You just checked your reply rate and it's sitting somewhere under 1%, and you're trying to work out whether that's broken or normal. It's probably normal, and the number that predicts it best is who's on the list, not your subject line. Belkins tracked 7,530,489 cold emails sent through 2025 and found reply rate falling in an almost straight line as company size rises: 0.72% at companies of ten people or fewer, down to 0.22% at companies of ten thousand or more. Founders reply nearly twice as often as VPs. Fix the targeting before you touch the copy.
Reply rate falls almost in a straight line as company size rises
Belkins defines reply rate narrowly: unique replies divided by emails sent, with auto-replies and bounce notifications excluded from the count. Across 34,393 tracked replies, the full breakdown by company size is this.
| Company size | Reply rate |
|---|---|
| 0-10 employees | 0.72% |
| 11-50 employees | 0.49% |
| 51-200 employees | 0.38% |
| 201-500 employees | 0.33% |
| 501-1,000 employees | 0.33% |
| 1,001-5,000 employees | 0.27% |
| 5,001-10,000 employees | 0.24% |
| 10,000+ employees | 0.22% |
Belkins calls the pattern "almost perfectly linear," and the table backs that up, with one small exception: the 201-500 and 501-1,000 brackets land at the same 0.33%, a plateau rather than a further drop. Every other step down in company size moves reply rate up. A company under ten people replies at more than three times the rate of an enterprise with ten thousand or more, from the exact same message sent the exact same way.
Founders reply nearly twice as often as VPs
The same study breaks reply rate down by seniority: founders and owners at 0.57%, C-level executives at 0.42%, VPs at 0.32%. Belkins puts the founder-to-VP gap at "nearly 80%."
The reasoning holds up outside the spreadsheet. A founder reads their own inbox. A VP's message usually passes through an assistant, a chief of staff, or an inbox filter tuned to route anything unfamiliar straight to spam, before a human sees it at all. Fewer administrative layers between the send and the read is the mechanism, not a coincidence in the data.
How this number gets counted
Belkins isn't the only source publishing a cold-email reply rate, and the published numbers don't agree because they aren't measuring the same thing. Instantly reports 3.43% as an overall average for the same 2025 period, counting every reply including follow-ups, without stating that it excludes bounces or auto-replies the way Belkins does. A commonly repeated 8.5% figure traces to Woodpecker, whose own two mentions of it don't fully agree with each other either: one page states it with no source at all, the other attributes a similar range to a third party whose own methodology isn't disclosed.
None of that makes any single figure the definitive reply rate. It's a reason to compare your own results against your own list, segmented the way Belkins segmented theirs, rather than against a platform average from a vendor with a stake in the answer.
What this means for who you target
If reply rate is mostly a function of company size and seniority, the lever available to you is a tighter list, not a better subject line. A hundred messages sent to companies under ten people and to founders specifically will outperform the same hundred messages sent to a mixed list that happens to include a few enterprise VPs, before either message is even written.
Message quality still matters. What targeting does is set the ceiling that messaging can't raise on its own. Get the list right first, and the reply rate you're comparing against stops being someone else's platform average and starts being a number you actually chose.
Frequently asked
- What is a good cold email reply rate?
- It depends heavily on who you're sending to. Belkins' 2025 data across 7.5 million emails shows reply rate ranging from 0.72% at companies of ten people or fewer down to 0.22% at companies of ten thousand or more, so a rate that looks low against one benchmark can be normal for a different audience.
- Why do smaller companies reply more to cold email?
- The data doesn't explain the cause directly, but the pattern (Belkins calls it "almost perfectly linear") tracks company size closely enough that fewer layers between the inbox and the decision maker is the most consistent explanation.
- Do founders reply to cold email more than other titles?
- Yes. Belkins found founders and owners replying at 0.57%, compared with 0.42% for C-level executives and 0.32% for VPs, a gap the study describes as founders outperforming VPs by nearly 80%.
- Why do different reports show different reply rate averages?
- Because they define "reply" differently. Belkins excludes auto-replies and bounce notifications from its count. Instantly's published average includes follow-up-driven replies without stating the same exclusions. A commonly repeated 8.5% figure traces to Woodpecker: one of the two pages it appears on states it with no source at all, and the other attributes a similar range to a third party whose own sample size isn't disclosed either.
- Does a low reply rate mean my email copy is bad?
- Not necessarily. Since reply rate correlates strongly with who receives the email, a low number is often a targeting signal before it's a copy problem. Segmenting your own results by company size and seniority, the way Belkins segmented theirs, will usually tell you more than rewriting the message.