1. What is Cold Email Conversion Rate?

A cold email conversion rate determines out of how many cold emails sent, how many brought paying customers.

How to calculate a cold email conversion rate?

You can simply calculate the cold email conversion rate by dividing how many clients you closed by how many emails you sent.

For example:

• 456 cold email sent

• 11 paying customer from your 100 cold emails sent

• Cold email conversion rate is 2,4% (11/456*100 = 2,4%)

What is a good cold email conversion rate?

A good cold email conversion rate is 4,2%.

A good cold email conversion rate

Let's breakdown this data together.

Let's assume the following:

• a good cold email open rate is 70%

• a good cold email reply rate is 15%

• a good cold email booking rate is 50%

• a good sales closing rate is 80%

If we take 100 as a base line, it goes like this: 1000,70,150,50,8 = 4,2.

If you're really good at cold emailing, you can expect to close 4 customers for every 100 cold emails sent.

Cold emailers performing at this level usually hyper-personalize their cold email outreach or are god-like at segmenting their prospecting lists.

It's a good strategy to execute if your total addressable market is not gigantic.

What is an average cold email conversion rate?

An average cold email conversion rate is 0,7%.

An average cold email conversion rate

Let's breakdown this data together.

Let's assume the following:

• an average cold email open rate is 55%

• an average cold email reply rate is 6%

• an average cold email booking rate is 35%

• an average sales closing rate is 60%

If we take 100 as a base line, it goes like this: 1000,550,060,350,6 = 0,7.

If you're not spectacular at cold emailing but not catastrophic either, you can expect to close 1 customer for every 142 cold emails sent.

Cold emailers performing at this level usually send large volumes of cold emails and virtually personalize their outreach.

It's a good strategy to execute if your total addressable market is huge.

What is a bad cold email conversion rate?

A bad cold email conversion rate is 0,032%.

A bad cold email conversion rate

Let's breakdown this data together.

Let's assume the following:

• a bad cold email open rate is 20%

• a bad cold email reply rate is 2%

• a bad cold email booking rate is 20%

• a bad sales closing rate is 40%

If we take 100 as a base line, it goes like this: 1000,20,020,200,4 = 0,032.

If you're bad at cold emailing, you can expect to close 1 customer for every 320 cold emails sent.

Cold emailers performing at this level usually send large volumes of cold emails and virtually personalize their sales outreach.

It's a very bad strategy to execute whatever your total addressable market is.

4. What parameters influence a cold email conversion rate?

Like we saw above, your cold email conversion rate is impacted by different elements.

How many emails you send

The number of emails you send per day will have a big impact on your conversion rate. Indeed, the more emails you send per day, the less qualitative they'll be.

Except if you have a big sales team, it's not possible to send thousands of quality cold emails per day (except if you've been preparing for that days/weeks prior).

Whatever you cold email conversion rate, it's a numbers game so keep up!

Your cold email open rate

Although some people consider the open rate as a vanity metric and that the inbox placement rate is a more realistic metric to begin with, it does impact your conversion rate a lot.

Not having a good email deliverability can seriously decrease your conversion rate, always use an email warm up tool and follow the best practices.

A good open rate is above 60%

Your cold email reply rate

Reply rates are probably the most likable metric in cold email. You still need to make the difference between positives replies and negative replies though as they'll have an impact on your cold email booking rate.

A good reply rate is above 15%

Your cold email booking rate

Not every cold email positive replies will generate you calls. You need to have straight to the point cold email call to actions (CTAs) to optimize your booking rate.

Example of two cold email call to actions

Your sales closing rate

Closing plays a big part of the sales cycle. You can close deals with traditional sales prospecting methods or accelerating the sales cycle with social selling techniques.

5. How to send cold emails that convert?

To send cold emails that convert, there's absolutely no secrets, you just need to stop thinking that cold email is about mass mailing people.

Hyper-personalize your cold emails or get better at prospect segmenting

The main factor to improve your cold email conversion rate is to get better at email personalization. You basically have two options here: hyper-personalizing or segmenting your prospecting lists.

1. Hyper-personalizing

To hyper-personalize your cold emails, you can use: LinkedIn news about your prospects, podcasts they've made, blogposts they wrote, etc.

Your role is to craft an email first line that will boost your open rate and use informations collected in the personalization process to design a cold email closing line tailored to the prospect.

Example of a personalized email using Breakcold

For that, I personally use my own software: Breakcold. Breakcold aggregates the most important news about my prospects but also use AI to faster the personalization process at scale.

2. Segmenting your prospecting lists

If you're not patient enough to hyper-personalize each cold emails you send, you need to get better at segmenting your prospecting lists.

For that take your buyer persona and divide it into multiple ICP.

Example of a good email targeting

Here's an example:

• your persona is: startups in the UK

• divide that persona in : B2B SaaS startups in Manchester, B2C Fintech Startups in London

Why should you do that?

Because it will help you craft generic yet personalized cold emails at scale.

Send lower volumes and do quality cold email outreach instead

Hyper-personalizing and segmenting your lists will both mean to send lower emails per campaigns. Instead of setting up a campaign with a 1000 leads in just one campaign, you'll send smaller batches with 30 to 80 leads maximum.

You can have a better ROI taking an extra 2 minutes of your time breaking the ice with your prospects

6. Other questions about the cold email conversion rate

I tried to regroup some questions I've seen on Quora.

How many cold email does it take to get a client?

Like we mentioned above, depending on your conversion rate, it will take you between 50 to a 1000 cold emails to get 1 client.

Is there a cold email conversion rate calculator out there?

Not yet but we're currently building one for you, stay tune :)

7. Cold email conversion rate vs alternatives to cold email

I think it would be interesting to compare the cold email conversion rate versus some cold email alternatives.

Cold email conversion rate vs cold call conversion rate

Apparently, cold call conversion rate is 5-10%. It would mean that it beats our cold email conversion rate of 0.7-4.2%.

Cold email wins versus Cold Call

Cold call is more expensive to run than cold email tough like we saw in our match cold email vs cold call.

Cold email conversion rate vs social selling conversion rate

Social selling accelerates the sales cycle by 50% on average compare to traditional sales prospecting methods, so the conversion rate follows.

If cold email conversion rates are between 0,7% and 4,2%, then social selling conversion rates are in the 1,4% to 8,2%.

Cold email loose against Social Selling

So like we saw in our cold email alternatives article, social selling is also a winner here.