TL;DR
The vast majority of outreach emails get zero responses, and a lot of them are landing in spam folders right now.
A quick screen recording of my own YouTube channel made me stop and pay attention.
If you’re selling marketing while spamming inboxes from free accounts, you’re proving you’re bad at marketing.
Outreach that proves you actually looked at someone’s business is the only cold email worth doing going into 2025.
“Do you SEO folk actually think by blasting my inbox you’re going to get my business?” 🤔
That’s what one redditor asked, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been in SEO for like eight years, and even I find these cold emails extremely annoying and lazy, so I totally understand the common business owner’s frustration over these spammy emails. Your SEO cold email strategy is probably broken and you already know it. 👋
But out of the thousands of garbage pitches I’ve received, exactly one got me to reply. One. And it wasn’t because of a clever subject line or some magic copywriting formula.
It was a personalized video. It changed how I think about cold outreach entirely.
Are spammy SEO emails worth it?
Why Your Cold Outreach Tactics Are Failing (It’s Not a Mystery)
I’m gonna be real with you. This is more of a micro-rant, but spam emails are really annoying—especially when they come from SEOs. We’re supposed to be marketers. We’re supposed to be the people who understand how to get attention the right way.
And yet our industry is one of the worst offenders when it comes to lazy, garbage outreach.
One of the comments on this reddit thread reads, “90% of them are from Gmail accounts. Signs of a serious company.” And that’s the thing: the people receiving these emails aren’t stupid. They can smell the laziness.
They see the generic template, the free email account, the vague promises, and they immediately know you spent zero seconds thinking about them.
Critical Error
A Backlinko analysis of 12 million outreach emails found that 91.5% never get a response. If you’re blasting out hundreds of emails a day, the math is working against you.
Another comment that stuck with me: “Honestly, no serious SEO pro does cold email blast anymore. The legit ones usually get clients through referrals or by showing results, not spamming inboxes.” I think that’s slightly overstated because cold email as a concept isn’t dead. The way most people do it is.
Most of these emails read like, “Hello sir/ma’am, I will get you to Google number one in 24 hours,” or something stupid like that. And obviously that’s just not how it works. If you’ve been in this industry for more than a week you know that, so why would you lead with a promise that tells the recipient you’re either lying or clueless?
The Real Reason Cold Email Blasts Got So Bad
A reason why these are so prominent now, I think more than ever, is because of AI. And not just AI, but automation. There are a lot of tools now that work in conjunction with AI and automation to send blasts of emails, and they’re easy to do. That ease is the trap.
But they have to be spending some serious amount of money casting a giant net, and it’s all just going into the spam folder. The economics are terrible.
Since 2024, Google and Yahoo require bulk senders shipping more than 5,000 emails per day to keep spam complaint rates below 0.3% and include a one-click unsubscribe. These platforms are using advanced AI-powered spam filters now that can detect pattern-generated templates, even the ones that look personalized but are really just mail merge.
Your “Hey {FirstName}…” template is a signal.
If this is how you present yourself as a marketer, you’re proving you’re bad at your job before the conversation starts.
Obviously if it was completely not working, they wouldn’t be doing it. Some people are getting results, and I’m not saying they’re all scamming. I’m just saying the idea of sending out a blast to thousands of business owners to promote your SEO service is… how effective is that really? And at what cost to your reputation?
| Cold Email Approach | Typical Reply Rate | Cost Per Lead | Reputation Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generic mass blast (thousands/day) | 1–2% | Low per email, high overall waste | Actively damages your brand |
| Semi-personalized template | 3–5% | Moderate | Neutral to slightly negative |
| Hyper-personalized with video/research | 8–20% | Higher per email, lower per actual lead | Builds credibility |
The Diamond in the Rough: A Personalized Video That Actually Worked
Now, there is one email that was really good that I got from another SEO—or maybe it was the video, I don’t recall exactly. What they did was they found me and then they took a screenshot video of them scrolling up and down my YouTube channel. That caught my attention instantly.
When I opened that email, the first thing I saw was that video embedded, and it’s showing someone scrolling up and down my channel, which made me think, “Oh my god, these people actually took the time.” And then giving it a little more thought and looking at how the email read, I noticed pretty quick that it was a little algorithmic—probably programmatic, maybe done with AI or something.
It still felt custom enough.
But I did reply saying I don’t need your service, but touché, well done, you got my attention. That’s the whole point.
“Truly that is a diamond in the rough.”
Think about what happened there. I’m an eight-year SEO veteran. I know the tricks. I probably get dozens of these pitches a month. And this one got me to reply.
Not because the copy was perfect—I literally told them I could tell it was somewhat automated. It worked because the personalized video outreach created a moment of genuine surprise.
Someone—or something that felt like someone—had looked at my actual work. That three seconds of seeing my own YouTube channel being scrolled through was worth more than every perfectly A/B tested subject line in the world. Surprise beats polish.
Success!
Research backs this up: personalizing just the email body can increase your response rate by 32.7%, according to the same Backlinko study. Now imagine what a personalized video does compared to swapping a name in a text template.
How to Actually Use Video in Cold Email (Without Being Creepy)
So if you’re doing the generic blast thing, please stop. It’s not helpful. But then how can some SEOs and other small agencies get noticed by potential clients? Use personalization that’s obvious.
The video in cold email approach is, in my experience, one of the most underused and highest-impact tactics right now. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. The person who emailed me didn’t produce a documentary.
They recorded a quick screen scroll of my channel. That’s it. Maybe 15–20 seconds. Keep it short and relevant.
If you can take screenshots of the business and insert them into your email, that’s really going to make someone stop and go, “Whoa, who’s this looking at me?” Like actually looking at my stuff. Screenshots prove you did the work.
What to Send vs. What to Stop Sending
What Works (Do This)
- Screen-record yourself browsing their actual website or social profiles
- Use tools like Loom or Vidyard to embed a quick personalized B2B video email
- Reference something specific you noticed: a blog post, a product page, a broken link
- Keep it under 30 seconds. Respect their time
- Send from a real domain email, not Gmail
What Doesn’t Work (Stop This)
- “Hello sir/ma’am, I will get you to number one on Google”
- Template emails with {FirstName} and nothing else personalized
- Blasting 5,000 emails a day from a fresh domain
- Promising results with zero proof or context
- Any email that could’ve been sent to literally anyone
Oh, and I had another thought. If you add a picture of the business owner into the email, that would stop me in my tracks. But… that might be creepy. That might be too much.
So maybe stick with screenshots of their business, not their face. There’s a fine line between personalized and stalker-ish.
Sending follow-up emails to the same contact can lead to 2x more responses, according to the Backlinko outreach study. So if your personalized video email doesn’t get a reply the first time, a thoughtful follow-up is absolutely worth sending. Just don’t send seven of them.
LinkedIn and Other Channels Worth Trying
Obviously, referrals are big. I think LinkedIn messaging is probably pretty good. I mean, I haven’t done it myself, but if I got a message from LinkedIn I’m much more willing to open it and read it, especially when it’s relevant to me or something about my business. Relevance earns attention.
That might not be as scalable as an email blast. But that’s kind of the point. The scalability of mass email is exactly why it doesn’t work—because everyone’s doing it, which means nobody stands out.
The slightly harder path of sending 20 genuinely personalized messages a day will almost always outperform 2,000 copy-paste templates. Scale is not the goal.
Did You Know?
Successful cold email campaigns in 2025 are reporting 40–70% open rates and 8–20% reply rates (SBL), but only when senders invest in proper domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), real personalization, and low daily volume.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, but only if you ditch the spray-and-pray approach. Cold email as a concept is legitimate; it’s how SEOs build links and partnerships every day. The difference is sending 50 deeply researched emails per week vs. blasting 5,000 generic templates per day. The first approach works. The second one is spam.
Loom and Vidyard are two of the most popular options for recording and embedding quick videos directly in emails. Some newer tools use programmatic approaches to auto-generate personalized screen recordings at scale. The key is that it feels custom, even if parts are automated.
Fewer than you think. With Google and Yahoo’s 2024 bulk sender rules, keeping your daily volume low is critical for deliverability. Many experts recommend starting with 20–30 highly personalized emails per day from a properly warmed domain. Volume is the enemy of quality.
Not at all—it’s one of the most effective things you can do because it instantly proves you looked at their business. The line gets crossed when you include personal photos of the owner or reference things that feel too personal. Stick to public-facing business assets.
Because the people sending them are either beginners or they’re trying to avoid the cost and effort of setting up proper domain email with authentication. And recipients notice immediately. You’ve lost before you started.
Final Thoughts
Look, I get it. Finding new clients as a freelance SEO or small agency owner is hard. The temptation to fire up some automation tool and blast out thousands of emails is real because it feels productive.
But you’re spending serious money casting a giant net and it’s all just going into the spam folder. Lazy outreach trains people to ignore you.
The person who sent me that personalized video of my YouTube channel got something that thousands of other emailers couldn’t buy: my attention and my respect. That’s the whole game right there. Stop trying to reach everyone.
Start trying to genuinely impress someone. Record a Loom video, browse their actual site, point out something specific, and send it from a real email address like a professional. You’ll send fewer emails and get more replies.