Curious about what the average cold email response rate is?
Most cold emails have one simple objective: To get the recipient interested enough to engage with you.
And tracking your response rate, which is the number of replies you receive, is one of the easiest and most informative ways to evaluate how well your campaigns are doing.
In this blog post, I’m going to cover what the average cold email response rate is, what influences it, and five simple tips to boost it easily.
The success rate of cold emails can feel like a mystery. With inboxes getting more crowded by the day, standing out is tougher than ever. Yet, understanding the metrics behind cold emails is crucial for your strategy. After all, knowing what works and what doesn’t could make or break your next big opportunity. Ready to dive into the numbers and see how your emails stack up?
What is a Cold Email Response Rate?
Cold email response rate (Or “cold email reply rate”) is a metric that gives you a percentage of the total number of responses out of the total cold emails sent.
But why does this metric get so much spotlight? You’ll get a clear answer next.
What Is the Average Cold Email Response Rate?
The average cold email response rate is 8.5%, according to reports. That means for every 100 cold emails sent, expect about 8 people to respond.
This could be because of many reasons, like:
- The average open rate of cold emails is only 23.9%
- Maybe you’re relying on spray and pray outreach
- Maybe your cold email subject line didn’t invoke any action
- Maybe your email address looks like this – giufv99982@hubspotcn.com
- Maybe your email just fell into their inbox at the wrong time
- Maybe your email copy wasn’t convincing
- Maybe, just maybe, your cold emails landed in the spam folder!
Alas, there is a multitude of reasons why your email recipients wouldn’t have responded.
But the most important reason, above all, is that maybe you’re reaching out to the wrong people. Even if you’ve dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, the quality of your email list could still be questioned.
What Is Your Cold Email Response Rate?
Before I break down some stats showing what the averages are, first I want to cover what your cold email response rate actually is. After all, the more you know about what you’re tracking, the easier it is to make sense of it!
Your email response rate is the number of replies you’ve received against the total number of emails you’ve sent, expressed as a percentage.
For example, if you sent 100 emails and received 5 replies, your response rate would be: 5/100 = .05, also expressed as 5%.
What is your cold email open rate?
If you were interested in learning about email response rates, chances are, you’ve come across the term email open rate, too.
And for good reason.
Both your response and open rates are key campaign metrics that you should track.
Your open rate is simply the number of unique people who opened your emails. For example, if you sent the same email to 100 different recipients and 50 of them opened it, your open rate would be 50%.
The key word here is “unique” because it counts the number of individuals who opened your email, not the number of times your email was opened — as including the number of times the same recipient re-opened your emails would skew your results.
Note: Some email marketing tools track total email opens (including re-opens) instead of unique opens. That’s why it’s always important to verify what your email tool is tracking before analyzing the data.
How to connect your open and reply rates
Ideally, you don’t want too big a discrepancy between your open and reply rates when cold emailing.
Why?
While your average open rate will always be higher than your reply rate, there shouldn’t be too big a discrepancy. If you’re barely getting any replies, despite a large number of opens, it’s usually a sign that your outreach isn’t engaging enough.
Think of it this way:
If you owned a store, your open rate would signify how well you were able to attract a potential customer to visit the store. Your reply rate would reflect how well you engaged them while they were inside your store.
If you have tons of customers simply visiting but not engaging or buying anything, something’s wrong — right?
Why does the cold email response rate matter?
The purpose of sending a cold email is to discover potential leads and engage them to drive more business opportunities to your door.
Well, tracking metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, reply rates, etc., help to determine the interested leads.
While all email metrics have their importance in assessing campaign effectiveness, the response rate for cold emails stands out as the most critical indicator of success.
How To Calculate Cold Email Response Rate?
A cold email software, or a sales engagement software, is a helpful sales automation tool that can be used to calculate cold email response rates and other relevant email metrics like cold email open rates, bounce rates, click-through rates, and email deliverability—all in real time.
But if you’re doing manual outreach, here’s the formula:
(Unique email responses/total number of successfully sent emails) * 100
Example:
Step 1 → (36 unique replies/80 successfully delivered emails) = 0.45
Step 2 → 0.45 * 100 = 45%
What Influences Your Cold Email Response Rate?
Here are the different factors that play a significant role in what your response rate could be:
1. Personalization
Here’s something on which every sales and marketing professional can agree:
More personalization = more engagement.
It’s simple, really.
If your cold emails are personalized and look like they’ve been tailor-made for your recipient (instead of looking mass-produced), you’ll increase your chances of getting a reply.
Over time, I’ve found personalized emails receive more than twice as many replies as non-personalized ones! (It’s why we’ve put so much focus into the personalization tools with GMass.)
What do I mean by personalized?
Personalizing your outreach refers to creating a personalized subject line that includes their name and an email body that references something they do or where they work. Essentially, it is about adding anything to show your recipient that the email you’ve sent was made for them and nobody else.
In fact, it’d be great if your cold email was so personalized the recipient believed it was a one-on-one email you sent to them directly.
Why does this cold emailing technique work?
With personalized emails, you’re showing your recipients that you actually took the time and effort to tailor this outreach email to their needs and wants. And as a result, you’ll be able to better connect with them, increasing your chances of getting a reply.
2. Your industry and offering
One of the mistakes most digital marketing professionals make when looking at cold outreach data is ignoring the context of that data, as certain industries have higher response rates than others.
What causes this?
A variety of unique factors influence the reasons that certain industries have higher averages than others. For example, factors like the nature of the industry, the level of competition, and the nature of your product/service, etc., can play a massive role.
What’s important to understand is that using a standard reply rate benchmark for all industries can be very misleading. That’s why you should always tailor your cold emailing expectations and goals to align with the field in which you’re marketing.
3. The intended call-to-action
This is one of the most impactful factors in determining your response rates.
Before analyzing your reply rates, ask yourself this question:
“What did I want my cold emails to achieve?”
- Generating a sign-up?
- Scheduling a meeting?
- Alerting them to a social media campaign they should check out?
Answering this is very important, as sometimes, getting a response isn’t a part of your cold email’s goal in the first place.
For example, if your lead generation emails included a sign-up link or a link to schedule a meeting on Calendly, you weren’t looking for a reply. You just wanted them to click on the link and be redirected.
However, if you were sending out outreach emails and wanted to carry on a discussion about how you could build on this relationship, you’re definitely expecting a reply.
As a result, these two types of emails are going to have very different average reply rates.
4. The “warmth” of your leads
There’s a difference between emailing cold leads and emailing warm or hot leads. The process with cold leads will have lower response rates and often a longer sales cycle. A warm lead might move faster — and a hot lead might move immediately.
Set your open rate and reply rate expectations accordingly. And if you are working with warm leads — make sure you remind they why they’re warm to boost your chances of getting a reply.
How Do You Improve Your Cold Email Response Rate?
You now know what response rates are and what influences them.
But how do you go about ensuring that your reply rate remains high?
Keep Your Email Concise
Multiple reports suggest that cold emails should have a length of 50-125 words or 5-10 lines. Readers online skim headlines, subheadings, and bullet points, so most SDRs we spoke to suggested keeping the cold email short and sweet and breaking the text heaviness by adding images. Another helpful point: skip the jargon.
Personalize them…a lot
As I mentioned before, mail merge personalization is a key factor in determining your reply rate.
Always try to include your recipient’s name in your email’s subject line and greeting. You could also reference their company, their job title, or something they’ve accomplished recently to show them that this email was really made for them.
Just make sure your personalization rings true. If you include a link to one of their articles and say how much you liked it — make sure you’re linking to an actual article, not a category page or other database-driven page. Disingenuous personalization is rarely going to impress anyone.
Research has shown simply including a recipient’s name or the name of their company in the email can boost the average response rate to over 9%.
Check if Your Email Follows This Structure
Ask the following questions while curating the email for your cold email campaigns.
- Is Your Subject Line Grabbing Eyes?
By addressing a pain point or asking a question that piques their interest in your subject line, you can immediately grab your reader’s attention. But note that whenever you promise to offer something in the subject line, follow through on it in the email. Otherwise, it’ll piss people off.
For example, “Are you struggling with [specific pain point]?” or “Have you considered [question related to your product/service]?”
- Is Your Introduction Personalized?
Set a good first impression in the opening of the cold email. We recommend you to use advanced personalization, as in personalizing further than using the company name or prospect name. It could be as simple as mentioning a recent company announcement or a shared interest you discovered through their social media profiles.
But Joel Thomas, an SDR from Almabase, says it has to be relevant to the product as well. “It’s not just personalization for the sake of personalization, but you’re trying to build a narrative around that particular personalization,” he adds.
He shares an example: “There was this guy who was a firefighter before he joined alumni relations, which is my target audience. So I used “Firefighting during events.” And I made it about how managing events can be like putting out a fire. So I started with that line, so that caught his interest.”
- Does Your Email Copy Offer Prospects a Benefit?
Every prospect will have one question in their mind when they receive a cold email: “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFT) or “Why should I care?”
In a few words, clearly explain what’s in it for your prospect if they respond to your email. It does 2 things: 1. Gets their attention, 2. Gives them a reason to remember your proposition (among a sea of emails that they’ll probably read).
- Is Your CTA Easy to Reply To?
End your sales emails with a clear, actionable call to action that encourages your prospect to take the next step. The best CTAs are low-friction; they’re like gentle nudges.
It doesn’t always have to be a meeting invitation. It could be as simple as asking them to watch a video or read a blog. Change the CTAs according to their buying intent. If it’s an inbound lead, find out where they came from and offer a CTA that caters to their interests.
- Does Your Sign-off Include All the Necessary Contact Information?
Your email should end with a self-sufficient sign-off that includes all necessary contact information, including your full name, professional email address, mobile number, and links to your company’s social media profiles.
This will help establish your credibility and make it easy for your prospect to contact you if they’re interested.
Cold Email Response Rates: Conclusion and Summary
Cold email outreach is like a carefully handed down, generations-old recipe. If you have all the ingredients right, and the portions right, you’ll see success. If one step is off, like a bad subject line, your response rates suffer.
Above, we mentioned a couple of points you can include in your cold emails to make them more effective. Cross all those boxes, and you’re good to go. Here’s a final parting gift: Keep your cold emailing efforts alive by constantly A/B testing your subject line, email body and CTAs in your cold email sequences. To do A/B testing and personalization at scale, you’ve got to use a sales automation tool.