How To Boost B2B Cold Email Response Rates for Every Client

Just a small upturn in your email reply rate could have a huge impact on the number of leads you generate for clients.

Of course, replies don’t just increase by chance — you need to take meaningful action.

To help you out, we’ve shared 17 tried-and-trusted tips that any lead gen agency can use to boost B2B cold email response rates. Plus we dived into our platform data to share benchmarks around what a healthy reply rate actually looks like.

Let’s get into it…

Cold Email Reply Rate Benchmarks

Before we get into advice on how to generate more replies, it’s worth considering what counts as a “good”, “bad”, or average response rate.

To do that, we analyzed all campaigns created in QuickMail over a three-month period that contacted over 1,000 leads. Here’s what we found:

What Is a Good Cold Email Reply Rate?

When digging into the data, we calculated percentiles — that is, the percentage of campaigns above or below a certain value. We discovered the following results for top performers:

• The top 5% of campaigns see response rates of 16.3%

• The top 10% of campaigns see response rates of 11.14%

• The top 25% of campaigns see response rates of 5.98%

In other words, one-quarter of campaigns generate (roughly) one response from every 16 emails sent.

What Is the Average Reply Rate for Cold Emails?

The median reply rate for all campaigns we analyzed was 0.48%, which doesn’t sound great.

But bear in mind that ​​people test a lot of campaigns. Some perform really well, others tank — but the top performers are almost always a direct result of multiple iterations. 

And you can’t make those iterations until you categorically understand what works (and what doesn’t).

What Is a Bad Cold Email Response Rate?

Again, we looked at percentiles to answer this question. Per our cold email statistics:

• The bottom 25% of campaigns see response rates of 0.04%

• The bottom 10% of campaigns see response rates of 0.02%

• The bottom 5% of campaigns see response rates of 0.01%

So one in 20 campaigns only get a single reply from every 100 emails they send. Ouch.

How To Increase Your Cold Email Reply Rate: 17 Actionable Tips

Whether you’re a top performer or struggling to generate the replies you need, there’s always scope to improve your B2B cold email response rate. Here’s are our top tips and tactics to make it happen:

Always Send From a Company Email

This first tip is simple: always send emails from your own domain (e.g. jane@yourcompany.com) rather than a personal email address (like jane@gmail.com).

For starters, it looks a lot more professional, which helps you build trust and generate more replies from your sales process. Plus you’ll be able to send a lot more emails without alerting spam triggers.

Personalize Every Cold Email

Your prospects are smart. They can spot mass emails a mile off. And if you don’t take the time to write personalized emails, why would they bother to reply?

Personalization needs to be deeper than just mentioning the recipient’s name and company name.

Sure, this takes more effort than sending a generic email blast. But QuickMail makes cold email personalization easy by letting you add custom variables, such as unique icebreakers tailored to individual prospects.

Optimize Your CTA for Replies

If you want potential customers to reply to your cold emailing, you need to ask them through the call to action (CTA).

Try asking a question that naturally encourages a response, such as:

• Are you available to chat?

• Is that something you'd be interested in?

• What's your biggest challenge around {[topic}} right now?

Even if they reply negatively (such as saying they’re not interested), it still shows email service providers that people are engaging with your sales emails, which can help improve email deliverability.

And the higher your deliverability rate, the more opens and responses you’ll generate.

Add Value With Every Email

Whether it’s the initial email in your sequence or the third follow-up, every email you send needs to add real value for the recipient. Otherwise, there’s little incentive for them to read to the end of the email body, let alone write a reply.

There are lots of ways to do this. For instance, you can:

• Speak to a common pain point your prospect is likely dealing with — and share a solution

• Share a useful guide or tool that makes your prospect’s life easier

• Build social proof in your client’s product or service by sharing a relevant case study or testimonial

• Propose an attractive offer, like a free trial or discount

For more inspiration, check out our guide to writing follow-up emails that get replies.

Keep Emails Short and Snappy

There’s plenty of guidance around the “perfect” length of a cold email. But, in reality, effective cold emails come in all shapes and sizes.

For example, this email clocks in at just 65 words, but it crams enough information into its relatively short length that the recipient can easily tell if they’re interested in the opportunity:

Whereas this cold email template has 100 words — but, because it’s relevant, email recipients won’t mind that it takes a little longer to read:

So don’t get too hung up on word count. Just concentrate on keeping emails as concise as possible while effectively communicating your offer. If a sentence doesn’t contribute to your goal of generating leads, cut it.

Target the Right ICP

We’ve already spoken about the importance of personalizing your outreach efforts to engage your target audience.

But what if you’re trying to engage the wrong audience?

Targeting a bad ideal customer profile (ICP) is one of the most common reasons for a low cold email response rate. So take the time to review your targeting strategy:

• Are you targeting the right industries?

• Are you reaching the right job titles?

• Are you speaking to prospects in the right locations?

Which brings us neatly to our next point…

Build a Highly Targeted Email List

Fact is, the harder it is to build a cold email list, the easier it’ll be to get a reply — because you’re targeting a highly specific audience that’s more likely to be interested in your client’s product or service.

For instance, if you know that your highest-converting prospects are CMOs at SaaS scale-ups with at least $1 million in seed funding and 30+ employees, take the time to find more of them.

Sure, it’s a lot more time-consuming than just downloading a list of all SaaS CMOs. But it’ll level up your cold email response rate.

Improve Your Email Deliverability

A low email deliverability rate means a bunch of your emails are being blocked or getting flagged by spam filters rather than landing in your prospects’ inboxes. Clearly, those emails aren’t going to generate replies.

QuickMail offers a bunch of features to help improve deliverability, from blacklist monitoring and unsubscribe headers to spintax and the ability to add variable time delays between emails.

Plus we developed our own tool, Deliverability AI, to automatically swap low-performing inboxes for higher-scoring ones:

Increase Quality, Not Volume

Every lead gen agency dissatisfied with their reply rate has tried to fix the problem with volume.

More domains. More email addresses. More prospecting. More email sends.

But we’re here to tell you that volume isn’t the answer — quality is.

To demonstrate our point, we’re sharing two screenshots from real campaigns managed in QuickMail. First up, we see a high-volume regular sender who generated 310 replies in three months…

…and now take a look at this low-volume occasional sender who got 425 replies over the same period:

That’s right — the second campaign has a reply rate that’s almost 80,000% higher than the first. All because they took the time to write email content that people actually want to read, rather than trying to hit some arbitrary target for emails sent.

Pitch the Call, Not the Product

Chances are, your sales reps are often pitching brands and products that your prospects have never even heard of. Convincing them to buy in just a handful of emails is a seriously tough sell — so save yourself the hassle and don’t do it.

Instead of pitching the product, pitch the call (or meeting, or consultation, or whatever a conversion looks like for your client). This requires way lower commitment from your prospect, so you’re far more likely to get replies.

Add Your Email Signature

If you don’t look legit, people aren’t going to reply to your cold emailing. And one of the simplest ways to build credibility is with a winning email signature. You’ll likely want to include your…

• Name

• Job title

• Company name 

• Contact details 

• Website

• Social handles (most likely LinkedIn)

…and, optionally, a picture to help humanize your outreach. Don’t underestimate the value of putting a face to the name.

Write Must-Click Subject Lines

Truth be told, subject lines aren’t that important to improving cold email response rates. Sure, that probably contradicts everything you’ve ever read about cold email outreach. But in reality, most prospects either:

• Open every email they receive, regardless of subject line

• Delete obvious spam messages and open everything else

Still, cold email marketing success is all about small optimizations, so improving subject lines certainly isn't a waste of time. There are plenty of ways to write better subject lines — for example, our research found that mentioning your prospect’s company name can improve open rates by ~10%.

For more inspiration and tips, check out our guide: 55 Cold Email Subject Line Examples & Best Practices.

Build Multichannel Outreach Campaigns

Ever seen the same product advertised on TV, on YouTube, and in magazine spreads and billboards? Hard to ignore, huh?

Cold outreach is no different: the more channels you use to reach your prospects, the more likely they are to notice you (and reply). 

That’s why QuickMail lets you build multichannel outreach campaigns spanning email, LinkedIn, cold calling, and SMS.

For example, you can automatically view a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, send them a connection request, then hit them with an email (plus a follow-up email or three).

Use a Natural Sending Cadence

People buy from people — not from automated outreach sequences. So it pays to make your sending cadence feel like it was sent by a real human.

For example, we built a campaign with an open rate of 77% and reply rates of 18% – 25% with this simple, natural cadence:

Check out the video to learn more:

Run A/B Tests To Learn What Drives Replies

A/B testing helps you understand which types of B2B emails are most likely to get replies.

With QuickMail, you can add multiple variants to campaign steps, allowing you to test email elements like:

• Subject lines

• Icebreakers

• CTAs
  

Send Up To Three Follow-Up Emails

When we analyzed 1.7 million emails sent through QuickMail, we found two things:

• 55% of cold email campaign replies come from follow-up emails

• Campaigns with three follow-up emails generate the best results

If you’re not sending (enough) follow-up emails, you’re missing out on a ton of extra replies and potential leads.

Analyze Results and Optimize Your Cold Email Strategy

The tips in this article are drawn from our extensive experience of powering (and managing) cold email campaigns. But while we know a lot about cold email, we don’t know your clients.

Take the time to analyze your cold outreach campaigns so you can better understand what works for your clients. You might find that their ICPs behave differently to the “average” audience — maybe they prefer super-long emails or only reply through LinkedIn.

They’re the people who matter most. So whatever they like, do more of it.

Improve Your Cold Email Response Rate With QuickMail

There’s another element to improving your B2B cold email success rate that we haven’t touched on yet: your choice of cold email outreach software.

QuickMail is loaded with features to help you generate more replies, such as:

• Multichannel campaigns with email, LinkedIn, SMS, and cold calling steps

• Deliverability AI to help you stay out of spam folders and hit more primary inboxes

• Advanced analytics to identify your top-performing campaigns

And that’s just for starters.

For a full overview of how QuickMail can help your agency, speak with us.