What’s the update on the cold email campaign video you made a while back?
I paused the campaign after getting a huge influx of positive replies – people were eager to hop on calls, which wasn’t realistic for me to handle. I had to pump the brakes in certain regions to keep growth sustainable. Here are the final stats: I ended up with 26 replies. When I launched the campaign I was opening at about 2‑2.5 % and have now scaled that up to roughly 4‑4.2 % after some split‑testing. I even recorded a video showing the iterations and published it, which helped a lot of people make money with cold email, confirming I was on the right track. I plan to follow up with deeper dives into the rest of the sales process, but it’s tough to justify the time right now because each sales call takes a lot of effort – I need participants who are comfortable having their calls published, and there’s a liability factor now. Producing one of those deep‑dive videos costs me about 10‑15 hours versus the 30‑45 minute videos I make now. I still think doing cornerstone content like this about once every 10‑15 videos is strategic, so I’ll keep it in the pipeline when the timing feels right.
First, 200 emails is very little in the grand scheme of things — getting zero booked calls off that just means your positive reply rate is under 0.5%, which about half of people land at, or you could have a decent reply rate but are still in random-noise territory because the sample is too small. You need to send 2,000, honestly more like 10,000, before drawing conclusions — that's the hard pill to swallow. On the 60 super-personalized videos only getting 1 call: if you send high-quality personalized videos across 3-4 platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, email), people realistically have about a 50% chance of seeing it, and a really high-quality personalized video might add another 20% chance of a reply — so you might reasonably expect a 10-20% reply rate. Getting only one call out of 60 like that is odd — it suggests either the service isn't actually valuable/solving a real problem, or you're not presenting it well, or something else is off that's hard to diagnose without seeing it directly. If you want real feedback, link a video and the exact outreach copy you're using so it can actually be looked at.
I wouldn’t recommend cold calling today. While it’s cheap to start—just a phone and your voice—the biggest downside is that it’s synchronous, meaning over half of your leads aren’t available when you call, cutting your efficiency in half right away. It also forces you to block time for calls, makes you vulnerable to spam patterns, and requires years of practice to become effective, with most of your time spent talking to unqualified prospects and having to convince them of your credibility. In contrast, asynchronous methods like personalized Loom videos let you work in short windows, avoid the 50% availability loss, and create a reusable asset you can send via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. When hyper‑customized, such videos can be seen by about two‑thirds of prospects and generate reply rates around 50 %. Spending an hour a day on Loom outreach can yield five to ten times the results of cold calling. That’s why I’ve shifted from cold email to warm inbound and scaled my agencies, and I advise you to use Loom videos for your SaaS launch.
You should start testing now instead of waiting for 1500 emails. Don't put a Loom video in your first outreach when going mass market—it hurts deliverability and offers little value unless the recipient already opted in. There are two main approaches. Hyper‑custom: spend 3‑5 minutes researching each prospect, craft a highly personal email, and record a short opportunity‑style Loom video that gives value first (e.g.,
A 1.2% reply rate isn’t terrible for a brand‑new campaign, but there’s plenty of room to improve. The fastest way to boost performance is to iterate weekly: run split‑tests on subject lines, body copy, and calls‑to‑action, then adjust based on the data. Even a single tweak can increase reply rates by 200%. Spend 20‑30 minutes each week scheduling these tests, reviewing results, and refining your copy. The time investment is minimal, so you can keep your cold‑email outreach running while experimenting with other channels. There’s no need to abandon email; you can run multiple methods in parallel because the maintenance overhead for email is low. Focus on consistent testing and optimization, and the numbers will climb from here.