When your agency sends a cold email draft for approval, check four things first. Every claim about your company is true. The proof is a real result you are allowed to use. The email asks for a short call instead of a purchase. The footer carries your postal address and a working way to opt out.
Then read it on your phone. If it is short, sounds like a person on your team, and a stranger could answer it in one line, approve it.
Do not start with the subject line. As I wrote in my notes on editing cold email, when founders send me a draft to review, "the question is almost always about the subject line." I read that part last.
Subject lines and phrasing get tested at volume, and your taste is one data point. Your part of the approval is what the agency cannot know from outside: whether the draft tells the truth about your business.
Smirnov Consulting Group is a Prague-based B2B outbound lead generation agency that runs cold email and LinkedIn campaigns for founder-led B2B companies and books qualified sales calls. It is my company, so I sit on the agency side of this exchange. This checklist is for the person on the other side.
What should you check before approving a cold email draft?
Run these ten checks against the draft. The worked example further down refers back to their numbers.
| # | Check | Approve when | Push back when |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sender and subject | The "From" name is a real person on your team, and the subject matches what the email says | The subject promises something the email never mentions, or fakes a "Re:" to look like an old thread |
| 2 | First line | It states a fact about their business that explains why you are writing and would fit no one else, or openly admits the email is cold | It is a compliment that would fit any company on the list |
| 3 | Rendered samples | You have seen 5 to 10 emails as they will go out, filled in from real rows of the list | You have only seen a template full of placeholders like [first name] |
| 4 | The ask | It asks for a short call and says what the prospect gets from it | It asks them to buy, request a proposal or sit through a product demo |
| 5 | One ask | There is one question to answer | A call, a booking link and "or point me to the right person" all compete |
| 6 | Proof | One result with a number and a timeframe that a prospect could check | Adjectives carry the weight: leading, trusted, award-winning |
| 7 | Claims about you | Every fact about your clients, services and results is true today and cleared for use | A client you have no permission to name, a number from years ago, a promise you do not make |
| 8 | Length and tone | Readable on a phone in under a minute, in a voice someone at your firm could have written | A company history paragraph, or a tone nobody at your firm uses |
| 9 | Follow-ups | Each step adds one new angle | Step three repeats step one with "just bumping this" |
| 10 | Footer | Your valid postal address, a clear way to opt out, and anything else the rules of your recipients' country require | Nothing under the signature |
Check 3 is the easiest to skip. A template with [first name] placeholders looks tidy. The rendered version shows what the merge fields actually pulled: a job title in capitals, an opener written for a CFO that lands on an IT manager.
The three checks only you can make
An agency can write a clean email about a business it has known for two weeks. What it cannot know is which of its sentences about you are true. That is why checks 6, 7 and 4 are yours.
The agency can judge the other seven as well as you can, so there you check its work instead of redoing it. Two of them stay with you anyway. The sender and subject (check 1) and the footer (check 10) carry a legal duty that, under US law, you cannot hand over, as the compliance section below explains.
Is the proof real, and can you use it?
My position on proof is simple: your past clients, their results and your case studies go inside the message, where a stranger actually sees them.
So a good draft carries one result. Check three things about it. The number matches your own records. The timeframe is stated. The client, if named, has agreed to be named. A doubtful prospect will ask about it, and you are the one who answers.
An adjective is a claim nobody can test, so it earns no trust. If the draft says "leading", ask for the number that would prove it instead.
Does it describe your business as it is today?
Drafts go wrong here when the agency's picture of you is thin. It knows what your website and one onboarding call told it. That is how an email ends up mentioning a service you stopped selling, a client from four years ago, or a promise your delivery team would never make.
Read every sentence about your company and ask one question: would I say this to this prospect on a call, word for word? If not, mark it.
Is it selling a call, or the service?
Asking a stranger to buy in the first message is the quickest way I know to get ignored. A stranger cannot judge a service from four lines of text. The first message sells a meeting. The service gets sold on the call.
Then check the last line. The closing "Would you be open to a quick chat?" is, as I have put it before, "where most emails go to die." Teams still defend it, because every template ends with it.
A free call still costs the prospect 20 or 30 minutes of a full week, so the draft has to sell it: one line on what they leave with, specific enough to believe.
Make sure you can deliver that call. If the draft offers a 20-minute review of the prospect's setup, someone on your team has to run that review every time a prospect says yes.
A weak draft, and the version worth approving
Below is the kind of draft that lands for sign-off. Everything in it is invented for illustration: the firms, the people and the numbers. The bracketed numbers point to the checks in the table.
Before
Subject: Quick question [1]
Hi [first name],
I hope this email finds you well. I came across [company] and was really impressed by your growth. [2]
We are a leading, award-winning IT consulting partner with 15 years of experience and offices in three countries. We help companies like yours with cloud migration, cybersecurity, managed services and custom software. [6] [8]
Would you be interested in a proposal for your infrastructure? [4] Let me know if you are open to a quick chat next week, or book a time here, or point me to the right person. [5]
Best, Daniel
What the marks mean. The subject [1] could head almost any cold email, so it tells the reader nothing about this one. The opener [2] fits every name on the list.
The middle paragraph [6] [8] is adjectives and a service menu. Its two checkable facts, the years in business and the office count, say nothing about what the prospect would get.
A proposal [4] is a buying decision. Three ways to respond [5] make it easy to choose none. There is no footer at all [10].
After
Subject: server room at Brenner [1]
Hi Martin,
Your job ad for a second on-site systems administrator suggests the server room at Brenner Logistics is still growing. [2] [3]
Last year we moved a 200-person logistics company off its own servers in 11 weeks, without taking its warehouse system offline during working hours. [6] [7]
Would a 20-minute call be useful? I would walk you through the plan we used and what it cost them in staff time, and you would leave with a rough timeline for your own move, whether or not we ever work together. [4] [5]
Daniel Novak, Kestrelworks IT, Example Street 1, 602 00 Brno
Not relevant? Reply "no" and I will not write again. [10]
Five things changed. The opener is a fact about Brenner. The company paragraph became one result with a number and a timeframe, and your job at check 7 is to confirm the 200 people and the 11 weeks against the case file. The proposal became a call with a stated payoff.
And the footer exists, with an address and a way out. What else it needs depends on where the list is; the compliance section below covers the US rules.
Last, the subject line. It now names what the email is about, which is all check 1 asks of you. Which wording wins a test is the agency's call.
What should you leave to the agency?
In my list of questions for agency interviews, I told buyers to spend almost none of the interview on the messaging: "The copy is the easiest part to fix later. The rest is not."
The same holds in the approval round. No wording rescues a bad list or a sender nobody trusts.
| Part of the draft | Who decides | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Claims about your business, clients and results | You | Correct anything untrue or not cleared |
| What the prospect gets from the call | You | Confirm your team can deliver it |
| Who it is sent from | You | Confirm the person, and that their LinkedIn profile is ready for a visit |
| Footer: address, opt-out and legal lines | You and the agency | Check they are there and the opt-out works |
| Subject lines | Agency | See the variants, confirm each matches the email (check 1), let them pick |
| Exact phrasing and word order | Agency | Flag tone only if nobody at your firm talks that way |
| Variants and spintax (automatic wording swaps) | Agency | Ask whether they exist |
| Plain text, links, formatting for the inbox | Agency | Ask how the draft is set up to reach the inbox |
| Number of steps and timing | Agency | Ask what job each step does |
If you are on a fourth round of edits and still unhappy, stop editing. Ask for 20 rows of the list and look at who is on it. Phrasing is also the part a small campaign can barely measure, which is why the test worth running on a short list changes the offer or the audience, not the words.
Should you approve every outbound message?
No. Approve the template for every step of the sequence, a sample of rendered emails, and any later change to a claim or the offer. A live campaign runs variants, often with spintax so thousands of sends are not identical text, and nobody can sign off on each one.
What you want instead is a rule, agreed in writing. New claims, new proof or a new offer come back to you before they go out. New subject lines and wording tests do not.
The compliance footer is still your responsibility
The rules below were checked in September 2026 against the FTC's guide. This is not legal advice.
In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act covers commercial email and makes no exception for business-to-business messages, according to the FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide. For a draft, that becomes four things you can check on the page:
- A valid physical postal address. The FTC accepts a street address, or a post office box or private mailbox registered under Postal Service rules.
- A clear explanation of how to opt out. A return email address counts.
- A subject line that matches what the email is about, and accurate "From" and "Reply-To" details.
- A clear disclosure that the message is an advertisement. The FTC gives leeway on how.
Two more sit behind the page. A "no" has to take effect within 10 business days, and the way to opt out has to keep working for at least 30 days after the send. Ask the agency who reads the "no" replies and how fast they reach the suppression list.
One line in the guide matters most if you use an agency. Handing your email to an outside firm does not hand over the legal duty: in the FTC's words, you "can't contract away" that responsibility.
The company whose product is promoted and the company that sends may both be held responsible, and each separate violating email can bring a penalty of up to $53,088.
The UK and EU countries have their own rules for B2B email, separate from CAN-SPAM. If your list crosses borders, ask the agency which rules the draft was written for.
How fast should you turn a draft around?
Fast enough that the copy is never the thing holding up the first send. The sending side needs time anyway: in the sending setup I use, new mailboxes get at least 10 days of warmup before they touch a prospect.
A draft approved inside that window costs you nothing. One approved after the mailboxes are ready pushes the first send back day for day.
Four habits keep it quick:
- One person approves, usually the founder or whoever runs sales, because they know which claims are true.
- All comments go in one document, in one round.
- Each comment is marked as a must-change (a failed check from the table) or a suggestion.
- The follow-ups get approved in the same round as the first email.
Questions founders ask about approving agency copy
Should I ask for several subject line variants? Ask to see them, but let the agency choose. Reply data picks a winner faster than a meeting does. Your only check is that each variant matches what the email says.
What if I do not like the tone? Point to the sentence and say why: too formal, or pushier than anyone at your firm would be. An email that sounds like a person beats a template that sounds like a machine, so "make it sound more like us" is a fair request. Asking for your website's brochure voice is not.
How many rounds of edits is normal? Aim for one full round and one short one for small fixes. If a draft needs a third or fourth, look upstream: a thin brief, an unclear offer or the wrong list.
For one B2B client, the home page essentially said "we do everything for everyone." We turned that into one promise for one kind of buyer first, as I wrote at the time, "months before anybody argued about subject lines."
Do I need to approve LinkedIn messages as well? Yes, the same way: the connection note, the first message and each follow-up. Checks 2 to 9 apply unchanged.