Cold Email Statistics 2026: Reply Rates, Send Times and Benchmarks

Key cold email statistics for 2026

• Best time to email CEOs: 12-3pm ET. Emails sent from 10-11am ET get roughly half as many replies.

• The first email gets the majority of results: 82% of positive replies come from email 1. But email 2 still gets ~60% as many positive replies per person who receives it.

• “No” is fast, “yes” is slow: median negative reply comes in 53 minutes after the email was sent, whereas the median positive reply arrives 1 hour 51 minutes later.

• At small companies, email the CEO: CEOs are about 3x more likely to reply positively than VPs. At bigger companies CEOs and VPs reply at similar rates.

• Google Workspace beats Microsoft 365: prospects using Google Workspace replied at 1.35%, as opposed to 0.29% for Microsoft 365 users.

• Angry replies are rare: roughly 1 in 550 replies complimented the email. About 1 in 3,200 swore at us.

Cold email reply rates by job title

Reply, positive reply, and meeting rates by prospect seniority. A positive reply means the person said they were interested or asked for a call.

Two title words stood out. Titles with “Head of” replied positively at 0.60%, and titles with “Growth” at 0.48%, against an average of 0.24% for all titles. HR titles were the lowest at 0.13%.

Should you cold email the CEO or a VP?

It depends on company size. We used the number of people we had contact info for at each company as a rough size proxy.

At a small company the CEO is often the buyer. At a bigger company the CEO usually forwards the email or ignores it, and the VP who owns the problem is the one who decides.

Best time to send a cold email to a CEO

Reply rate for CEOs, founders, owners and presidents by the time the first email was sent (Eastern Time). We also compared send times within the same campaign, and the pattern held.

• Best window for CEOs: 12 to 3pm ET.

• Worst window: 10 to 11am ET, when most executives are in back-to-back meetings.

• Best day for CEOs: Monday. Worst: Friday.

• VPs are different. Their best time was 1pm ET and their best day was Thursday.

How fast people reply to cold emails

• Median time to a negative reply: 53 minutes.

• Median time to a positive reply: 1 hour 51 minutes.

• 29% of all replies come in within 15 minutes, and 50% within an hour.

• 82% of positive replies come in within 24 hours.

Don’t judge a new email by its first hour, because the early replies skew negative. Give it a full day, and answer positive replies fast.

How long to test a new cold email campaign

For campaigns that eventually got a positive reply or a meeting, here is how long the first one took after launch.

Replies alone don’t mean a campaign works. Of campaigns that got a human reply in their first 72 hours, 29% never got a positive reply and 40% never booked a meeting.

Do cold email follow-ups work?

Email 1 gets most of the credit partly because everyone receives it. Per person who actually received each email, email 2 got about 60% as many positive replies as email 1. Always send email 2. Don’t expect email 4 or 5 to save a campaign that email 1 didn’t work for.

Cold email reply rates: Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365

Reply rate for business contacts by the email platform their company uses.

Companies on Microsoft 365 replied at about a fifth of the rate of companies on Google Workspace. Microsoft filters inbound cold email more aggressively, so more of it never reaches the inbox. If a big share of your list is on Microsoft 365, expect lower reply rates and check inbox placement before you judge the copy.

Does weather or seasonality affect cold email?

We matched sends to the NOAA weather report for the prospect’s state that day, then compared each day to the same state in the same month.

Across all sends, June had our best reply rate (0.96%), and August and October the worst (0.74% and 0.71%). But within the same campaigns, replies in October were about 30% lower than in March. The best-fit people get emailed first, so campaigns wear out. Refresh lists and plays every month or two instead of blaming the season.

What out-of-office replies tell you

• The most common out-of-office reason wasn’t vacation. 18% said the person was no longer with the company, which usually means their LinkedIn profile is out of date.

• Next were business travel, vacation and parental leave.

• The typical absence was 4 days.

• People who wrote “limited access to email” were half as likely to reply later as everyone else who was out.

How people react to cold email

• About 1 in 550 replies complimented the email.

• About 1 in 3,200 replies swore at us.

• Even among people asking to be removed, 44% said thank you.

Cold email stats that didn’t hold up

• “Short subject lines win.” Most campaigns already use subject lines under 25 characters, and the best campaigns didn’t use shorter ones.

• “Always email the CEO.” True at small companies. At bigger companies the CEO and VP positive rates were about the same.

• “Hot days hurt replies.” Hot days happen in summer and in hot states. Comparing the same state and month, the effect disappeared.

Methodology

• Source: a sample of the millions of cold emails IntentSignal sends for B2B companies, February to October 2026.

• We only report rates, never raw volumes.

• Every email in the sample went to a person in their professional role, about something relevant to their business, with a working opt-out that we honor.

• Replies are human replies only. Auto-replies and out-of-office messages are filtered out, except in the out-of-office section.

• Send times are the time the first email was sent, in Eastern Time.

• Company size uses the number of people we had contact info for at each company as a proxy.

Using these statistics

You’re welcome to cite any number on this page. Please link back to this page as the source. We update it as new data comes in.

We book hundreds of meetings a week from cold email for B2B companies. If you’re looking for a B2B cold email agency, or you want to see the exact campaigns we’d run for you, book a call.