Do Loom videos and cold email work better than plain text emails when you personalize them, or is it enough to start with just text?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.