Cold Email Audit

Cold Email Audit — 30-Point Outbound Program Review

Loaded by cold-email when the user asks to "audit our outbound", "why isn't this working", "grade our cold email program", or similar. Scores a B2B outbound program against 30 points across 4 dimensions and surfaces the top 3 levers.

Activation triggers

• "Audit our outbound"
• "Why isn't our cold email working"
• "Grade our outbound program"
• "Outbound audit"
• "What's wrong with our cold email"
• "Score our outbound"

Workflow

1. Intake (one batch of questions)

Ask the user to provide context in a single message — DON'T ask 30 questions sequentially. Surface a structured intake form:

To run the 30-point audit, share what you can across these 4 dimensions:

INFRASTRUCTURE
  - Sending domain(s) — primary and secondary
  - Inbox provider (GSuite / O365 / Smartlead / Instantly / custom)
  - Warm-up: how many mailboxes, ramped how long, current daily limits
  - SPF / DKIM / DMARC status (or paste DMARC TXT record)

TARGETING
  - ICP definition (one paragraph)
  - PSP (Pain Signal Profile) — what signals do you anchor on?
  - List source (apollo / clay / hand-built / scraped / referrals)
  - List size, send volume per week, response rate baseline

MESSAGING
  - Paste your current T1 opener
  - Paste your subject line (or top 3 subjects)
  - How many sequence touches, cadence in days
  - Personalization layer: none / variable / per-person-research

OPERATIONS
  - Reply handling: who, response SLA
  - Booking motion: link in email, link in reply, manual?
  - Hand-off to sales: who routes, when, what info
  - Reporting cadence: weekly / monthly / never

Don't grade until you have the user's answers. If they don't have a dimension at all, that's a finding — note it as "Not in place".

2. Score against the 30-point rubric

Load references/audit-rubric.md and score each point 0 / 0.5 / 1.

The four dimensions:

Total: 30 points → normalize to a 0-100 score:

Score = (totalPoints / 30) * 100

3. Identify the top 3 levers

After scoring, find the 3 lowest-scoring points and rank them by impact-per-day-of-effort. Don't just list the lowest scores — weight by:

• Compounding impact: a fix to infrastructure compounds across every campaign forever; a subject-line tweak compounds for one campaign.
• Effort: an SPF flatten is 1 hour; a full PSP rewrite is 2 weeks.
• Sequencing: deliverability MUST be solid before any messaging iteration matters.

4. Output

Produce a structured report:

# Outbound Audit — <company name>

## Score: <0-100>/100

| Dimension | Score | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | <0-8>/8 | A / B / C / D / F |
| Targeting | <0-8>/8 | |
| Messaging | <0-8>/8 | |
| Operations | <0-6>/6 | |

## The top 3 levers

### 1. <Lever name> — <effort / impact>
<2-3 sentences on what to fix, why it compounds, how to ship in 7-14 days.>

### 2. <Lever name>
...

### 3. <Lever name>
...

## 90-day remediation order

| Days | Lever | Owner | Verify by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-14 | <Lever 1> | <role> | <metric> |
| 15-45 | <Lever 2> | | |
| 46-90 | <Lever 3> | | |

## Full point-by-point detail
<Optional: only if user asks. Otherwise keep concise.>

Grade thresholds

References

• references/audit-rubric.md — full 30-point rubric with scoring criteria
• ../../cold-email/references/jmc-framework.md — the framework underneath
• The full 30-Point Outbound Audit Template ships as a DOCX in the free Cold Email Linter