Rewrite a bloated cold email to under 75 words
Compresses an overweight cold email to under 75 words through a visible sentence-by-sentence audit — KEEP, MERGE, or CUT — followed by a rewrite that preserves your voice and strongest proof. The audit teaches you what to stop writing; the flag list tells you what belongs in a later touch instead.
You are a ruthless cold email editor. Your specialty is compression: taking a 180-word email that a committee would approve and cutting it to under 75 words that a stranger will actually read. You operate on one principle — in cold email, every sentence is paying rent, and most of them are behind. I'm going to paste a cold email that's too long. Your job: 1. First, show me the audit: quote each sentence and label it KEEP (does a job: relevance, problem, proof, or ask), MERGE (has a point but wastes a sentence on it), or CUT (throat-clearing, feature detail, company biography, hedge words, or a second CTA). 2. Then deliver the rewrite: under 75 words, keeping my strongest proof point and exactly one CTA. Preserve my voice — compress it, don't replace it with generic 'punchy' AI cadence. 3. Flag anything important you had to cut so I can decide if it belongs in a later touch instead. Banned in the rewrite: 'just', 'I wanted to reach out', 'as I mentioned', softeners like 'I think we might possibly', and any sentence that restates another sentence. Before you edit anything, interview me. Ask me these questions ONE AT A TIME, waiting for my answer each time: 1. Paste the email, subject line included. 2. Who is it going to, and how senior are they? 3. What is the ONE thing you need this email to communicate? 4. Is there a hard constraint I should respect — a compliance line, a required disclaimer, a phrase your brand always uses? Once you have my answers, run the audit and then the rewrite. If the email is trying to make two different pitches, tell me to pick one before you cut.
How to use it
- 1
Copy the prompt into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM.
- 2
Paste your real email — the longer and more committee-approved, the more useful the audit.
- 3
Review the KEEP/MERGE/CUT labels before reading the rewrite; that's where the learning is.
- 4
Move anything valuable from the flagged-cuts list into a different sequence step rather than cramming it back in.
Best practices
Answer question 3 with one sentence — if you can't, the email's problem isn't length.
Watch for the model replacing your voice with generic punchiness; if it does, reply 'keep my phrasing, only cut'.
The 75-word cap is for the body; subject line and signature don't count.
Run every email in an existing sequence through this once — most sequences lose a third of their word count and gain replies.
Example: what this looks like in practice
A sales leader at a manufacturing software company inherits a 210-word cold email written by product marketing — two paragraphs of company history, four feature mentions, and two CTAs. The audit labels nine sentences CUT, including the founding story, and MERGEs the two CTAs into one. The rewrite lands at 68 words: the plant-downtime problem, one customer proof point ('cut unplanned downtime 22% at a 3-plant fabricator'), one soft ask. The flagged cut about their integration list becomes touch three of the sequence. Replies triple within the same list and sending setup.
Best fit
This prompt is one gear in a bigger machine. We orchestrate 20+ tools into outbound systems our clients own — and guarantee the results.
Apply for a Pilot Spot → →Frequently asked questions
Consistently, yes — shorter emails get read on phones, respect the reader's time, and force you to lead with what matters. The mechanism isn't magic word counts; it's that compression eliminates the filler that signals 'mass outreach'. Under 75 words is an aggressive but proven target for first touches to busy buyers.
More cold email writing prompts
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Write a complete cold email from scratch
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Audit and rank your subject lines before you hit send
Puts every subject line candidate through a brutal pre-send audit: a 1-10 plausibility score, its biggest weakness named, spam-pattern flags, and a fixed rewrite. You get a ranked list with a clear verdict — two to test, the rest to kill — instead of sending on gut feel.