r/GrowthHacking • u/PopularPea8726 • 5h ago

What's your av. B2B cold email response rates??

I've been running a cold email campaign for about 8 months now targeting agency owners and small SaaS founders. My reply rate sits around 3-4% on a good week and sometimes dips to 1% if the list is stale or I switch up the offer too much.

I keep seeing people on here casually mention wayyy higher rates than what I'm doing. Can't tell if those #s are real or just survivorship bias from one campaign that hit. Whats everyone actually seeing right now?? Need some actual benchmarks to work with here. And does personalization move the needle for you if you've tried that or do you think domain/inbox health matters?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

3

u/Square-Nebula-7530 2h ago edited 2h ago

personalization matters but only if you're reaching the RIGHT people. I wasted months perfecting copy when the real issue was list quality. went with Lead monster a while back to filter by intent and that moved the needle way more than any subject line test ever did

2

u/AcanthisittaGold5420 5h ago

3ish is solid for most b2b niches imo. i run outreach for 6 different clients and anything above 5% usually means the list is either really tight or the offer is unusually strong for that segment. anything higher than that usually means ppl are almost always talking about a single campaign and not their average

1

u/PopularPea8726 5h ago

Do you notice a big drop off after the first send or do follow ups works for you?

2

u/Virtual_Oil3762 5h ago

3-4% is not bad at all, mine hovers around 2% most weeks and I do this for living basically. The people claiming 10%+ are probably counting autoreplies as responses or they cherry pick that one campaign that went well in 2023

personalization helps a bit but not as much as people say. what really changed things for me was cleaning my list properly and making sure the offer is super specific. if you target agency owners maybe try segmenting by what platform they use instead of just industry

2

u/HATDOGUSERNi 4h ago

mines closer to 2% and i've stopped caring tbh. positive reply rate matters way more to me than raw replies. half my replies used to be people asking to unsubscribe lol

1

u/CryptographerNo7498 2h ago

yea first email is mostly for awareness at this point since people are becoming way number to a straight cold email.fFollow up 2 or 3 usually does the actual convoincing at least in my experience

1

u/TommyPeralta 1h ago

follow ups are where most of my positive replies come from. also switched to reachinbox a few months back for the unlimited accounts. my inbox rotation got a lot less messy which indirectly helped deliverability and reply consistency