Templates
Message templates
100 messages you can copy, fill in and send — cold DMs, follow-ups, awkward money conversations and everything else you put off writing. Pick a collection below; everything is free and needs no sign-up.
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By what you need to write
Cold outreach
First messages to someone who has never heard of you. Filter by the role you are writing as, or search for the situation you are in.
Open collection 10 templatesFollow-ups
Chasing a reply without becoming annoying. Filter by role, or search for the moment you are following up on.
Open collection 10 templatesPricing & proposals
Quoting, scoping and talking about money without flinching. Filter by role, or search for the conversation you are about to have.
Open collection 10 templatesGetting paid
Invoice reminders and overdue payments, escalating from a gentle nudge to a final notice. Filter by role or search for your situation.
Open collection 10 templatesProject updates
Keeping clients and colleagues informed without spending your day on it. Filter by role or search for the moment you are writing about.
Open collection 10 templatesSupport replies
Refunds, bugs, complaints and apologies. Filter by role or search for the kind of ticket in front of you.
Open collection 10 templatesSaying no politely
Declining work, discounts and scope creep without a paragraph of apology. Filter by role or search for what you need to turn down.
Open collection 10 templatesBrand collaborations
Pitching and negotiating paid partnerships, from both sides. Filter by role or search for the stage you are at.
Open collection 10 templatesManaging a team
Feedback, praise, nudges and the conversations most managers postpone. Filter by role or search for the situation.
Open collection 10 templatesTeaching & students
Messages to students, parents and cohorts, written to be clear and quick to send. Filter by role or search for the situation.
Open collectionPicked for a particular job
The same templates, gathered for one role with notes on how to use them.
Cold DMs for freelancers
Cold DMs work for freelancers when they are short, specific and easy to reply to. Copy any of these, swap the bracketed parts for real details, and send.
Open collection Sales · 8 templatesCold email for sales
Cold email templates built around the openers that still work: a problem they would recognise, a trigger event, or a competitor they are already unhappy with.
Open collection Freelancers · 10 templatesPayment reminders for freelancers
Chasing an invoice is uncomfortable, which is why it gets delayed — and delay makes it worse. These escalate in tone, from a gentle nudge to a final notice.
Open collection Freelancers · 9 templatesClient updates for freelancers
Clients rarely get anxious because work is slow. They get anxious because they cannot see it. These keep them informed without eating your day.
Open collection Support · 10 templatesRefund emails for support
Refund conversations are where support gets tested. These cover approving, declining, apologising and handling someone who is already angry.
Open collection Influencers · 9 templatesBrand collabs for influencers
Pitching brands, quoting rates, declining gifted-only offers and negotiating a low one upwards — the messages that decide whether creating pays.
Open collection Managers · 10 templatesFeedback for managers
Praise that means something, feedback that lands, and the conversations most managers put off for a week longer than they should.
Open collection Freelancers · 10 templatesSaying no for freelancers
Turning down work, discounts, free labour and one-more-small-thing requests — politely, quickly, and without a paragraph of apology.
Open collection Sales · 9 templatesFollow-ups for sales
Most deals are lost to silence rather than rejection. These follow up after no reply, after a call, after a proposal, and after a price objection.
Open collection Instructors · 10 templatesParent emails for teachers
Progress updates, unhappy parents, missing work and absences — written to be clear and calm, and quick enough to send thirty of.
Open collectionNo collections match that
Try a plainer word — “invoice”, “cold”, “refund” or “feedback” — or clear the filter above.
How to use a message template without sounding like one
A template is a starting structure, not a script. The parts in square brackets are the parts that matter, because they are where the specific, human detail goes. A message sent with them half-filled is worse than no message at all, since it proves you were not paying attention rather than merely that you were busy.
Everything else exists so you do not have to think about the shape of the thing at eleven at night. That is the real value of a template: not the words, which you could write, but the decisions about order and length that you would otherwise make badly while tired. The reliable test before sending is to read it back and ask whether it could have been sent to anyone else. If it could, it will be treated as though it was.
Why shorter almost always wins
Every template here is deliberately brief. Most are read on a phone, between other things, by someone who did not ask to hear from you. A message that fits on one screen gets read; one that needs scrolling gets saved for later, and later rarely arrives.
Brevity also forces clarity about the ask. A long message often hides the fact that the sender has not decided what they want, and the reader can feel that even if they could not name it. Every template here ends with one clear next step — a single question, a date, or an explicit invitation to say no. If you find yourself adding a third paragraph of context, it usually belongs in the reply you will send once they are interested, not in the message that has to earn the reply.
Make the first line do real work
Readers decide whether to continue somewhere in the first sentence, and most messages waste it. Openings that begin with an apology for intruding, a description of who you are, or a statement of the obvious all spend that attention on nothing.
The strongest first lines do one of three things: name something specific about the reader's situation, state the decision or the outcome immediately, or ask a question only they can answer. Which one depends on the message. A refund approval should lead with the refund. A cold email should lead with the problem. A payment reminder should lead with the invoice number and the date. In every case the principle is the same — put the thing the reader cares about where they will actually see it.
Tone: warm, plain and unhedged
The most common tonal mistake in professional writing is hedging. Softeners like just, sorry to bother you, I was wondering whether, and if that is at all possible accumulate until the message has no spine and the reader is not sure what is being asked.
Removing them does not make you rude. Plain requests read as confident and are easier to answer, which is a kindness to the recipient. The second most common mistake is the opposite: a stiff formality that sounds like a legal notice. The register that works for almost everything here is how you would speak to a respected colleague — direct, courteous and recognisably human. Reading a message aloud before sending catches both failures faster than any editing rule.
Filling in the brackets properly
Placeholders are written as square brackets so they are impossible to miss, and the most embarrassing failure in template use is sending one unfilled. Before sending anything, search the message for an opening bracket. It takes a second and it has saved a great many people from a message beginning with a name that is not the recipient's.
Some placeholders need more than a swap. Where a template asks for a specific observation or a concrete result, a vague filler defeats the purpose of the template. If you genuinely cannot fill one in, that is usually a signal about the message rather than about the template — a cold email with nothing specific to say, or a case study request with no result to point to, is not ready to send.
Timing matters more than wording
A competent message sent at the right moment beats an excellent one sent at the wrong one, and this is true across every category here. A payment reminder sent three days after the due date works because the deadline is still fresh. The same message a month later has already conceded that the date was optional.
The same logic applies elsewhere. Feedback lands within a day or two of the event and not a month later. A follow-up after a call is worth ten times as much within the hour. Campaign results sent unprompted a week after a collaboration open a conversation that the same numbers three months later would not. If you find yourself agonising over wording, it is usually more productive to send something reasonable now than something perfect next week.
Adapting a template to your own voice
Templates written by someone else will not sound exactly like you, and sending them unmodified is how people end up with a professional voice that is not theirs. The fix is not to rewrite everything but to adjust two or three habitual things and leave the structure alone.
Most people have a characteristic opening, a way of closing, and a level of formality that stays constant. Set those once across the templates you use most and the rest follows. It is also worth cutting anything that would make you wince if quoted back to you. A phrase that feels overblown when you write it will feel worse when a client repeats it, and the templates are only useful to the extent that you would defend every sentence in them.
Building a personal library
Most people end up relying on five or six messages: a follow-up, a payment reminder, a polite no, a project update, an apology. Copying those from a web page every time is fine once and tedious by the twentieth.
Keeping them somewhere you can trigger with a few keystrokes — a text expander, a snippets tool, even a pinned note — turns a two-minute task into a two-second one. That sounds like a marginal saving and is not, because the real cost of a two-minute task is not the two minutes. It is that a message which takes two minutes and a small amount of willpower frequently does not get sent at all, and the follow-up you never sent is the one that would have won the work.
Keeping templates current
A template library decays quietly. Rates change, services change, the tools you name go out of date, and the results you cite get old enough to undermine rather than support you. A message referencing a case study from four years ago is doing less work than you think.
Reviewing them twice a year is enough. Check that the numbers are still true, that the examples are still your best ones, and that anything referencing a specific platform or price is accurate. It is also worth deleting the ones you never use. A library of forty templates you have to search through is slower than six you know by heart, and the point of the whole exercise is speed.
When not to use a template at all
Some messages should be written from scratch. Genuine apologies for something serious, condolences, anything involving a person's job, and any situation where the recipient would be hurt to learn a template was involved.
The signal is emotional weight rather than difficulty. A firm payment reminder is uncomfortable but transactional, and a template makes it better by keeping you calm and factual. A message to someone who has just had bad news is not transactional, and a structure borrowed from a web page will show. In those cases the templates here are still useful as a reminder of shape — lead with the substance, keep it short, say what happens next — but the words should be yours.
