The Voice of Email Methodology
Four stages, in order, every time. Applied to every email your buyer gets, from the first cold one to the renewal. Built across 100+ B2B software companies since 2017.
Start a conversationEmail is a funnel, not a channel.
Cold outbound is the loud part. It is not the big part. A buyer gets five kinds of email from you, and the same method writes all five.
The cold email that gets a stranger to answer.
The follow up that turns the reply into a meeting.
The nurture that keeps a slow yes warm.
The sequence that gets the deal over the line.
Activation, upgrades, and the win back for the ones who went quiet.
In that order, every time.
Skip one and the next three carry the problem forward. Most programs start at stage three and wonder why the machine is loud and the pipeline is quiet.
The buyer already wrote your email
Sales calls, win and loss notes, reviews, churn reasons, every reply you’ve ever gotten. Plus everything you already sent and what happened to it.
Across the funnel: strangers get read through prior sends and the list. Customers get read through what they did next, and why the ones who left, left.
One page. One claim. Settled.
Who it’s for, what it’s against, the one claim only you can make, in your buyers’ words. One working session. Every email after gets written from it.
Across the funnel: the cold email decides what a stranger has to believe to answer. The lifecycle decides who the reader is trying to become.
Fix what carries the message first
Authentication, a live placement test, the list split by relationship. Then the writing: one idea, one ask, in your platform, sent by me.
Across the funnel: engaged, went quiet, never replied get three different emails. The flows nobody built get built: activation, nurture, win back.
Count the thing you actually want
Replies from real buyers and meetings on the top two rows. Opens demoted to a deliverability signal. A Monday report, every week.
Across the funnel: outbound is scored on meetings. Lifecycle is scored on activations, upgrades, and revenue traced to the sequence that caused it.
What stage one returns
A plumbing problem
The domain, the list, the authentication. Words are irrelevant until this is fixed. The cheapest of the three.
A decision problem
Three leaders describe three companies. No writer can rescue it. The most common.
A copy problem
Plumbing works, decision exists, writing still isn’t landing. Rare on its own.
Top of the funnel. Bottom of the funnel. Same four stages.
729 brokers who had ignored every prior campaign. The read found a send ceiling and an unsplit list before anyone wrote a word.
open rate, same audience
replies from real brokers
lunch and learn, plus first meetings
8,000+ clinics already on the platform. Arrival was never the problem. The decision: a tier migration is not a price change, it’s a choice about what kind of practice you run.
click through across the program
annual revenue, from the campaigns
programs: partner, launch, webinar, migration, pages
Four things I’d bet on.
Two thirds of a copy problem is not copy.
Deliverability, list, segmentation. Fix the sentence on top of a broken layer and you wrote a better message to a spam folder.
If leadership can’t agree on one sentence, no writer can rescue you.
The decision has to exist before anybody writes from it.
The first cold email is not where you sell.
It’s where you prove you know what their week looks like. The next four emails and the call do the selling.
The leak is the hour after the reply.
Programs that book and programs that don’t have similar reply rates. The difference is whether anyone knew what to send back to a yes, a later, a referral, a no.
Find fifteen minutes.
Tell me what’s broken. I’ll tell you which of the three problems you have, and whether you need me for it.
Calendars are annoying. Just email me. I answer everything myself, usually same day.
Britt Prim at Karias takes reference calls about this work. Ask and I’ll connect you.