Campaign Type — Cold Outbound
A campaign with no signal — the prospect did nothing observable. They are targeted only because they fit the ICP. This is the hardest mode: there is no warm hook, so every message has to earn attention purely through tension and insight.
Use this playbook when the user has a list that matches their ICP but has no engagement, intent or trigger data on it.
Targeting discipline
With no signal, targeting is the campaign's quality. The message can't be personalized to an individual action, so it must be sharply true for the segment.
- Keep the segment tight. One persona, one industry, one size band per campaign.
- If the segment is broad, the copy goes generic. Sub-segment instead.
- The message must read as "written for people exactly like me" — even though it wasn't written for me specifically.
Angles — no signal crutch
Signal-based angles are unavailable here. Lean on:
- Pattern A — Tension / Irony — name a tension the segment lives, purely by observation.
- Pattern C — Insight-based — reframe something the segment thinks they understand.
See email-rules.md for the patterns and angle-framework.md for building the 3 angles. The opening must make the reader think "how do they know this?" — without any signal to lean on.
Channel mix & cadence
| Mix | Sequence | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Email-only | 3 emails | J0 / J+4 / J+8 |
| Multichannel (recommended) | LinkedIn invite + email + LinkedIn DM + 2 emails | J0 / J+4 / J+7 / J+11 / J+15 |
| LinkedIn-only | invite + 2 DMs | J0 / J+5 / J+12 |
LinkedIn-only is the weakest cold mix: with no signal, the invite has no hook, so acceptance rates drop and it spends limited weekly invite quota on prospects qualified by ICP alone. Prefer multichannel; use LinkedIn-only only when email isn't viable.
Sequence shape
- Touch 1 — a tension or insight the whole segment recognizes. No product, no pitch.
- Middle touches — deepen the root cause, then shift to a different pain, lens or risk. Fresh angle each time (see
angle-framework.md). - Last touch — clean breakup with a conditional resource offer.
Expectations
Cold is the lowest-converting mode — target the cold benchmarks in quality-check.md (5–15% reply, 0.5–2% booking). Do not promise warm-campaign numbers. The lever is segment tightness and angle quality, not volume.