to buy — comes from /inbox-lifecycle-manager. Do not eyeball the health CSV and retire whatever looks bad; that is how healthy domains get killed on an unlucky week.

Run (read-only, writes nothing):

# Within /inbox-lifecycle-manager:
npx tsx scripts/plan-lifecycle.ts --goal=<your daily send goal> --out=./lifecycle-$(date +%F) --snapshot

Review plan.csv and actions.csv:

• BURNED — under 1% reply on 200+ sends, 30+ days old. These are the real cancels.
• KEEP_BELOW_THRESHOLD — burned but nothing warm to replace it. Buy first, cancel next week.
• BOUNCE_FORK — bounce over 3%. Classify the codes in /deliverability-incident-response before condemning anything; it is usually the list, not the domain.
• TOO_YOUNG / INSUFFICIENT_DATA — not judged. Leave them alone.
• HELD — warmup is off, so reputation is unreadable. Report it; don't quietly switch warmup back on.

Action — after you have actually looked at the plan and said yes:

# Within /inbox-lifecycle-manager (dry run first, always):
npx tsx scripts/apply-lifecycle.ts --actions=./lifecycle-$(date +%F)/actions.csv
npx tsx scripts/apply-lifecycle.ts --actions=./lifecycle-$(date +%F)/actions.csv --apply

Tags only. Provider subscription cancellations are a separate, explicitly approved step in small verified batches — see that skill's references/cancellation-safety.md.

If the plan reports a capacity shortfall: start a domain purchase cycle via /zapmail-domain-setup-public now. It takes ~2 weeks from purchase to sendable and 30 days before the new domains can even be judged, so you are always buying a month ahead of the need.

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
• /inbox-lifecycle-manager — the biweekly cancel / promote / buy decision
• /smartlead-inbox-manager — executes the approved tag changes
• /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