I booked over 90+ demo calls with SaaS companies with 11-50 employees in May. This sequence got an 18,4% reply rate and a 9,5% positive reply rate.

Below, you can see the 3-step sequence I used (with copies).

I marked all the personalized elements in bold, and an arrow pointed to the software I used to get them.

Step 1 - the inital copy

Kept it to plain text to ensure good deliverability
Kept it short to optimize it for phone users
Personalized the first sentence to stand out and get people to read the email. I used Clay x Open AI integration to automate the personalization.
Used a soft call to action to reduce friction as much as possible. Often when you ask for a call directly, you demand too much from your prospects to enter the next step of your sales funnel, which causes a friction point.
When someone responded positively, I marketed the lead as interested, moving them to a subsequence where the personalized demo video was sent automatically (using Vinna.ai), followed by 7 follow-ups.

Step 2 - the first follow-up

Started the email with “you” to capture attention.
Quickly summarize my last email in the first sentence.
Embedded a personalized video with a custom thumbnail cut through the noise. (I used Vinna.ai to create the personalized videos automatically).
Gave social proof to back up my claim.
Asked for a meeting

Started the email with a question.
Gave a quick summary of the video and my value proposition.
Reused personalization to capture attention.
Did not ask for anything, the goal of this email is simply to get them to watch the video I sent.