Sources for Accurate Cold Email Benchmarks

[JMartin954]

Hi all,

I've run into some issues with a client splitting hairs over a partially completed sequence, and the advice my leadership gave me was to find some benchmarks on cold email to provide. 

The problem is, when I search "cold email benchmarks 2024," or another variation on that, what I get is all marketing email performance benchmarks. Some of which are as absurd as "anything over 60% open rate is considered good." 

I've looked at resources from Mailchimp, WebFX, HubSpot, Constant Contact, but so far it's only been marketing email performance. 

Anyone out there know where to find metrics for actual cold email? 

[BruceT · Accepted solution]

Hey @JMartin954 

This is going to vary massively depending on a bunch of factors including industry, email domain technical setup, how brand aware your audience is, message etc. For cold outreach, the general consensus is that open rate isn't a great metric to focus on, instead optimze for positivie replies. I recommend you check out some numbers and reccomendations from platforms who are specialize in the cold outreach sequencing: 

• https://www.lavender.ai/blog/building-your-own-sales-email-benchmarks
• https://www.outreach.io/resources/blog/email-open-rates
• https://www.lemlist.com/blog/cold-email-open-rates

Focus on establishing your own baseline, then split test to continously improve your metrics. And don't rely 100% on email - make your sequences multichannel. We've seen a lift in over 20% engagement when layering on channels.

Bruce Tomkins

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[JMartin954]

Bruce,

These resources are fantastic, especially the Lavender article. And honestly, very validating as I had led with "we should develop our own baseline from the first couple of sequences"!

In the process of researching I also came across this very cool page from Gmass, where you can view real-time deliverability results on 17 test accounts using various spam filters: https://www.gmass.co/inbox