Spend a little time around people who sell cold email and you will see screenshots of 15 and 20 percent reply rates. Some of them are real. They tend to come from a small send to a tight list, after months of iteration, and they tell you very little about what your first campaign will do.
If you plan around those numbers, you will decide cold email does not work about three weeks in.
The range to plan against
For a well run B2B campaign to a decent list, we plan against 3 to 6 percent of people replying. Not all of those are interested. A fair share are "not now," "wrong person" or "take me off your list." Only some are real conversations.
Some markets do better and some do much worse. Treat 3 to 6 as what you build a budget on, then be pleasantly surprised if you beat it.
Turn it into meetings
The number that matters is meetings, and you can get there with simple math.
Say you reach 2,000 people in a month. At 3 percent, that is 60 replies. If one in five of those turns into a booked meeting, you have 12 meetings. If you close one in five of the meetings, you have about two new clients.
Now put your own value on a client. If one is worth $15,000, that month produced about $36,000 in new business. If it is worth $2,000, this channel probably does not pay and you should know that before you begin.
Every step in that chain is something you can work on, and the chain tells you where to look. We put a calculator on our home page so you can run this with your own numbers.
If your replies are low, check in this order
Most people go straight to rewriting the email. That is usually the wrong first move.
1. Is it reaching the inbox?
If your messages are going to spam, no copy will help. Test placement first. Our setup guide covers how to get this right.
2. Is it the right audience?
A reply rate near zero with no hostile replies usually means the people on your list do not have the problem. This is the most common cause and the least popular, because fixing a list is more work than writing a new subject line.
3. Is the offer worth a reply?
"Can I have 30 minutes to show you what we do" asks for a lot and gives nothing back. A sharper offer, a more specific outcome or a smaller ask can change results more than any phrasing tweak.
4. Then the copy
First line, length, the call to action. Test one thing at a time, with enough volume that the result means something. Twenty sends tell you nothing.
Measure the right things
Open rate is not a useful number any more, because of how mail apps handle images. Reply rate is better. Positive reply rate is better still. Meetings held is the one you should actually run the business on.
Also give it enough time. A first campaign is partly a research project: you are finding out which audience and which angle work. Judge the trend over a few weeks, not the first hundred sends.
