Can you explain your advice on using Loom videos in cold emails and provide a demo?
Using Loom videos in cold emails works and can be effective, but it lowers deliverability because links and media trigger spam filters. You trade volume for personalization—send fewer, highly tailored emails with a Loom video that shows you’ve already built the asset, which creates a pattern break and raises perceived value. To compensate for lower deliverability, reduce volume or improve mailbox practices. It’s not fully scalable like pure text cold email, but it’s a valuable tactic when you need to stand out.
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.
Treat personalized video outreach as a separate campaign from your regular cold email. For the video campaign, gather prospects using Apollo or social‑media scrapers, then send customized DMs that reference specifics from their profiles or websites so it’s clearly not a template. Keep your standard cold email process distinct. Within that flow, I’d record a Loom video for about five to twenty prospects per day — enough to add a personal touch without overwhelming your workload — and run the video outreach alongside your usual cold email sequence.
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).
Just start with plain text. Simple text‑only outreach works fine for a new campaign. If the simple approach gets results, you don’t need to add video or complex tech. As long as your copy complies with copyright guidelines and you keep the message straightforward, it can be effective.