4 Eye-Opening Cold Email Stats for 2018 [Based on 3M+ Emails]
After a wonderful second year, we thought we'd dig into our data to give you some insight about what works and what doesn't in terms of cold emailing metrics.
Here's a first batch that the miners extracted!
Sending time
Want to get your emails opened and responded to?
Here are your two best option:
- Be on top of the pile when your prospect gets to work
The sweet spot:
5AM-6AM: 37% open rate - 8% response rate
2. Email your prospect when competitors have left the office
The sweet spot:
7PM-9PM: 48% open rate - 8% response rate
Subject line length
Short vs Specific
The usual advice when it comes to writing subject lines is to keep it short so as to let it appear fully on a mobile screen. It is thus generally recommended to not go over the 45 characters limit.
So, for a while that's what we recommended to our users until we actually dug into the data and crunched the numbers. Turns out you gotta make it very short or longer but very specific. 45 characters? Not the best results.
The sweet spots:
3-12 characters : 44% open rate
81-86 characters: 43% open rate
98-111 characters: 54% open rate
Suprisingly: 29-45 characters: 33% open rate
Content length
Short vs Specific (again)
Just like for subject lines, make it short and to the point or make it very specific!
The sweet spots:
200-400 characters: 3,5% response rate
900-1000 characters: 7,5% response rate
1400 - 1500 characters: 8% response rate
Campaign steps
We've covered the subject of follow-up quite a few times on this blog so it was time we provided some numbers regarding the correlation between the number of steps and the conversion rate of drip campaigns.
A conversion means a specific action taken by the recipient of the email on the website of the sender.
1 step: 0,74%
2 steps: 0,62%
3 steps: 0,84%
4 steps: 1%
Suprisingly, we also found that a 15 steps campaign launched on 1227 prospects yielded a 1,39% conversion rate.
Hold on!
These stats are not to say that anything else than what is recommended here won't work. On the contrary, it all depends on your prospect and on how you craft the email you're going to send them.
The point here is to show that, as in many cases, counterintuitive practices do produce results!
