How a Tiny Script Fixed Cold Outreach

This is the first post in my Modern Marketing Stack series, where I share small automations that have made a big impact for my clients.

Cold outreach is tough. Most marketers know the feeling — you write what feels like the perfect message, send it to a carefully curated list, and then crack open the analytics only to see … nothing. Low open rate, no meaningful replies, and no traction. After all that effort and a tad of expectation, it’s quite deflating. Been there, done that, and it’s awful. You probably know the feeling, too.

This is exactly what was happening to one of my clients. They were reaching out to new prospects with the hopes of starting up a few good conversations that would help fill the sales funnel. Their messages were targeted, professional, and followed all of the traditional rules of good email marketing. They created clever subject lines, built solid preview text and leveraged clean email lists to keep their white list reputation solid. But they weren’t getting any traction. Most of their emails went unopened, unanswered and ignored.

When we took a closer look, we realized that the issue wasn’t the writing — it was the context. The outreach didn’t reflect what their audience actually cared about. The writing was good, but we were failing to speak the language of our audience. We were vague, too general and sounded like everyone else - just cranking out mildly annoying noise.

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The Problem: Good Writing, Wrong Context

That’s when my client had an aha moment. Their prospects weren’t ignoring them because the messaging was bad — they were ignoring our messages because they could have come from anyone in the market and failed to address what mattered to the client. Competitors were sending the same lists of benefits and claims. What people actually respond to is relevance — when it’s clear you understand what matters to them — at the moment they open it.

But that’s no easy task. This level of personalization takes research — and doing it manually for dozens of companies each week just doesn’t scale. You end up spending all of your time in “write and research” mode instead of having real conversations with prospects. It’s a time sink that can take you down a bad path.

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The Insight: Relevance Scales Better Than Volume

The breakthrough came when my client realized that engagement didn’t come from sending more of the same generic messages — it came from sending better messages that contained content the prospected cared about.

When their outreach mentioned something specific — like an upcoming event or a relevant industry trend — replies jumped. Suddenly, people were responding with “Good timing” or “We’ll be at that show, let’s connect.”

That’s when we decided to automate the research process with AI — without losing the natural, conversational tone of our messages. The goal was simple: find timely insights that gave people a real reason to open and respond. We decided to start with event messaging. For my client, this was an obvious place to start given what they sell.

Here’s how we did it…

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