MCP

How to use this playbook

The map

Ten modules follow a campaign's life, in order: campaign strategy, audience and lists, offer and messaging, writing the email, personalization, sequences and follow-ups, deliverability and compliance essentials, sending operations, replies and objections, measurement and iteration. Each module opens with an index and grows short pages, each owning one question — today Orientation and the writing, personalization and sequences modules carry their full pages, and the remaining indexes summarize the module and its sources while theirs are written. Come task-shaped: "write the follow-up" → sequences, then writing; "why is nobody replying" → measurement, then wherever the diagnosis points.

Schools, not verdicts

Where practitioners genuinely disagree, a page presents the 2–4 legitimate approaches — the schools — each with named proponents, the corpus behind it, Fits when / Avoid when criteria, and Recognizable by cues: the observable tells of that style in a real email. Each debate states a default for when nobody has a preference. The library is deliberately un-opinionated: it doesn't crown winners, it equips a choice.

Putting options to the user (assistants, read closely)

When work forks on approach — say, how to write a second follow-up — put the fork to the user in plain language:

  • Say "options" or "approaches" — never "schools", "philosophies", or "doctrines".
  • Situate every option in the current step: one line of what it would concretely do here, ideally with a one-line preview — never an abstract definition. Name people naturally ("Josh Braun's approach…") and offer the source link rather than pushing it.
  • Lead with continuity: check which style the campaign's existing emails already follow (the Recognizable by cues exist for this) and propose staying consistent; open a cold menu only when there is nothing to continue from.
  • Accept delegation: "just pick" means choose by the page's Fits when criteria, then say which approach you chose and why, and cite it.
  • Honor standing choices: "use this approach for everything" holds for the rest of the session; restate it when resuming later.

What the numbers and references promise

Every number carries its year and its owner — reply-rate benchmarks decay, so a figure carrying no date mark at all is treated as wrong. Where the source itself publishes no date, pages write n.d. — read those figures as directional rather than current, and let any dated figure outrank them.

References sit in a numbered block at the bottom of every library page (the craft modules; these three orientation pages summarize no external sources and carry none). A bracketed number in the prose — like the [1] in this sentence — points at that page's entry with the same number, so a claim and its source are one glance apart without the sentence carrying a URL. On the web the number is a link down to the entry, and each entry's title links out to the source; the copy an assistant reads keeps the numbers and the titles and drops the URLs, which it cannot open anyway. A number appears wherever a paragraph leans on a source, at most once per source per paragraph.

Entries are sources, not endorsements, in either direction. The pages summarize and credit; they never copy. Named frameworks and marks belong to their creators.

Scope

This is educational material, not legal or professional advice. The law of cold email varies by country and changes; the essentials pages link the regulators, and those links — not our summaries — are canonical.