Recurring or scheduled outreach over a list — cold volume, batch prospecting, a segment run. The highest-volume motion on Swan and the one where generic copy does the most damage.
The angle
Volume changes where the personalization lives: it moves from the individual to the slice and the persona. A workable slice shares one real, checkable thing — the same trigger in the same window, the same tool in the stack, the same lifecycle stage. The persona determines the angle; the slice determines the hook; one line varies per contact.
Do
- Tighten the slice before writing. If the copy would read the same sent to a different slice, the slice is too loose — cut it down.
- Build a persona-angle matrix: every org that systematized this motion segmented by department or persona (finance hears cost and risk, ops hears coordination pain, the practitioner hears workload) with a proof point matched to each. Write one email skeleton per persona, not one for the list.
- Keep one varying line per contact, drawn from something checkable. If that line is swappable decoration, drop the pretense — an honest segment email beats fake intimacy.
- Match proof to segment size and industry; one proof point per email, attributed.
- Plan capacity against sender limits and spread the list across days; show the user the calendar shape before staging.
- Draft in the language the org sells in. A mixed-language sequence is an error, not a style choice.
Don't
- Don't fake 1:1 intimacy at scale — no "I noticed", no "came across your profile", no invented familiarity.
- Don't let the constant body swell into a feature list; recheck it against the parent's gates every run.
- Don't relax the list filters to feed volume — slice drift is how a working play becomes spam.
- Don't stack CTAs or add a soft-out on top of an ask; one ask, stated once.
- Don't send the identical follow-up to non-repliers — every touch is a new angle or it's skipped.
Tighten over time
After each run, read the reply data for this play. Find the slice and persona-angle that got replies and the ones that died; recommend narrowing the list definition or retiring the losing angle before the next run. A cold list that doesn't tighten becomes spam with better grammar.
Sequence shape
Placeholder until this org sets its own:
| Step | Day | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | email — slice hook + persona angle + one ask |
| 2 | 3 | email — new angle, shorter |
| 3 | 8 | LinkedIn or email — proof angle |
| 4 | 14 | soft close |
This org's rules
Nothing recorded yet. When the user gives feedback on a list run in conversation, write it here: the slice definitions that work, the persona-angle matrix, retired angles and why. Rules only — approved copy accumulates automatically as message examples.