Is cold email effective?

Cold email effectiveness depends heavily on execution, targeting, and what you're measuring.

Typical benchmarks: Response rates for cold B2B email typically range from 1% to 10% depending on targeting quality, message relevance, and sender reputation. Open rates vary wildly (and are increasingly unreliable due to privacy tools).

Where it works: Cold email tends to perform better for B2B sales with specific ideal customer profiles, where the sender offers genuine value to the recipient's professional role, and where targeting is precise rather than broad.

Where it struggles: Untargeted blasts, consumer audiences, generic messaging, and oversaturated markets produce poor results and damage sender reputation.

Hidden costs: Beyond response rates, consider reputation damage, domain burnout, deliverability decline, and potential legal exposure. These costs don't appear in campaign metrics but affect long-term viability.

Cold email is a tool with specific applications. It's neither universally effective nor universally worthless. Results depend entirely on how it's used.