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Sketchief walks you through all three stages automatically — ICP, list strategy, and micro offer — and builds your campaign for you. Check it out here →
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Hey, I'm Ollie founder of Sketchief.
I went from a 2-3% reply rate to consistently hitting 11-16% on cold email. And the biggest shift wasn't a better subject line or a smarter sending tool. It was planning properly before sending anything.
Most people skip the planning stage entirely. They pick a job title, build a rough list, write an email, and hit send. Then they wonder why nothing comes back. The planning stage is what determines whether everything else works. The copy, the personalisation, the targeting. None of it lands if the foundation isn't right.
There are three stages to planning a cold email campaign properly. Done in order, they set you up for the highest possible reply rate before you write a single word of copy. Done wrong or skipped and no amount of clever copy will save you.
🎁 Stage 3: Offer & Capabilities
🧩 Running Through All Three Stages
This is the most important stage. It's also the one you mainly only need to do once and then refine over time as you learn more. Get this right and every campaign you run becomes easier and more effective because everything builds on it.
The goal here is simple: understand exactly who you're targeting so well that when they read your email, it feels like you wrote it specifically for them.
Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is not just a job title and a company size. Those are the surface level. A real ICP definition goes much deeper than that, and the depth is what separates campaigns that generate real conversations from ones that generate nothing.