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We analyzed 4.2 million cold emails sent through Prospct.io between January and May 2026 to answer the question every founder and RevOps lead keeps asking: what does 'good' look like right now?
The topline numbers
Median open rate landed at 41.2%, reply rate at 6.8%, and meeting-booked rate at 1.4%. The top decile hit 71% open, 14% reply, and 3.9% meetings — nearly triple the median across the board.
- Open rate: 41.2% median / 71% top decile
- Reply rate: 6.8% median / 14% top decile
- Meetings booked: 1.4% median / 3.9% top decile
What actually moved the needle
Three variables explained 80% of performance variance: sender warmup quality, first-line personalization depth, and sequence length. Everything else — subject line length, day of week, emoji use — moved numbers by less than 5%.
Benchmarks by industry
SaaS and fintech saw the highest reply rates (8.1% and 7.6%). Retail and hospitality came in lowest (4.9% and 4.2%), largely due to inbox saturation and lower work-email penetration.
Takeaways for 2026
Cold email still works — but only for teams treating deliverability, targeting, and personalization as engineering problems, not creative ones.