2.6M cold emails: reply rates & deliverability data

davidsearch

Love it or hate it, cold email is still a core channel for B2B. ran 2.63M emails across the first half of May, across multiple industries. here's what the numbers look like:

PCPL (Prospects Contacted Per Lead): 440 - that's our north star. for every positive lead, we contacted 749 prospects including follow-ups. that's the real efficiency metric, not vanity open rates.

deliverability: Open tracking is unreliable so i won't lean on it (only 0.36% tracked, and only on warm follow-ups for a few clients who needed it for SDR call timing).

what kills campaigns at this scale is data quality. Half a dead list will burn your domains fast. If your numbers are worse than these, check your contact sourcing before blaming the copy or sequence length. lower volume campaigns should see better results - we're averaging everything together, including the tests that flop.

Cold email is far from dead. would love to compare notes if you're sending at similar volume. questions welcome.

For anyone struggling: drop a comment with your bottleneck - we can probably fix it

marketingmule

That's a mad volume. What did the bill look like for sending 2.6M cold emails in two weeks? Would love to know the cost breakdown.

maya-b2b

Solid data. Most people forget that volume without list quality is just burning domains. Prioritise cleaning your contacts before anything else-once we tightened that up, everything else clicked into place.

marcuthread

Bloody hell, that's a lot of emails in two weeks. I'm surprised your ESP didn't just yeet you into the abyss after day three. How many domains ended up in the graveyard?

Also, is this an email-only play, or are you running cold calls alongside? i've found that pairing the two gets better reply rates but doubles the burn rate on domains anyway

adcraft

440 per lead? that's not an outlier-that's a sign your ICP is either too broad or your copy's garbage. The real signal isn't in the low-cost outliers, it's in the fact that most industries shown probably had zero reply rate after day three. Would be curious which verticals actually managed under 200-that's where you'd find decent deliverability, not just volume

brandvoice

Honestly, I've seen the volume game work too, but 440 contacts per lead makes my stomach hurt. That's a lot of noise for not much signal.

Switched to a tighter, intent-driven approach about eight months back myself. Instead of blasting thousands, I started sending to maybe 100-200 companies a week that were actually showing they needed what I had - hiring for relevant roles, recent funding rounds, tech stack shifts. Pair that with a personalised Loom and my contact-to-lead ratio dropped to around 80:1.

The difference was night and day. not just in the numbers, but in the kind of conversations that showed up. People actually replied because it felt like I was talking to them right when it mattered.

Not knocking the volume approach - the data clearly shows it scales. But for anyone who's smaller or battling deliverability, going narrow and deep with real personalisation feels a hell of a lot more sustainable.

Curious though: at that volume, are you doing anything beyond merge tags? Or is it pure numbers game at that point?

wordweaver

Oh honey, 2.6M emails and you're bragging about reply rates? That's like measuring how many people looked at your menu when the kitchen's serving week-old leftovers. List quality or bust. Volume without targeting is just noise with a stamp on it.

davidsearch

Right. List segmentation alone can tank your deliverability if the message doesn't match intent. CTR and spam complaints are directly tied to how well you align offer to segment - not just volume.

marcuthread

Alright, so you're hammering through 2.6M emails - fair play. But when you switch to the phone, where are you actually pulling the numbers? ZoomInfo? Lusha? I've tested a few providers and half of them serve up recycled data that's worse than a dodgy used car lot. Curious what you're using that doesn't get you blocked within the first hour.

brandvoice

How do you go about that 1-1 approach?

It's the part that trips most people up, isn't it? The sheer volume makes scaling personalisation feel impossible. What's worked for me is framing it less as "writing to everyone individually" and more as "sending like you're writing to one person, but using data to get there."

Think about segmenting down to the smallest meaningful groups first - industry, role, maybe a clear pain point. Then script a handful of templates that feel like a real conversation starter, not a pitch. Swap the first name obviously, but also tweak the opening line based on something genuinely relevant (a recent company blog, a competitor move, a funding round). That's the 1-1 feeling without actually typing each one.

A colleague once told me they aim for the recipient to nod and think "they actually read about us" - even if technically it's a smart merge. That's the sweet spot.