The prompt I use to turn "no website found" into an email opening that doesn't sound like a mail-merge
I do freelance web design and small-agency work on the side — video, social, copy, strategy — and after enough of these pitches I landed on a simple thesis: the easiest lead to convert isn't a business with a site that might want a redesign. It's a business with no site at all, or one that's broken, or one that's clearly been abandoned. Which means the whole pitch lives or dies on how specifically you name the gap.
I built a small tool to find these businesses: it pulls local businesses by category and town from OpenStreetMap's free public map data, then actively checks whether each one has a real working website instead of trusting whatever OpenStreetMap has on file. That catches both directions of error — a business OpenStreetMap doesn't know has a site, and a domain that's registered but dead. It scores each business 0-100 on how convertible the gap looks, labels it HOT/WARM/COLD, and generates a short dossier plus a draft email for each one.
But the piece of this worth sharing on its own, whether or not you ever build the scanning part, is the writing step. Once you have three plain facts about a business — its category, its town, and what the check actually found about its website — the job is turning that into a first paragraph that reads like you looked at that specific business, not a template with the name swapped in. That's what the prompt below does. The prompt doesn't care where those three facts came from — you can type them in by hand.
The steps below are how I use it, and the prompt itself is the reusable part.
Steps
- 1
Gather three plain facts, nothing more
Category, town, and what the website check actually found — no site found anywhere, a domain that exists but doesn't load, or only a social media page with no site. I don't add anything I haven't actually confirmed.
- 2
Feed those facts to Claude or ChatGPT with the prompt below
I paste in the business name, category, town, and the website finding, then run the prompt as-is. If I know one more real detail — a phone number listed, an address — I add it; if not, I leave that line blank rather than making something up.
- 3
Read the output before using it
It should read like a short, specific observation about that one business, not a form letter. If it comes out generic, that's a signal the facts I gave it were too thin, not a prompt to fix by pushing it to sound more confident.
- 4
Spot-check HOT and WARM leads on Google Maps before sending anything
This is not optional. OpenStreetMap's listing can be incomplete or mistagged, so "no site found" sometimes just means the map data is wrong, not that the business lacks a site. I check every HOT and WARM lead by hand before it goes anywhere near an email.
- 5
Drop the paragraph into the dossier or email and add the opt-out line
The AI-written opening becomes the first paragraph; the rest of the email and a GDPR opt-out line are added after, not generated by this prompt.
You are helping me write the opening paragraph of an outreach email to a local business that has no working website. I do freelance web design and small-agency work (video, social, copy, strategy), and this paragraph is the difference between an email that gets read and one that gets deleted as spam.
Here is what I actually know about this business, nothing more:
- Business name: [NAME]
- Category: [CATEGORY, e.g. "hair salon", "pizzeria", "electrician"]
- Town: [TOWN]
- Website check result: [state exactly what was found, e.g. "no domain registered under any obvious variation of the name", or "a domain exists but the site returns an error and doesn't load", or "found only an Instagram page, no site"]
- Any other confirmed detail (optional, leave blank if none): [e.g. phone number listed, address]
Write a 2-3 sentence opening paragraph for the email, in my voice, first person. Rules:
1. Use only the facts I gave you above. Do not invent anything about the business — not its size, not its reputation, not how long it's been open, not who runs it, not how busy it looks. If I didn't tell you, you don't know it.
2. Be specific to this business and this gap. Reference the category and town naturally, and state plainly what the check found (no site, broken site, or social-only). A reader should be able to tell I actually looked at their business, not that I swapped a name into a template.
3. No hype, no exclamation points, nothing like "game-changing" or "unlock." Write like someone who does this for a living and is being direct.
4. Stop at the point where the ask ("would you have 15 minutes?" or similar) would naturally come next. I'll add that line separately, along with the opt-out line.
5. If the facts above are thin — basically just "no site found" and nothing else — write the shortest honest version of that observation instead of padding it with invented texture to sound more researched. A short, true sentence beats a longer generic one.Where this breaks
"No site found" sometimes just means OpenStreetMap's listing for that business is incomplete or mistagged, not that the business actually lacks a site — I always manually check HOT and WARM leads on Google Maps before sending anything, because skipping that means occasionally emailing a business to tell them they have no website when they do, which makes the whole pitch look sloppy. The free map-data lookup rate-limits under heavy use, so scanning a whole town in one sitting sometimes fails partway through and needs a retry a minute later; it's not built for scanning at large scale in one go. And the prompt above is only as good as the facts you feed it — for a business with almost no public data at all, the generated paragraph comes out generic, and generic is worse than not sending anything when the entire premise of the pitch is that you actually looked.
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