Two cold email benchmarks, a 4.6x gap, and how to plan next year's pipeline

Here's the problem. Two big cold email benchmarks disagree by a factor of about 4.6 (FER calculation: 3.43 divided by 0.74). Instantly puts the average reply rate at 3.43%. Smartlead says its median sender gets one reply per 135 people contacted, or 0.74%. Both companies sell cold email software, and both are reporting what happens on their own platforms.

“The reply rate you assume can change the workload fivefold.”

Why the benchmarks disagree

They're measuring different things. Instantly divides all replies, including replies to follow-ups, by total emails sent, across workspaces on its platform from 1 January to 18 December 2025. It doesn't say whether "please remove me" counts.

Smartlead's figure covers more than 850 million emails sent from January to June 2026, and it's framed per person contacted. It reports the median sender, where Instantly reports an average, and a handful of strong senders can pull an average up. Instantly's own top 10% clear 10%.

If anything, the like-for-like gap is wider than 4.6x. When each person gets a sequence, a rate per person should come out higher than a rate per email, because the person counts once however many emails they got. Smartlead's per-person number is the lower one anyway.

The spread inside Smartlead's data is the more useful lesson. Its top 5% of senders need 26 contacts for a reply. Its median sender needs 135, about five times as many. Its bottom 10% need 625. The reply rate you assume can change the workload fivefold before you've even picked a vendor's benchmark.

The playbook: build the plan from your own numbers

1. Write next year's new revenue as one number. Not total revenue: the new business you need to win on top of what renews.
2. Divide it by your average first-year deal value from the last 12 months of closed deals. That's how many wins you need.
3. Pull your own close rate from first call to signed deal. Count every first call, including the ones that went nowhere. Divide wins by this rate to get first calls.
4. Work out how many replies it takes to book one call. Go through last quarter's replies by hand and count the ones that became a meeting.
5. Pick a contacts-per-reply figure from your own last three campaigns. Multiply it by the replies you need.
6. Divide by 46 working weeks and look at the weekly figure. If nobody on the team can send that volume well, change the plan now, not in March.

Here's the shape of it with example inputs (swap in yours). Say you're a SaaS founder who wants £20,000 of new MRR next year, and your average new customer pays £500 a month. That's 40 new customers. If one first call in four closes, you need 160 first calls. If one reply in three books a call, you need 480 replies.

At Smartlead's typical rate of 135 contacts per reply, that's 64,800 people, or about 1,400 a week. At its top 5% rate of 26, it's 12,480 people, or about 270 a week. (FER calculation from the example inputs and Smartlead's percentiles.) One plan is a full-time job for a team. The other is a founder's Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

For an agency the maths is shorter but the logic is the same. If an average new client is worth £40,000 in year one and you want ten, you need ten proposals won.

Loopio, which sells RFP software, puts the average RFP win rate at 45%, from performance data for 2019 to 2026 across more than 1,500 teams. A formal tender isn't a proposal to a warm lead, so use your own rate if you have one. But at 45%, ten wins means 23 proposals, or one a fortnight across 46 working weeks (FER calculation).

Where it goes wrong

Borrowing the top-line number. 3.43% works out at about 29 emails per reply. If your list behaves like Smartlead's median of 135, you're planning for roughly a fifth of the work you'll actually need (FER calculation).

Counting all replies as pipeline. Neither report says it strips out "not interested" or out-of-office replies. That's why step 4 matters: replies that become calls are the only ones that pay the bills.

Fixing a low rate with more volume. Long sequences don't rescue weak targeting. Smartlead's data shows the first email earns a 1.18% reply rate and the seventh earns 0.33%. Instantly finds 58% of replies come from the first email. If your numbers look like the bottom of the chart, the list and the first line are the fix, not email number seven.

The trade-off: tighter targeting means smaller lists, and smaller lists mean fewer shots. If you've only got 2,000 people who genuinely fit, even Smartlead's top 5% rate gets you about 77 replies, not 480 (FER calculation). That's the point at which referrals, founder content and partnerships have to carry part of the number, and it's better to see that in the plan than in the pipeline report.

The Monday-morning version: open last quarter's campaigns and work out your own contacts per reply and replies per booked call. Put those two numbers, not a benchmark, at the bottom of next year's plan.