#158 · Your outbound sucks. Here's how to fix it
I’d recommend using large email campaigns for volume and sending Loom videos for a personal touch. Large campaigns let you reach many prospects quickly, while Looms are free and can be used to follow up or explain a service without any cost.
The Loom video approach was terrible for me. My other approach was sending a lead magnet (a Google doc). To reconcile scale with customization, there are two approaches: low volume, high customization—sending a personalized Loom video that solves a problem, delivers value, and builds a warm connection to maybe 10‑30 people a day; and high volume, low result—blasting a generic “do you mind if I send you a Loom video?” to a million people and only recording when they reply. The latter is overdone and saturated; it’s not effective anymore.
Email deliverability isn’t a simple spam‑or‑not‑spam binary; it’s more like a sliding scale. Adding a link to an email nudges it toward the spam side, but excellent copywriting can pull it back toward the inbox. Adding images moves it further toward spam, yet a strong warm‑up routine, a pristine list, and high engagement can still keep you in the inbox. If you send a Loom video that’s incredibly high‑value and gets a great response, you might willingly take a small deliverability hit because the back‑end conversion makes up for it. Likewise, cutting your daily email volume—say, from 25‑30 down to 5‑10—improves your sender reputation and helps the mailbox provider see you as a real user. Platforms like Instantly let you run separate campaigns (e.g., a Loom‑video‑only campaign) and monitor deliverability on just those mailboxes, so you can isolate any impact. In short, when I say Loom personalized videos are the best form of cold outreach, I’m talking about using them to apply for jobs on Upwork (and similarly via Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn DMs, and email).
You don't need to send 100 personalized Loom videos per day. Sending about five highly targeted, high-quality videos daily can still get you to around $25k a month in a few months if you're smart. The '100 per day' figure refers to standard cold emails where you use AI to personalize an icebreaker and blast them via a platform like Instantly. Customized Loom outreach is much more time‑intensive per client, so even five a day—especially if you send them across multiple channels (email, DMs) with an omnichannel approach—will yield strong results, assuming the video quality and information are decent.
I don’t run a fully automated cold‑email system with Loom videos because it doesn’t scale well. Instead, I keep a simple Google sheet with columns for first name, last name, company, email, icebreaker, and a Loom link. I add each lead to the sheet, automate the icebreaker, then manually record a short Loom video (2‑4 minutes) for each prospect, talking about their specific needs. Sending 15 personalized videos takes about an hour of recording plus an hour to set up—so it’s doable but not highly scalable. The nuance is that customized Loom videos conflict with the goal of high‑volume automated outreach; the best approach is to do the recordings yourself when you want that level of personalization.