LinkedIn B2B outreach statistics: Belkins’ 2026 study
Author
Michael Maximoff
Co-founder of Belkins, serial entrepreneur, and investor with a decade of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing.
Updated:2026-06-29
Reading time:13 min
We tracked every connection request, reply, and booked meeting across 15 million LinkedIn outreach touchpoints. Here’s what good actually looks like in 2026.
LinkedIn has become the default first stop for B2B outreach. But if everyone’s doing it, it doesn’t mean they do it well. Most teams have a rough sense of their own numbers. Very few have context for whether those numbers are good.
This year, Belkins analyzed two complementary datasets to build the most complete LinkedIn outreach benchmark study we’ve published. The first comes from our own client campaigns: 14,077 individual contact records tracked from invite to connection to reply to a booked meeting. The second comes from our partner Expandi, one of the leading LinkedIn automation platforms, covering over 15.1 million outreach touchpoints across thousands of campaigns run throughout 2025.
Together, they give a picture of LinkedIn outreach performance at two levels — the granular mechanics of the funnel and the macro patterns across industries, roles, geographies, and campaign strategies.
The average LinkedIn connection rate is 26% — but whether you include a note with your request changes both the volume and quality of what follows.
Overall reply rate across 15M+ contacts is 7.2%, but it ranges from 4.2% to 10.5% depending on the industry alone.
HR and Talent professionals reply at the highest rate of any seniority group (10.9%), outperforming C-level executives (7.0%) by a significant margin.
April has the highest LinkedIn reply rate (7.9%); September has the lowest (6.3%).
The US has one of the lowest reply rates among major English-speaking markets at 6.0% — trailing the Netherlands (10.5%), UK (6.1%), Canada (7.1%), and Australia (6.4%).
Messenger campaigns outperform all other campaign types, achieving a 12.2% total reply rate when contacts are already connected.
AI-assisted messaging helps modestly. Campaigns using AI prompts returned a 7.3% reply rate vs. 7.0% without.
Methodology
The Belkins contact-level dataset covers 14,077 LinkedIn outreach records from campaigns run across 34 client projects between January 2025 and December 2025. Each record tracks an individual prospect from initial connection invite through to first reply and, where applicable, a meeting booked. The data includes timestamps, connection status, industry, company size, and job title, which allows timeline and segmentation analysis.
The Expandi platform dataset covers 15.1 million outreach contacts from campaigns run throughout 2025. This dataset is aggregated rather than contact-level, but it covers significantly more volume and enables statistically robust comparisons across campaign types, geographies, industries, and seniority groups.
Where the two sources overlap — such as campaign type performance or reply rates — they are presented separately. For aggregate benchmarks (monthly trends, country breakdowns, seniority), the Expandi data is the primary source due to its scale.
Reply rate in this study is calculated as replies divided by messages sent (for reply rate) and connections divided by invites sent (for connection rate). These are the standard denominators for LinkedIn outreach measurement.
Average LinkedIn connection rate, reply rate, and meeting rate
Before getting into the variables, it helps to understand the basic structure of what LinkedIn outreach performance looks like end-to-end.
LinkedIn outreach runs in stages: you send a connection request, some percentage accepts, you send a message, some percentage replies, and a fraction of replies convert to meetings. Each stage has its own benchmark, and each stage where you lose people compounds with the next.
Across Belkins’ own campaigns, the funnel breaks down as follows: 18.7% of invited prospects accepted the connection request, 17.6% of those connected prospects replied to follow-up messaging, and 1.3% of connected prospects ultimately booked a meeting.
LinkedIn connection rate benchmark: with or without a message?
One of the most fundamental decisions in LinkedIn outreach is whether to include a note with your connection request. The data offers a clear answer — but with a trade-off worth understanding.
Across 11.5 million connection requests sent in 2025:
Requests with a personalized note: 25.3% connection rate, 8.2% reply rate
Requests without a note: 27.6% connection rate, 5.3% reply rate
Blank requests get accepted slightly more often. This makes sense intuitively — there’s no friction, no pitch to evaluate, nothing to reject before clicking Accept. But the downstream engagement tells a different story. People who accepted a note-accompanied request are meaningfully more likely to reply once the conversation starts: 8.2% vs. 5.3% is a 55% difference in reply rate.
The interpretation is straightforward: a note acts as a soft filter. Prospects who accept despite knowing what the outreach is about are self-selecting into engagement. Those who accept a blank request may simply be LinkedIn-active people who accept connections broadly — and have no particular reason to reply when a sales message arrives afterward.
📌 Belkins tip: For teams optimizing for meeting volume rather than just connection volume, including a note is the better strategy despite the marginally lower accept rate.
LinkedIn campaign type performance
LinkedIn outreach comes in more forms than most teams use. The Expandi data covers four distinct campaign types with sufficient volume to benchmark, and the performance spread is significant.
Messenger Campaign: 12.2% total reply rate (8.7% first action, 3.5% subsequent actions). This is the highest-performing campaign type in the dataset. Messenger campaigns target people you’re already connected to, which explains the elevated rate. The audience has already cleared the acceptance hurdle, and a direct message to a first-degree connection carries more weight than a cold request.
Connector Campaign: 7.9% total reply rate (4.0% first action, 4.0% subsequent actions). This is the most widely used campaign type in the dataset, covering 8.5 million contacts. It’s the standard LinkedIn prospecting workflow: send a connection request, follow up with messages after acceptance. Performance is split evenly between first-touch and follow-up replies, reinforcing that follow-up messages carry meaningful weight even on LinkedIn.
Builder Campaign: 5.4% total reply rate (0.06% first action, 5.3% subsequent actions). Builder campaigns don’t lead with a connection request — they build warmth first through profile visits, follows, and engagement before messaging. Almost all reply activity comes from subsequent actions rather than first touch, which reflects the longer nurture arc of the campaign structure.
Open InMail Campaign: 7.5% reply rate. InMail reaches prospects you’re not connected to at the cost of InMail credits. The 7.5% rate here is roughly in line with Connector campaigns, though InMail volume is much lower (13,600 contacts in this dataset), so treat it as directionally useful rather than conclusive.
LinkedIn reply rates by role and seniority
Not all personas respond equally on LinkedIn, and the pecking order may not be what you expect.
HR and Talent professionals are the most responsive group by a considerable margin. This may reflect the nature of their role — people in HR are accustomed to fielding outreach, tend to be active LinkedIn users, and are often evaluated on responsiveness. The channel is simply more native to how they work.
C-level executives sit in the middle of the table at 7.0%, not the bottom. They’re harder to reach in absolute terms — lower acceptance rates, busier inboxes — but those who do engage appear to do so at a reasonable rate. Founders and Owners trail at 6.4%, suggesting that founder-targeted campaigns need particularly strong messaging to overcome the noise they receive.
Marketing and Finance professionals are the most difficult to engage on LinkedIn, both having a reply rate below 6%.
Industry produces the widest performance variation of any variable in this dataset. The gap between the most responsive and least responsive industries is more than double.
The top of the table skews toward industries where LinkedIn is deeply embedded in business culture — VC, staffing, professional services, logistics. These are sectors where decision-makers are active on the platform, familiar with outreach, and often open to relevant conversations.
The bottom of the table features industries where LinkedIn is less central to how business gets done, where buying cycles are more inbound-driven, or where the relevant decision-maker population is harder to segment accurately. Retail, Consumer Electronics, and Luxury Goods also trend toward B2C-heavy professional communities, which dilutes the B2B signal.
💡 For teams running campaigns across multiple industries: A 6% reply rate in Outsourcing/Offshoring represents strong performance relative to the industry baseline; the same rate in VC would be well below par. Use this data as a calibration tool, not just a benchmark.
LinkedIn reply rates by country
Geography creates meaningful differences in LinkedIn engagement, and the findings carry a useful warning for predominantly US-focused teams.
Among the 17 countries with 100,000+ contacts reached in 2025, the US ranks second-to-last among named major markets with a 6.0% reply rate. This is not a volume or methodology artifact — the US accounts for 5.3 million of the 15 million contacts in the Expandi dataset, making it the most statistically robust figure in the table.
The relatively lower US rate likely reflects a combination of factors: higher outreach saturation on LinkedIn, more defensive inbox behavior among US professionals, and the platform’s longer history as a prospecting channel in North America, leading to more tuned-out recipients. The UK follows close behind at 6.1%.
Continental European markets, particularly the Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium, lead the table by a significant margin. South African professionals also show notably high engagement rates.
📌 For US-based teams: 6% is a reasonable baseline, not a floor. Beating 7–8% in a US-focused campaign would represent strong performance. Don’t benchmark against global averages (7.2%) — you’ll consistently feel underperforming against a number that doesn’t reflect your market.
Monthly trends in LinkedIn replies: does timing matter?
LinkedIn outreach performance across the last year shows a relatively stable pattern with a few notable exceptions.
April was the strongest month of the year at 7.9%, and Q2 as a whole (April–June) ran meaningfully above average. September stands out as the weakest month at 6.3% — a drop that mirrors the post-summer re-engagement lag familiar from email outreach, where inboxes repopulate faster than attention does.
The overall range — from 6.3% in September to 7.9% in April — is narrower than what Belkins’ email data shows across the same period. LinkedIn appears less sensitive to calendar seasonality than email. Monthly fluctuations exist, but they are smaller in magnitude and less likely to materially affect campaign planning. Volume, targeting, and messaging quality will outweigh timing for most teams.
LinkedIn reply rates by day of the week
The day-of-week effect on LinkedIn reply rates is real but modest.
Thursday and Monday are the highest-performing days, each just above 7.4%. Friday and Saturday are the lowest at 6.9%. The range across the full week is less than one percentage point — which means the practical impact of day selection is small.
The pattern aligns loosely with professional availability: early and mid-week tend to find people in more active professional modes; Friday activity drops as attention drifts. Weekend sends are generally lower-volume in practice, but the data doesn’t show a significant penalty in reply rate for Sunday in particular (7.3%), likely because messages sent Sunday are read Monday morning.
📌 Belkins tip: If your sequencing tool defaults to weekday-only sends, that’s a reasonable setting. Optimizing specifically around Thursday–Monday windows is unlikely to move the needle meaningfully compared to other levers like audience targeting and message quality.
Does AI-assisted messaging yield more replies on LinkedIn?
The Expandi dataset includes a direct comparison between campaigns that used AI-generated or AI-assisted message prompts and those that did not — across 3,431 AI campaigns (389,925 contacts) versus 62,103 non-AI campaigns (13.9 million contacts).
With AI prompt: 7.3% total reply rate (3.7% first action, 3.6% subsequent)
Without AI prompt: 7.0% total reply rate (2.8% first action, 4.2% subsequent)
The results show a real but modest advantage for AI-assisted campaigns. The more interesting finding is where the difference shows up. AI-assisted campaigns perform better on first-touch replies — 3.72% vs. 2.78% — suggesting that AI-enhanced opening messages may be more engaging or better personalized. However, non-AI campaigns slightly outperform on subsequent actions (4.2% vs. 3.57%), possibly reflecting more natural, human-feeling follow-up messages.
The net gap is 0.3 percentage points. That’s real at scale — across millions of contacts, the difference compounds. For individual campaigns, it’s not a decisive factor on its own. AI-assisted messaging appears to be a useful tool rather than a transformative one: it can sharpen first-touch performance, but it doesn’t replace the fundamentals of audience targeting and message relevance.
What the benchmarks tell you
A 7% reply rate across your LinkedIn campaigns is roughly average. If you’re running Connector-type campaigns to a broad US audience across tech or marketing verticals, 6–7% is the expected range. Exceeding it requires either better audience targeting, stronger messaging, or both.
Connection rate is a leading indicator, not a vanity metric. A 26% average connection rate means that roughly 3 in 4 people you invite won’t connect — and you’ll never get a chance to message them. Investing in connection request quality (including a note, personalizing the hook) pays back in downstream reply rate, even if it marginally reduces the accept rate.
Industry and seniority selection matter more than most teams realize. The gap between a VC/PE audience (10.5%) and an outsourcing/offshoring one (4.2%) is larger than anything you can achieve through messaging optimization alone. Before testing copy, test whether you’re in the right pond.
The US market is saturated — price it in. A US-focused team that benchmarks against global averages (7.2%) will consistently feel underperforming. The correct US baseline is closer to 6%. Above that is good; above 8% is excellent.
Campaign type selection has a ceiling. Messenger campaigns yield 12.2% — but only because they target already-connected people. That’s a different strategy from cold prospecting. Most outreach campaigns will be Connector-type, where 7.9% is the realistic ceiling for strong performance.
LinkedIn outreach rewards precision over volume. The channels with the highest reply rates — specific industries, seniority groups, geographies — tend to be those where outreach is still novel enough to feel relevant rather than routine. Building campaigns around those pockets, rather than spraying broadly and hoping the averages hold, is what separates benchmark-beaters from benchmark-watchers.
📚 For channel-specific benchmarks, see our companion studies:
Data sources: Belkins proprietary campaign data (14,077 LinkedIn contacts, January–December 2025) and Expandi platform data (15.1 million contacts, January–December 2025). All figures reflect outreach to B2B audiences. Individual client names have been anonymized.
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Michael is the сo-founder of Belkins, serial entrepreneur, and investor. With a decade of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing, he has a passion for building world-class teams and implementing efficient processes to drive the success of his ventures and clients.
