At Belkins, cold outreach is more than a service — it’s an ongoing experiment. Every campaign we run feeds back into how we think about what works, what’s fading, and where the real opportunities still lie.
For this year’s study, we analyzed 7.5 million cold emails sent across our client campaigns throughout 2025. This report breaks down reply rates by month, seniority, company size, industry, geography, and timing — giving you a ground-level view of how cold email actually performed last year.
This year, we’re reporting the reply rate as replies divided by total emails sent. It’s a stricter and, frankly, more honest denominator. A 5% reply rate against openers and a 0.45% reply rate against total sends can describe the same campaign; they’re just measuring different things.
We made this shift because open rate data became unreliable once we stopped tracking it — the rate tracking pixel was hurting deliverability throughout the industry in 2024, whereas total sends are a consistent baseline. Going forward, Belkins’ email benchmark reports will use this methodology.
We sent over 7.5 million cold emails across 2025. Here’s how reply rates moved month by month.
The first half of 2025 averaged a 0.50% reply rate. The second half dropped to 0.40% — a 20% decline within the same year.
The sharpest fall came in July and August, which is consistent with summer slowdowns in North American and European markets (where the bulk of our campaigns run). What’s more notable is that the autumn recovery was weak — September and October stabilized at 0.45%, but November and December continued sliding, with December hitting the year’s low at 0.35%.
A few factors compound each other:
One of the most actionable findings in our data is how dramatically reply rates shift depending on who you’re reaching out to.
Founders and owners are the most responsive audience — and by a meaningful margin. At 0.57%, they outperform C-level executives by 35% and VPs by nearly 80%.
This might seem counterintuitive. Wouldn’t founders be the hardest to reach? In practice, they often lack the administrative layers that insulate executives in larger companies. No EA is filtering their inbox, no procurement committee to route through. If your message is relevant to their business, they’re likely to read it themselves and respond.
C-level executives at larger organizations are the inverse. At 0.42%, they’re one of the harder groups to engage. They receive high volumes of outreach, they have gatekeeping systems in place, and they’re priced above day-to-day operational problems. Most cold email messages simply don’t land in a context they care about.
VPs are the toughest nut to crack, coming in at just 0.32%. This may reflect the fact that VP-level contacts at mid-to-large companies sit in the gap between C-suite prestige targeting and ground-level relevance — they’re senior enough to have filtering systems, but not senior enough to have the final say on most buying decisions.
Company size is one of the clearest and most consistent predictors of cold email responsiveness in our data.
The correlation is almost perfectly linear: the larger the company, the lower the reply rate.
Very small companies (0–10 employees) reply at 0.72% — more than three times the rate of large enterprises (10,000+ employees at 0.22%).
At small companies, there’s typically one or two decision-makers to handle any given problem. If your email finds the right person — and in a small company, it’s much harder to miss — you’re having a direct conversation with someone who can actually act on your offer. No procurement process, no committee, no internal bureaucracy.
At enterprise-level organizations, the dynamics flip. Multiple contacts at the same company receive similar outreach. The right person is harder to identify. Internal processes slow decisions. And individuals are more likely to filter or ignore cold outreach as a matter of habit.
This doesn’t mean enterprises aren’t worth targeting — it means enterprise campaigns need to be designed differently. Lower reply rates are expected; the value per appointment is correspondingly higher. Strategies like multi-threaded outreach (reaching relevant contacts across different departments), ABM-style personalization, and longer nurture sequences matter much more in enterprise contexts.
Timing matters, but not always in the way conventional wisdom suggests. Our 2025 data produced one finding that directly contradicts what we saw in previous years.
Sunday shows an unusually high reply rate of 0.57%, but this should be interpreted carefully — Sunday volume is very low (21,615 emails vs. 1.6M+ on Monday), which makes the rate statistically noisy. The small number of highly engaged prospects checking their email on a Sunday skews the percentage.
Among standard working days, Thursday and Wednesday are your best bets at 0.48% each. Friday edges toward the weekend slump. Monday, despite having the highest volume, sits mid-table. This matches the idea that people are catching up and triaging rather than engaging deeply at the week’s start.
Morning wins. Emails sent between 8 AM and noon generated the highest reply rate at 0.54%, with early morning (5–8 AM) close behind at 0.52%.
This is a notable shift. In our previous studies, late evenings (8–11 PM) were the top-performing time slot. In 2025, they rank last alongside night sends at just 0.40%.
A plausible explanation: inbox behavior has changed. As more teams moved to AI-assisted inbox management and email filtering tools, evening emails — which were once prime real estate because they’d be at the top of the inbox at the start of the workday — may now be getting triaged by algorithms before the recipient even sees them. Morning sends, by contrast, may benefit from recipients actively processing their inbox in real time, when engagement intent is highest.
Industry context shapes cold email performance more than most people realize. The difference between the best and worst-performing sectors in our data is almost 10x.
Food & Beverage stands out dramatically at 3.47% — nearly 8x the overall average. This sector may benefit from relatively lower outreach saturation, high operational urgency (supply chains, vendor relationships, tools for distribution and growth), and decision-makers who are accustomed to responding to supplier and partner outreach quickly.
Education and Government also outperform significantly — both sectors with procurement needs, often seasonal decision windows, and contacts who tend to manage email carefully (meaning they respond rather than ignore).
The middle of the table is equally telling. Industries like Construction, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Legal Services all land in the 0.56–0.60% range — above average, and representing some of the highest-volume campaigns in our dataset. These are sectors where cold email is genuinely competitive as an outreach channel.
Banking and Insurance sit at the bottom — heavily regulated industries where gatekeeping is institutional, procurement processes are lengthy, and unsolicited outreach faces the highest scrutiny. Cold email into these sectors isn’t impossible, but it requires exceptional targeting and messaging precision to break through.
Geography plays a meaningful role in cold email performance — both because of cultural differences in how email is used professionally and because of practical factors like inbox provider norms and spam filter behavior.
Poland leads with a 1.43% reply rate — nearly 3x the overall average — across a meaningful volume of 46,000 emails. European markets dominate the top 10, which is consistent with lower cold email saturation in many European business cultures compared to North America.
Ireland and Denmark come in at 0.74% and 0.73% respectively — strong performers with relatively modest send volumes, suggesting that well-targeted campaigns into these markets punch well above their weight.
The US and UK, despite representing the largest send volumes (5.6M+ and 370K+ emails, respectively), sit at 0.51% and 0.48% — at or slightly above the overall average but far below the top performers. This reflects the volume effect: these are the most heavily targeted cold email markets in the world, which means the noise floor is higher and engagement is harder to earn.
Canada punches above its weight at 0.63% despite significant volume (266K emails) — a market worth prioritizing for B2B outreach if your ideal customer profile maps there. South Africa is a notable entry in the top 10 — an emerging B2B outreach market where inbox saturation remains relatively low.
The United States, while not a top performer by rate (0.51%), is included here because it accounts for the vast majority of Belkins’ campaign volume — over 5.6 million emails in 2025. Even at a modest reply rate, that volume translates into the single largest source of replies and booked appointments in absolute terms.
Cold email in 2025–2026 is harder than it was two years ago. The numbers are honest about that. But “harder” and “not worth doing” are actually very different things.
Across 7.5 million emails, we booked over 1,200 appointments. Email still works — it just doesn’t forgive laziness the way it might have in earlier years.
Here’s what the data says about where to focus:
Target the right person, not the highest title. Founders at small- to mid-sized companies remain the most responsive audience. Don’t reflexively aim for the C-suite when a Director or Owner will engage at nearly twice the rate.
Match company size to your strategy. Smaller companies reply more — but enterprise deals may be worth the extra effort. If you’re targeting large organizations, adjust your expectations and your approach: more personalization, multi-threaded outreach, longer nurture timelines.
Send in the morning. The timing data flipped this year. Wednesday and Thursday between 8 AM and noon now outperform all other slots. Late-evening sends have lost their edge.
Prioritize receptive industries. If your solution applies across verticals, lean your highest-effort campaigns into sectors like Food & Beverage, Education, and Government, where the data shows genuine engagement. Pull back volume (not effort) in sectors like Banking and Insurance, where even excellent emails face structural headwinds.
Think quality over quantity. Lower send volumes produce higher reply rates. Every extra email you remove from a campaign — if you replace it with a better-targeted one — is likely to outperform what it replaced.
The fundamentals haven’t changed: relevant message, right person, right moment. The bar for what counts as relevant just keeps rising.
📚 For channel-specific benchmarks, see our companion studies:
All data in this report is based on cold email outreach performance collected between January 2025 and December 2025 across Belkins client campaigns.
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