Rémi KokabiNovember 27, 20254 min readLast update: Oct 7, 2026
How Zendesk Booked 30 Meetings Using Personalized Videos at Scale (with lemlist)
Thirty meetings booked before a conference even started. An 80% click-through rate. A 60% open rate. And an event attendance ratio that jumped from 50% to 70%.
Those numbers came from one Zendesk team running cold email ahead of the SIGMA conference. No bigger list. No extra headcount. Just a two-step sequence built around personalized video.
In this story, I’ll break down exactly how they did it: the funnel they built, the email format that pulled the most clicks, what sat on the landing page behind that click, and how you can rebuild the same play today.
Key takeaways
Metric | Result |
|---|---|
Meetings booked from the first campaign | 30 |
Click-through rate | 80% |
Open rate | 60% |
Event attendance ratio | Up from 50% to 70% |
About Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer service software company headquartered in San Francisco. On its homepage, Zendesk says it is trusted by more than 100,000 companies.
At that size, growth stops coming from doing more of the same. Zendesk keeps testing new ways to reach buyers and keep relationships warm, which is how cold email with video personalization landed on their roadmap. You can see the same pattern in more customer stories from teams running outbound at scale.
Their goal
Personalize sales emails at scale.
Ahead of the SIGMA conference, the Zendesk team wanted to reach potential customers and book meetings in advance to grow the sales pipeline. In a fast-growing SaaS company, pipeline growth is the whole job. You either grow it or you stall.
The problem with personalizing at scale is obvious. One rep can write ten brilliant emails a day. Nobody writes four hundred. That gap is exactly what Smart messaging closes now, and it’s the same gap Zendesk solved back then with custom images and tailored landing pages.
Their strategy
Zendesk used lemlist for two things. Book qualified meetings before conferences started. Increase the attendance ratio for the events they were organizing themselves.
Here’s how the funnel worked.
1. Start with a clean list
Zendesk ran a lot of events every year, so they already had email lists. That’s an advantage most teams underrate.
They didn’t just upload and send. They went all in on list hygiene, verifying email validity and setting up custom domain tracking in lemlist to keep the bounce rate close to zero and increase email deliverability. Boring work. It’s also the reason the open rate hit 60% instead of 6%.
2. Send a cold email with a clickable video thumbnail
To book meetings before the conference, Zendesk launched a two-step campaign: a cold email, then a dynamic landing page.
Every touchpoint was personalized. The email format that won was the clickable video thumbnail.
I can’t show you their exact copy (that wouldn’t be cool), but here’s a similar example from our own garage.
The job of this email is to earn attention and a click. Here’s why it worked:
It contains a play button, which boosts click rates and pushes people to watch the video
It’s a custom image, relevant to the person. In the example above, it has their website screenshot and their name, but you can play with text, logos or any other images that work for you
3. Send the click to a personalized landing page
Once somebody clicked, Zendesk sent them straight to a custom-made page built with lemlist’s dynamic landing pages.
Each page carried the customer’s name, their company logo, an embedded Calendly, and a personalized video. Highly personalized video was the core of the play, and it’s what turned clicks into booked meetings.
Here’s the magic behind those pages:
Embedded video personalized for the prospect
The prospect’s first name, along with the company’s name and logo. This makes people feel you went the extra mile to build something for them. Relationships are the secret sauce.
Zendesk’s Calendly at the bottom of the page. Prospects book in two clicks, friction drops.
No coding. You can have one running in five minutes.
Email, then personalized page, then booking link. That’s a sequence, and you can run the same shape across channels today with multichannel sequences.
4. Reuse the same play to fill your own events
Zendesk also used lemlist to drive attendance for the conferences they organized.
For their main event in Paris, they sent a similar campaign to registrants two weeks before the doors opened. The content was video, and the point was to explain the value of showing up.
Attendance went from 50% to 70%.
Overview of their results
The first campaign alone booked 30 meetings before the SIGMA event.
Across the campaign, engagement stayed high: an 80% click-through rate and a 60% open rate. Those are numbers you get when the message looks built for one person, because it was.
The team went on to consider rolling the same approach out to other regions after the results in France and South Europe.
Features used
Zendesk uses the following lemlist features in their campaigns:
If you’re rebuilding this today, you don’t have to assemble the sequence by hand. lemAgent builds this kind of multi-step, personalized sequence in minutes, so a rep can go from a lead list to a live campaign the same afternoon.
Final thoughts
The replicable part of this story isn’t the video. It’s the chain: a clean, verified list, one email built around a single click, and a page behind that click that does the booking for you.
You can run that chain this week. Clean the list first. Build one custom image. Put the Calendly on the page, not in the email body.
lemlist is rated 4.6/5 on G2 with 2,000+ reviews, and you can test the whole workflow yourself. Start a 14-day free trial and get full access to all features, no credit card required.
Let’s get some results first and talk business later.
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