What's a good cold email response rate?
Two studies, very different numbers
Instantly, an email sending platform, looked at cold email sent through it during 2025 and found an average reply rate of 3.43%. Belkins, an outbound agency, looked at 7.5 million cold emails it sent for clients in 2025 and found 0.45%.
Both can be right. Belkins divides replies by every email sent, follow-ups included, and says its earlier studies divided by the people who opened an email instead. The same campaign can look like 0.5% one way and 5% another. That's why a promised "reply rate" means little until you know what it's out of.
How to measure yours
- Divide replies by people, not emails. Someone who got a first email and two follow-ups counts once.
- Count real replies. Leave out auto-replies, out-of-office messages and bounces.
- Track interested replies on their own. A "no thanks" is a reply too. The number that pays the bills is how many people want to talk.
What moves replies up
- Follow up. In Instantly's data, 42% of replies came from follow-ups rather than the first email. Skip them and you leave a lot on the table.
- Keep it short. Instantly reports that the best campaigns keep emails under 80 words.
- Make it about them. In Belkins' subject line study, personalized subject lines got a 7% reply rate against 3% for generic ones. See our guide to B2B cold email subject lines.
- Mind who you're emailing. Belkins found very small companies (up to 10 people) replied at 0.72%, over three times the rate of companies with 10,000 or more (0.22%).
What we promise, and what we don't
We don't promise a reply rate. Anyone who guarantees one is guessing about your market. What we control is the work behind it: a real detail about each company in every email, short plain emails, two follow-ups, and published addresses only. Here's the email structure we use, and how our cold email outreach works.