# What is a good cold email reply rate?

https://salesintelligenceexperts.com/answers/what-is-a-good-cold-email-reply-rate

## Short answer

Commonly cited ranges put a good B2B reply rate somewhere between 5% and 10%, with platform-wide averages nearer 1-4%. Treat all of these carefully: nearly every published figure comes from a sending-tool vendor reporting its own customers, which is not a neutral sample.

## What this is based on

- Google's AI Overview for this query cites 5-10% as good and 1-4% as average, sourcing woodpecker.co, instantly.ai and gmass.co, all of them cold-email sending tools reporting on their own users. ([Our capture of 97 SERPs and their AI Overview sources, August 2026](/research/reddit-is-the-most-cited-source-in-ai-overviews))
- Reddit ranks #1 organically for this query, above every vendor, and is the most-cited domain across the AI Overviews we sampled. (Our analysis of 97 SERPs, August 2026)

## What we don't know

- We have not measured cold email reply rates ourselves. Everything here is a report on what others publish, and who they are.
- None of the commonly cited figures state their sample size or how they define a reply. Auto-replies and out-of-office messages may or may not be included.
- Reply rate varies enormously by list quality and targeting, which makes a single benchmark close to meaningless for any individual campaign.

## The numbers you will see

Search this and you will get a consistent-sounding answer: **1-4% average, 5-10%
good, above 10% excellent.** Google's AI Overview says roughly this, and most of the
ranking pages agree.

## Who is producing those numbers

We captured the sources behind that AI Overview. They were `woodpecker.co`,
`instantly.ai`, and `gmass.co`: three cold-email sending platforms, reporting
aggregate statistics about their own customers.

That is not necessarily dishonest, and it may well be the best data available. But it
is worth naming, because:

- Their users are people who bought cold email software, which is not a random sample
  of anyone sending cold email.
- A vendor whose product is judged on reply rate has an obvious interest in the
  reported range being achievable but not trivial.
- None of them publish a sample size or a definition of "reply". Whether out-of-office
  auto-replies count is not a small question when the whole figure is single digits.

## What we would use it for

As a rough sanity check, not a target. If you are at 0.2%, something is broken. The
list, the authentication, or the offer. If you are at 15%, your list is probably very
tight and very small, which is usually good.

Beyond that, a benchmark drawn from a different list, a different market, and a
different definition of the metric is not really telling you about your campaign.

## A more useful metric

Positive reply rate. Total replies include "unsubscribe", "wrong person", and "never
contact me again", and a campaign can hold a respectable reply rate while generating
mostly irritation. Splitting positive from negative replies tells you whether the
targeting works. Total reply rate mostly tells you whether the subject line worked.

## Why Reddit ranks first here

Worth noticing: for this query, the top organic result is a Reddit thread, above
every vendor page. In the SERPs we sampled, Reddit was also the **most-cited domain
in AI Overviews overall**, ahead of Salesforce and HubSpot combined.

When the highest-ranked answer to a commercial question is a forum thread, it usually
means the published answers were not trusted.

Free tool for this: [Cold Email Grader](https://salesintelligenceexperts.com/tools/cold-email-grader)