Heard a VP at a networking event say cold email is dead - got me thinking

I was at a B2B meetup last Tuesday in Austin and this VP of Sales from a SaaS company said he hasn't opened a cold email in 2 years. He claimed his team gets maybe a 0.3% reply rate now. But then another guy chimed in saying he's still getting 5-8% with hyper personalized sequences using video snippets. Got me wondering if it's more about the approach than the channel itself. Has anyone else seen cold email actually working lately or is it really dying off for real?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade_lane191mo ago

Video snippets aren't cold email, that's just lazy warm outreach.

barnes.brian1mo ago

In my experience running sales for a 12 person SaaS company last year, we tested sending 45 second video snippets and saw a 3.2% reply rate on the first touch. That's actually higher than the cold email benchmarks I've seen from places like HubSpot, which usually sit around 1-2% for the first email in a sequence. So it's not really lazy, it's just a different tactic that works better for some industries like ours where talking through a problem is easier than writing it out. The key is the video still needs to be personalized and relevant to the person you're reaching out to, not just a generic screen recording.