What are B2B cold email response rates? Belkins’ 2024 study
Author
Yevheniia Pashaieva
Yevheniia has been a professional copywriter since 2014. Her vast experience in writing for marketing, e-commerce, fin-tech, and pharmaceutical businesses in B2B and B2C enables her to craft resonating content of any complexity.
Updated:2024-10-10
Reading time:10 m
Reaching out to leads via cold B2B emails, we at Belkins constantly monitor campaign performance. This data-driven approach helps us discover and scale the most effective tactics and then offer them to our clients as a part of our cold email outreach services.
Last year, we analyzed response rates from over 11 million B2B cold emails sent by our customers from 93 business domains.
This time, we teamed up with our partner Reply to get an even more comprehensive view of engagement across different acquisition channels:
Belkins processed 7.5 million client emails sent across 40 industries from March 2023 to February 2024.
Reply analyzed 6 million user emails to single out different factors that influence basic metrics.
Check out our major findings on reply rate benchmarks and the drivers behind them.
The average cold email response rate is 5.1%, with the average open rate being 27.7%. Last year, these numbers were 7% and 36%, respectively.
Businesses operating in legal services show the highest reply rate of above 10%.
December has the worst reply rate among all months (4.67%), which is most likely due to the holiday season. At the same time, the highest reply rate was in July at 6.3%.
Wednesdays gather the most responses at 5.8%, with a 7–11 a.m. time frame raising this number to 7.1%.
Emails under 100 characters demonstrate the highest reply rate of 5.4%.
2 email rounds bring the highest reply rate of 6.9%.
Emails without attachments or graphic materials have almost 2x higher reply rate (around 2%), compared with those with attachments (1.3%) and images, videos, or GIFs (1.1%).
Waiting 3 days before following up results in the greatest increase in reply rate.
Reaching out to 8 people from 1 company yields a reply rate of up to 8.06%.
Sending cold B2B email sequences to fewer than 100 people results in the highest reply rate of 5.5%.
Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer at ZeroBounce, shared his thoughts on our research:
“The findings in this report accurately reflect our own experience in the B2B space. For instance, reaching out to more than two people at one company has proven to perform better than contacting just one person. Targeting several prospects increases your chances to reach a decision-maker and move closer to a sale.”
How follow-ups influence reply rates
Find out how follow-ups can either increase B2B cold email response rates or drop them. This section also reveals how many emails to send and the best time to remind the recipient about your previous message.
B2B email response rates dynamics, depending on the number of follow-ups
When it comes to following up with your prospects, it’s crucial to strike a balance so that you come across as neither pushy nor indifferent. Both extremes can lead you to losing an opportunity.
Let’s dig into the details of these numbers.
Reply rates soar nearly 50% after the first follow-up
Our research found that the first reminder can boost B2B response rates by up to 50%. By analyzing the top 20% of our highest-performing client campaigns, we’ve discovered that 120% more people answer emails after the first follow-up.
Sending the second reminder gives only a 3% increase in reply rates
Unlike the first follow-up, the second one (which is technically the third email in the sequence) brings only 3.2% more responses. This is 45% lower than the first follow-up.
The third follow-up drops responses by 30%
The fourth email in a row starts working against you, even if you wait a few weeks before sending it. The third B2B follow-up results in 30% fewer responses than the initial email. This means if you had 150 replies after the first email and 300 after the second one, now you’ll have just 45 answers.
The best time to send the first follow-up
Our research found that waiting 3 days before following up results in the highest reply rate. Sending anything before day 3 decreases the likelihood of a response.
The optimal length of the email sequence
We also found that the highest response rate of 6.9% comes from 2 total emails in a sequence.
Sequences with 3 or more follow-ups show the opposite, causing a gradual drop in responses.
At the same time, the Reply research found that it takes an average of 3 emails to generate 1 qualified lead (meaning an interested reply or booked meeting).
Both years prove that the first follow-up email, or the second email in the sequence, boosts the reply rate by 49%.
Likewise, our research shows that the second follow-up email leads to only a small increase in responses. There was a 9% rise in 2023 and a mere 3% rise in 2024.
Finally, sending a third follow-up dropped reply rates by 20% in 2023 and declined even more — by 30% — in 2024.
Sequence length isn’t the only factor that drives higher reply rates — without resonating content, you won’t make people answer your cold B2B emails. Our internal experts share some proven tactics that boost responses:
Super-tailored niche content
“Niche approach can do magic to your reply rates. If you’ve found out that healthcare organizations face some brand-new challenge (like it was with switching to online during COVID-19) and your product or service can solve this problem — there you go. Offer this solution, and you’ll double your chances to get responses from your ICPs.”
“The best cold emails look like regular messages as if you converse or chat with someone via WhatsApp. That’s why when I send an email myself, I always read it out loud, and if it doesn’t sound like an actual person is talking, I won’t send it.”
Also, Caspian Lewke, former Associate Sales Engineer at Gong, shares a few underrated factors that affect email response rates:
“Having a legitimate reason to reach out. Saying, ‘I wanted to reach out as you’re a {{ICP_Role}} at {{Target_industry}}’ isn’t a good reason. Thinking of it from their perspective, why should your prospect care at all about your product/service? If you can answer that, you’re on to a great start.
Concision. Save writing novels for your free time.
Creativity. People talk about personalization (which is great), but there are ways you can make emails even stronger. Can you build in a pun (when appropriate) to your email? Do it! Can you find a way to slip in a reference to their favorite movie? Or a GIF from their favorite TV show? These are the things that help you stand out from the other 1,000 sellers who you’re competing with for your prospect’s time.”
“Another aspect worth stressing is that the relevance of the email makes the biggest difference. Using list segmentation and personalizing your message to the last detail allows you to stand out in someone’s inbox. Do your best to be the person who knows exactly what your prospect needs and wants. Aside from using the stats in this report as a guide, being relevant is key to the number of sales you close.”
📌 Note: To help you keep your emails relevant and personal, we've prepared 9 hands-on examples, with each B2B cold email template explained.
The best time to get more email responses
The cold B2B email conversion rate can also depend on the month, the day of the week, and even the hour you send emails. Discover the prime time for sending your emails below.
Our study shows that people are more likely to reply to emails in the morning between 7 and 11 a.m.
For a 5.8% replay rate, the best day of the week to send emails is Wednesday, while Mondays and Fridays have the lowest chance of getting an answer. At the same time, open rates are the highest on Tuesdays (28.2%), with Wednesdays following them (27.5%).
“We’ve noticed that we get the highest open rates on Tuesdays, followed by Thursday mornings. However, people tend to reply in higher numbers on Wednesdays, just like this report shows. It could be that prospects need more time to think about the offer and consult with their teams before moving forward and making a purchase.”
Finally, June and July are the most favorable months to get the highest reply rates of around 6%. Winter months are the worst in terms of response rates.
Who is most likely to answer cold B2B emails?
Recipients from different industries and with different positions also have some repeated cold email response patterns. Here are some of our observations.
Reply rate stats by job title
Employees outside the C-suite are 32% more likely to answer cold B2B emails than C-level executives — 5.6% against 4.2%, correspondingly.
This trend reversed compared to 2023, where C-level executives responded to 6.2% of emails, while people with other titles answered only 5.2% of emails.
As you can see, chief information officers (CIOs) and founders have a high reply rate of 4.3% and 4.0%, along with chief operating officers (COOs), who respond to 3.8% of emails.
At the same time, chief technology officers (CTOs) and chief product officers (CPOs) show the lowest reply rates (2.1% and 1.3%).
Also, HR managers and IT personnel reply to emails most often, while product managers and engineers have the lowest response rates.
Reply rate stats by industry
We’ve also noticed the following trends in response rates to cold B2B emails depending on the industry the recipient comes from.
The legal services industry demonstrates the highest reply rates of 10%. This is almost 2x higher than average. Last year, it was 16.5% and more for museums, nonprofits, and religious institutions.
E-learning and edtech, as well as businesses from the chemicals industry, also have high response rates (greater than 7%).
The fewest replies to B2B cold emails are from businesses operating in apparel and fashion, IT services and IT consulting, biotechnology, and veterinary services — less than 4%. At the same time, consumer goods and banking show the lowest open rate of less than 20%.
Software companies seem to show the lowest response rate (less than 1%), but we do not have enough data in this category to confirm.
The lowest response rates are for companies in veterinary services — merely 3%, which is almost half of the average reply rate across all industries. The software industry hasn’t gone far enough, with 0.5%, but our data range is too small to figure out why.
Thankfully, low response rates aren’t something you can’t do anything about. Sometimes to boost your campaign’s performance you just need to improve email deliverability. In other cases, you might need to review your lead list or ICP.
Need to increase your cold B2B email conversion rate but don’t know where to start? Get in touch with one of Belkins’ outreach experts to get a thought-out email strategy that can bring you sales-ready leads.
Email content and response rates correlation
In addition to timing, industries, and job titles, other (no less important) factors influence the response rates, such as email size, sentence length, links, and attachments.
Short emails perform better in terms of responses
In short, conciseness brings better results.
The shortest emails (under 100 characters) demonstrate the best reply rate at 5.4%. The most common messages, between 400 and 500 characters, have a reply rate of 1.8%, which is less than half the average.
Also, longer emails show the lowest response rate.
When it comes to email structure, messages with 1 or 2 paragraphs have the highest reply rate (3.8%). Longer emails show a decreasing trend in performance. For example, emails that have 8 or more paragraphs have an extremely low reply rate of 1.1%.
Optimal sentence length to get more replies
Finally, emails with shorter sentences (fewer than 10 words) demonstrate the best response rates, ranging from 1.9% to 3.6%.
Emails with 7 words in a sentence bring the highest reply rate of 3.6%.
Number of questions and response rates
It seems that people don’t like being overloaded with questions. According to Reply, adding only 1 question to your email body results in a reply rate of around 2.2%, while emails without any questions have a slightly lower reply rate of 2.1%.
But the more questions you add to your message, the lower reply rate you’ll get.
The best amount of links to include
Emails with links are less common because adding links can negatively impact your deliverability. These emails also usually have a lower reply rate of 1.4%.
Conversely, people reply more eagerly to emails without links (2.3% of responses).
How attachments and graphic materials influence reply rates
We don’t recommend adding attachments or graphic materials like videos, images, and GIFs to your cold emails since they increase your chances of landing in the spam folder.
Moreover, adding those results in lower response rates:
Emails with attachments show a 1.3% reply rate compared with 1.9% in emails without added files.
Graphic materials in the email nearly cut responses in half: 1.1% against 2.0% for those without graphics.
Expert tips on email content from Reply.io
Here are just a few recommendations by Eugene Suslov from Reply.io on how to keep your emails neat and tidy and improve response rates:
Keep your first cold email free of any attachments and links so it does not land in a spam folder.
If you include attachments in follow-up emails, add only lightweight attachments and visuals. Keep them below 100 KB in size. Also, use online tools to compress images without losing quality.
If you need to add links, use only internal links to your website. Limit them to one with a clear CTA. Avoid shortened links.
Including HTML templates, images, GIFs, colorful fonts, and all these flashy elements in your email will not make it look fancy. Plain text emails appear more organic to spam filters when sent as cold emails. So remember — less is more if you want to land in recipients’ inboxes.
Additional findings from Belkins’ 2023 study
Compared to 2023, some data from 2024 needed to be more complete to make conclusions. Still, the previous report contains details you might find useful. Check out the important findings from last year’s study.
Reply rates depending on the hour of the day
In 2023, we observed the most replies between 7 a.m. and 12 p.m. Further segmentation found that:
Companies from 25 industries, including computer hardware, media, retail, marketing and advertising, and healthcare, observe the highest reply rates from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Manufacturing, telecom, hospitality, accounting, and 10 more industries drive the most answers in the early morning between 7 and 8 a.m.
12 industries, including VC, event services, construction, and wellness, get more responses between 1 and 2 p.m.
The rest of the industries have different patterns and time preferences. For example, architecture and planning companies tend to answer emails between 5 and 6 p.m. (10.3% reply rate). Government and policy organizations reply most from 6 to 7 p.m. (10.8%).
FAQ
How many cold emails does it take to get a client?
Just like with the reply rates, there’s no silver bullet. Sometimes, prospects may reply to the first email. In other cases, you’ll need to spend months nurturing potential customers to land meetings with them.
If we’re talking about the optimal number of cold emails not to scare them off, it’s around 2–3 messages in a row.
How many cold B2B emails should I send per day?
To prevent your cold emails from going to spam, you’d better not exceed the limit of 500 messages per day. Also, if you’ve just registered a mailbox, we don’t recommend sending bulk mailings from it. Start small by warming it up and then growing the number of emails gradually, but still don’t go over 500 daily.
What is an acceptable email bounce rate for your B2B business?
Bounce rate means the percentage of emails that don’t get through to your recipients for whatever reason. A 2% bounce rate is considered to be an industry average. If your number is higher, it’s time to review your lead lists and domain configurations.
All figures and stats, unless otherwise stated, were derived from Belkins’ proprietary data on over 11 million emails sent by our customers from 2021 through 2023 and 7.5 million emails from March 2023 to February 2024.
The open rate was calculated as the number of unique recipients who opened an outreach email divided by the number of unique recipients contacted in a given industry, country, job function, etc.
The reply rate was calculated as the number of unique recipients who responded to the outreach email divided by the number of unique recipients contacted in a given industry, country, job function, etc.
Follow-ups were considered as the second, third (and so on) rounds of B2B outreach emails sent to the same set of recipients in a given email sequence.
The number of contacts per organization was estimated as the number of unique email addresses on the same email server domain (e.g., @example.com), excluding generic domains like @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, and the like.
The change in follow-up reply rate was calculated as the difference between the reply rate for the initial, first round of emails in a sequence and the reply rate for the subsequent (i.e., second, third, etc.) round of emails, expressed as a percentage.
To estimate open and reply rates by the hour of the day, UTC times of email delivery were converted to local time using the time zones corresponding to the city and country of the email recipients. Cities and their respective time zones were collated from the GeoNames database of cities with over 15,000 people.
Hours of the day, days of the week, and months of the year when either open rates or reply rates were the highest were considered the “best times” to send B2B cold emails.
Open rates and reply rates for job titles were estimated based on the total number of unique contacts, email opens, and email replies, where the recipient's job title matched a variation of a given job title (e.g., CEO, chief executive officer, founder & CEO). All job titles were taken from the Job Title field in Reply.io’s data.
The industry was determined as the industry of an organization where a given prospect was employed at the time of contact, according to a somewhat tweaked version of LinkedIn’s industry classification, as obtained from Reply.io.
The country was considered the country where a given email recipient was based, according to Reply.io data.
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Yevheniia has been a professional copywriter since 2014. Her vast experience in writing for marketing, e-commerce, fin-tech, and pharmaceutical businesses in B2B and B2C enables her to craft resonating content of any complexity.
