/cold-email-weekly-rhythm

name: cold-email-weekly-rhythm
description: Operational playbook for running cold email continuously. Prescribes what to do on Monday / Wednesday / Friday / biweekly / monthly / quarterly. Use this as your ongoing cadence once your first campaign is live. What separates hobbyist from top 1% operators isn't tooling — it's consistency. This skill is the schedule.

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.

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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.

| Event title | Cadence | |---|---| | Cold email: Monday deliverability audit | Every Monday, 9:00 am | | Cold email: Wednesday positive-reply sweep | Every Wednesday, 10:00 am | | Cold email: Friday campaign retrospectives | Every Friday, 3:00 pm | | Cold email: Inbox lifecycle (cancel / promote / buy) | Every other Monday, 11:00 am | | Cold email: Monthly spam placement test | 1st of each month, 10:00 am | | Cold email: Quarterly experiment review | First Monday of each quarter, 1:00 pm |

**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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 --actio