The raw counts
Everything below is a row count. If a number is not in this table, we did not measure it and it is not on this page.
| Event | Channel | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Cold emails sent | 49,848 | |
| Replies received | 443 | |
| Connection requests accepted | 1,539 | |
| Connection requests withdrawn unanswered | 1,826 | |
| Messages sent to connections | 286 | |
| Profile views generated | 1,219 | |
| Booking-link clicks | 139 | |
| Total logged events | Both | 55,598 |
What the numbers actually say
A 0.89% reply rate is not a failure. It is the denominator being honest.
The published figures you will find elsewhere are almost always drawn from a winning campaign. Ours includes the segments that died, the sequences we killed in week two and the lists that turned out to be wrong. Measured that way, 49,848 emails produced 443 replies. If a vendor quotes you a rate without telling you how many emails it is divided by, they have told you nothing.
LinkedIn converts far better per touch, and cannot be scaled.
45.7% of invitations were accepted, and 9.0% of those accepted connections went on to click a booking link. Those are enormous numbers next to email. They are also capped: LinkedIn limits invitations per week, and pushing past that gets the account restricted. The channel that converts best is the one you cannot buy more of, which is exactly why the two run together.
1,826 withdrawn invitations is a feature, not waste.
More invitations went unanswered and were withdrawn than were accepted. That is normal, and withdrawing them is the point: LinkedIn caps how many invitations can sit pending, so leaving dead ones open silently throttles everything behind them. Most outreach setups never withdraw anything and then wonder why volume quietly collapses after a few months.
Plan the list size backwards from the reply rate.
At one reply per 113 emails, and with only a fraction of replies becoming meetings, a target of ten conversations a month from email alone implies a five-figure monthly send volume. That is a sending-infrastructure problem before it is a copy problem, which is the part most founders discover after their main domain is already burned.
Method, and what this is not
- Source. Every send, reply, connection, withdrawal and click is written to an event row at the moment it happens. These totals are a straight count of those rows.
- Window. 29 December 2025 to 8 October 2026.
- Scope. 4 companies selling B2B services and software, mostly into the Netherlands, Belgium and the wider EU.
- Not a survey. Nobody was asked to estimate anything.
- Small n on the client side. 4 companies is enough to be real and not enough to be universal. Your ICP, offer and list quality will move these numbers more than any subject line will.
- No client is identifiable. These are aggregate counts. No company, campaign or individual is named or derivable from them.
Using these numbers? Cite them as Sell Successfully, Cold Outreach Benchmarks 2026, and link to this page. Happy to answer questions on method.
Questions
What is a realistic cold email reply rate in 2026?
Across 49,848 cold emails sent between 29 December 2025 and 8 October 2026, we measured a 0.89% reply rate. That is roughly one reply for every 113 emails. Vendor marketing routinely quotes 3% to 5%, and those figures usually come from a best-performing campaign rather than from everything that was sent.
Why is this reply rate lower than the numbers agencies quote?
Two reasons. First, this counts every email sent, including the dead segments and the sequences we stopped, not a hand-picked winning campaign. Second, inbox providers have become much stricter since 2024; the same copy that earned 3% in 2022 lands in a spam folder today. A quoted rate without a denominator is marketing, not measurement.
How many LinkedIn connection requests get accepted?
45.7%. Of 3,365 invitations sent, 1,539 were accepted and 1,826 were withdrawn after going unanswered. Withdrawing stale invitations matters because LinkedIn caps pending invites, so leaving them open quietly throttles the whole channel.
Is LinkedIn or cold email more efficient?
Per touch, LinkedIn is far stronger: 45.7% of invitations were accepted and 9.0% of accepted connections went on to click a booking link. Per unit of volume, email wins, because you cannot send 50,000 LinkedIn invitations without losing the account. They are complements, not alternatives.
How big does a list need to be to book one meeting?
On these numbers, plan on about 113 cold emails per reply, and remember that a reply is not a meeting. If you need ten conversations a month from email alone, you are looking at a five-figure monthly send volume and the sending infrastructure to support it without burning your domain.
How was this measured?
Every send, reply, connection, withdrawal and click is logged as an event row at the moment it happens, across every client campaign we run. These totals are a straight count of those rows across 4 companies over nine months. No sampling, no modelling, no survey.