After someone accepts my LinkedIn connection request, what should I do next? How should I message them to get them interested in booking a call, and when should I send a custom Loom video in the DMs?
Sure. When someone accepts your connection request, just send another message. I haven’t run large‑scale cold DMs myself—I’ve made most of my money with cold email—but here’s how I’d approach it. As soon as the connection is accepted, record a short video. Say thanks for accepting, mention that you’ve been following them for a long time, compliment their work, or note that a friend shared their profile. Thank them for the value they provide. Explain that you’re recording a quick video to help them make more money, and give context: you work with XYZ technology and see they’re leaving money on the table. Share the video, tell them they can do whatever they want with it, and that you don’t need to talk again if they’re not interested, but you wanted to put it in front of them. In the video, reiterate that they’re free to use the material as they wish and that you’re not pitching—you’re just happy to have the chance to talk. Offer to give more context or walk them through your approach on a call if they’re interested. That’s the LinkedIn DM sequence I’d use: over‑deliver massive value every time.
I think there are a couple of things to clarify. First, the idea that a Loom video almost always lands in spam is not true. Sending links in email at larger volumes does decrease deliverability and can negatively impact your ability to reach the inbox, but it doesn't mean every email goes to spam; deliverability might drop from, say, 95% to around 75%. Some emails will still land in spam, and if your Loom videos are poor, recipients may mark you as spam, which can hurt your sender reputation over time. However, it's not an all-or-nothing situation. Think of deliverability as a gradient. You can move toward the delivery side by improving practices—using multiple mailboxes, low sending volumes, perfect DNS records (DMARC, DKIM, etc.), good subject lines, and valuable content. Adding a link pushes you toward the no-delivery side, but strong deliverability practices can pull you back. Regarding your specific tactic: I don't send a 'can I send you a quick two-minute video?' preamble anymore. That approach used to work, but now it's common and doesn't stand out. Instead, I record the Loom video ahead of time, make it highly valuable and customized, and then distribute it across multiple channels (email, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, etc.). If each platform gives roughly a 20% chance of being seen, the combined probability of being seen on at least one channel is about 1-(0.8)^5 ≈ 67%. Multiplying that by a conservative deliverability estimate of 75% gives roughly a 50% chance the video is seen. If the video is really good and hyper-customized, maybe one out of two recipients replies, yielding around a 25% response rate. The bottom line: there's no definitive rule from email providers about links causing spam; they approximate based on signals. Use common sense, test the approach, and see what works for you.
Yeah, great question. I love this sort of question. So, how would I do it? I would split test this: let's say you're sending these manually, so I'd take 200 leads and split them into batches of 100. I'd do 100 customized Loom videos and then 100 hyper-customized emails that include an offer to do a demo or let them interact with my voice agent themselves. For the first 100 with the Loom videos, I'd say something like: 'Hey Pete, what's going on? Been following you for a really long time. Really love your stuff. I know this is out of left field. I wanted to send a video to you showing you how I think I could make probably another $5,000 to $10,000 a month for you with a simple database reactivation system. If you've never heard of this before, the way it works is XYZ.' By the end of the video, I want you to have everything you need to do this sort of thing on your own because I really like you, trust you, respect you, have been following you for a while, really like your company—whatever the hell. Just make them feel like you've been, you know, this isn't the first time you've done outreach; you've talked to them or come into contact with their brand. I want to make sure you have everything you need to do it yourself. So, even if you choose not to work with me, that's totally okay. I know values—giving value is how you get ahead in this industry—so I just wanted to give a bunch to you. And if you do, for whatever reason, want to work with me, just send me a message and I can sort it all out for you. It'll take less than five minutes of your time. And as I mentioned, I'm confident I can make you at least another five to $10,000 a month. Okay. So, here's how it works. Boom. Then just run them through how the thing works. Okay. At the end, uh, just talk about how much you like them and stuff like that. And then in the, um, demo, just do the same thing over text. Just obviously you need to format it a little bit differently. Make it a little bit punchier, make a little bit shorter so they don't have to read like a whole wall of text. And then offer to do a demo and say like, 'I believe so strongly in this and I'm actually like down to do a demo with you. Going to show you this thing. Um, and I don't know what you meant by demo here. I imagine they're just testing it on their end without even talking to you because you believe so strongly in the quality of the product.' If that's the case, you could just find a way to link the demo. Um, if you're only sending, you know, 100 emails, if you're doing this super hyper customized, you can just send the link directly. That's okay. Uh, but if it's eventually going to be a big high-volume thing, you need to find another way to position the demo.
Yes, a LinkedIn connection is viable and very viable, but it needs to be heavily personalized. The highest‑ROI way to personalize these days is a Loom video, because video has far more bandwidth than plain text—a picture is worth about a 1,000 words, while a video at 24 fps is worth roughly 24,000 words per second (even more at 30 or 60 fps). If you’re good at what you do, there’s a multiplicative relationship between the medium’s bandwidth and the value you deliver, so using video greatly boosts your conversion rate. After you’ve spent five minutes making that Loom, you should send it through email, your LinkedIn profile (the easiest path for scrapers), and any other platforms you have—Twitter/X, Instagram, etc.—because each extra channel adds another chance of being seen, which raises the expected return on your time investment. As for Instantly, if you’re trying to send emails one‑by‑one with Make, you’ll realistically manage only about 10‑15 a day before you start getting blacklisted, so a dedicated cold‑email service like Instantly is worth using. They offer cheap plans (around $37/month) and let you avoid burning your main domain. While you could split several Gmail accounts and wrestle with Make authorizations, the simpler, more scalable recommendation is to use a cold‑email service to handle your campaigns.
Sending just a few Loom videos per day (e.g., nine in three days, about three per day) yields low reply rates. Successful students in Maker School send 20‑30 videos daily, seeing a 30‑40% connection acceptance rate and a 30‑50% reply rate, which translates to roughly 10‑15% overall reply rate and about five warm leads per day. To improve results, break your outreach into a funnel and boost volume at each stage. The Loom video itself should be dynamic—start with high‑value content in the first few seconds, avoid AI‑generated templates, and add personal touches like zooming in on the recipient’s picture or embedding a short GIF. Consistently send more videos (20‑30 per day) and follow up as needed; there’s no strict limit, but higher volume with personalized content drives better engagement.