Are you using cold email to promote your product and service, but worried your emails are landing in the spam or promotions folder?
Here at Sales.co, we run hundreds of cold email campaigns across various industries, so we've learned to navigate almost any roadblock imaginable.
In this article, we'll dive deep into proven tactics and industry secrets that will boost your response rate and turn cold emails into meaningful business relationships.
Let's dive in.
What Are The Average Cold Email Response Rates?
The average response rate for cold emails typically ranges from 1% to 5%, depending on the industry, targeting, and quality of the email content. However, well-crafted and highly-targeted cold emails can achieve response rates of 10% or higher.
Let's break down some of our typical numbers per industry —
Cold Email Response Rates for Marketing, Advertising, & SEO
The marketing, advertising, and SEO industries are notoriously difficult to stand out in, and for good reason.
Business owners are often inundated with droves of ambitious pitches and offers from these industries. This makes it exceptionally challenging for any single outreach to gain traction. Response rates in these industries typically hover between 1–4%.
To break through the noise in such a saturated environment it's imperative that you have a compelling and unique pitch that demonstrates tangible value. This means instead of just promising value, provide them with free value from the start. This could be an audit, template, custom video, access to a report, free trial, etc.
Cold Email Response Rates for Newsletters
Newsletters are famously one of our top-performing industries with average response rates ranging from 4–10%, but we've seen campaigns creep up to the 30% mark.
This is because a newsletter feature is a fantastic opportunity for businesses to get in front of highly-targeted audiences at a much lower price point than other paid advertising efforts.
Cold Email Response Rates For Science & Healthcare
Science and healthcare are fairly middle-of-the-road for us here at Sales.co with average response rates ranging from 1.5–5%.
Scientists and doctors are busy, so we focus on keeping our messaging as short and compelling as possible for these industries. This means having a digestable CTA and clearly defined value.
Cold Email Response Rates For Finance & Fintech
Finance and Fintech is another tricky industry that can be difficult to get results for. Given the challenges in this industry, having a well-planned cold email strategy is crucial to navigate around spam filters and craft compelling offers. Generally we see a response rate between 1–2.5%, and this is for a few reasons.
First, finance & fintech are fairly saturated industries. Breaking through the noise means crafting compelling and unique offers. But second, one of the biggest hurdles we face for the industry is navigating around spam filters. Words like money, cash, earn, revenue, fees, credit, finance, etc. are all spam trigger words. Avoiding words about money while pitching anything in the finance industry is a serious challenge.
Which Factors Impact Your Cold Email Response Rate?
Regardless of your industry, here are the top things to consider when it comes to improving your cold email reply rates. Conducting an effective cold email campaign involves understanding these factors and continuously optimizing your approach to improve response rates.
Deliverability Issues
One of the most crucial factors affecting your cold email response rate is deliverability. Even the most well-crafted email won't yield results if it doesn't land in your recipient's inbox. Here are key aspects to consider:
- Spam Filters: Emails containing certain trigger words or phrases (like "money," "earn," or "finance") may be flagged as spam. To improve deliverability, avoid these words or use them sparingly and in context.
- Email Reputation: Your sending domain's reputation plays a significant role in deliverability. High bounce rates, low engagement, and frequent spam reports can harm your reputation, leading to more emails being filtered out.
- Sending Volume: Be cautious with your sending volume, especially if you're just starting out. Gradually scale up your email volume to avoid being flagged for suspicious activity by email providers.
Your Overall Offer
If you want to master B2B and see serious results, you need to focus on adding value and solving problems rather than just pushing a sale. Aligning your offer with the overall sales process can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your cold email outreach. To be frank, people and businesses are tired of being sold to and simply introducing your product or service will rarely yield success.
Some examples:
- ❌ Don't say — "Our product can improve your company's efficiency."
- ✅ Do say — "Our product helped a company like yours save over 30 hours per week and slash budget by 20%."
- ❌ Don't say — "Our service helps you track customer feedback efficiently."
- ✅ Do say — "I can help you address 90% of customer complaints within 24 hours, leading to a 25% improvement in your customer satisfaction scores."
- ❌ Don't say — "We can save you money."
- ✅Do say — "In just 30 days I can help you cut your ad costs by 30% or you don't pay a penny"
Making arbitrary promises in generic cold emails won't help your reply rate. When you solve a specific pain point or promise tangible value your cold outreach will be much more successful.
Having an Unclear Call To Action (CTA)
Long term value is important, but so is short term value. There should be a quick dopamine hit or reward for responding to your cold email. Some businesses take this literally and offer gift cards in exchange for a meeting, but this doesn't have to be monetary.
We like to offer short personalized videos explaining some specifics about what we can do for their business. Other ideas include free audits, compelling relevant reports or case studies, a free sample of a product, a custom graphic, etc.
Offering "more information" as a CTA in a cold email often falls flat unless you can spark significant curiosity right from the start. Similarly, asking for a meeting or call is a hefty request that can deter potential leads. Cold prospects generally have no interest in jumping on a sales call, and convincing them your intention is otherwise will be a difficult task.
Targeting The Wrong People
List hygiene is essential for maintaining a strong sender reputation and ensuring your cold emails reach the right inboxes. Sending emails to outdated or irrelevant contacts not only wastes your time but can also harm your deliverability. When you target the wrong people, your emails are more likely to be ignored, marked as spam, or result in a high bounce rate — all of which can damage your sender reputation over time.
This means you should diligently clean your email lists to remove inactive addresses and check for typos. Also be sure you're targeting the right decision makers. When we're unsure who the proper decision maker is for a given company, its acceptable to ask, "are you the right person to contact, or is there someone else you can point me to?"
Not Personalizing Each Message
Don't be misled by the term B2B — when sending a cold email, remember that it's one human reaching out to another human. Adding personalizations and avoiding "salesy" jargon always elicits more responses.
We've extensively tested personalizations in our emails and found that including a short sentence congratulating someone on a recent achievement, sharing that you found a blog post interesting, or acknowledging any other distinguishing facts builds credibility and trust. Our research shows that emails with a personalization yield 23% more responses to those without.
Using personalized subject lines can also boost open rates. This can be as simple as just adding the prospects first name. Because of advancements with AI, it's possible to add personalizations at scale with minimal additional work with the right tools and software.
👉Psst: Want to read in-depth research reports and cold email statistics we've compiled after analyzing millions of cold emails across various markets? Click here!
Not Enough Variability in Your Messaging
Sending the same emails over and over again will raise red flags for email providers and likely land you in the spam folder.
We extensively A/B test copy in the beginning to figure out messaging resonates best with the the demographic. But once we find the winning copy, we need to add enough variability without changing the messaging in order ensure your email lands in the right folder. More on this later.
Not Sending Follow-ups
Prospects are busy. You never know if someone checked your email on their phone getting off the train, a few moments before a meeting, or right before the phone rang. There are a multitude of reasons someone may forget to respond to your email.
This is why sending a follow up is so important. Similarly, we find that sending relatively short initial emails (200-300 words) lead to a much higher reply rate, so a follow up email is another opportunity to add additional value without overwhelming prospects.
We often say something like "I completely understand if this isn't a priority right now, but I'd love to send you XYZ." This can be a case study, free guide, playbook, video, etc. Something different than your initial offer, but still valuable.
Outdated advice on the internet will lead you to believe you should send follow ups endlessly until you elicit a response, but our extensive data shows otherwise. While you may pick up a couple extra warm leads, we find it much more impactful to either target a different demographic, or completely re-engage leads that never responded.
Poor Subject Lines
Having a subject line that is irrelevant, too long, or too spammy can have a significant impact on open and response rates. We find that including a prospect's first name followed by 1-4 words is the most effective method.
This way you're sparking just enough curiosity to get your email opened. Adding their first name means you can have personalized subject lines without breaking your back. The most compelling subject lines we see work are more often the simplest ones.
How to Fix Deliverability Issues
Now that we've addressed what affects email deliverability, here's everything you need to know about how to fix it.
Have a Great Lead List
There are countless tools out there to help you build a lead list. We use a mix of several tools including Clay, Apollo, and Crunchbase to both build and enrich our lead list— but the right tool for you will depend on who you're targeting.
Does this sound daunting and confusing? Let us help you build your first leadlist!
Email Content Issues
We mentioned the importance of avoiding spam trigger words in your email body, but there are a couple of other things to consider as well.
We always recommend you skip sending links until after a prospect responds positively. I know how tempting it can be to include a link to your site, calendar, LinkedIn, etc. But this can affect deliverability and should only be sent after a prospect responds positively.
We also mentioned the importance of variability in your copy to prevent hurting deliverability. Depending on what sending tools you use, this can be fairly simple to do.
We use Instantly which has an auto-spintax generator that can embed randomized code into your subject lines and email body to ensure you're sending thousands of different variations of the same message. This can also be done with ChatGPT or by hand.
Unreliable or Not Enough Sending Domains
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when doing an outreach campaign is to send from your main business email. Each email account has a sender reputation and the last thing you want to do is damage that.
We recommend setting up alternative domains to send cold emails from. We use around 10 unique domains for each of our clients and send 200 a week evenly spread across each of them. If you plan on having a higher sending limit you may consider more domains.
Additionally, ensure your domains are properly authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, and have each gone through a proper warm up period.
Doing this manually is possible, but tedious and time consuming. There are countless tools on the market that can do this for you for a very low cost — so we highly recommend going that route.
Examples of Our Response Rates at Sales.Co + What We Did Right
This section will have screenshots of some of our most successful campaigns and anecdotal info.
1. Newsletter Success
These are campaign results from one of the newsletter companies we work with. While we regularly see steady positive response rates from them, this particular campaign stood out because we targeted startups that were less than a year old.
Newsletter sponsorships are a reliable and affordable way to generate leads and spread brand awareness for new companies, so narrowing our focus to startups in need of cost-effective lead gen proved to be effective.
2. Narrowing Down The Offer
One of our long term partners, offers a versatile platform that can solve many problems and is packed with features. While it may sound like a good thing, from a cold emailing perspective it actually posed a significant challange — focus.
After many iterations and campaigns where we averaged 1-2% response rates, we finally narrowed down one aspect of their platform that solved problems for a specific pain point in a targeted demographic.
Instead of listing off all of the robust features and capabilities, this narrowing of focus helped 2-3x our response rates because we could promise quality of life improvements and solve specific pain points. Instead of overwhelming prospects with too many details, we honed in on what mattered most to them.
3. Contacting The Total Addressable Market
We previously theorized that by narrowing our focus and targeting smaller, more specific pools of leads, we could achieve better results. This way we could craft more targeted copy and paint a clearer picture of which audiences resonate most with our messaging.
While this strategy works in theory — we shifted our focus from a segmented approach to addressing the TAM (Total Addressable Market) and saw spikes in positive responses in several campaigns.
Another example — the blue bars represent positive responses from segmented campaigns, and the yellow bars represent positive responses from a campaign targeting the TAM for another client.
Final Thoughts
Cold emailing remains a powerful tool for B2B outreach when done right. There are a lot of moving parts involved to not just land in your prospects inbox, but drive a positive responses.
If you need more assistance or are looking to outsource your cold email outreach, please don't hesitate to book a call.