Should You Email Two People at the Same Company?

When sending email outreach, one of your very first questions is "who do I email?"

Hunter users know this, because on average, Domain Search returns 12.5 email addresses per company. And no matter how good the data is, in the end, you’re the one that needs to decide who should get your email.

Not only that, you also need to decide how many people per company to email, and it’s a decision that weighs on your overall sending volume too. Sending ten emails to a single company means your emails to nine other companies will have to wait in the queue.

Deciding who to email is really tough and there are no good answers until you understand your buyers. 

But deciding how many people to email doesn’t need to be as blurry. We ran the numbers, and here is what we found:

• Contacting 2-3 people at the same company roughly doubles the odds that the company replies. The positive effect diminishes significantly after person 3.
• Who you pair matters more than how many.
• The cheapest trick in the whole dataset is to email the company's info@ inbox, and it beats the much harder work of finding a second named contact. More on that below.

How we measured it

We looked at 12 months of anonymized, aggregated Hunter Sequences data (25,138 campaigns and about 6.3 million contacted companies) and asked a simple question: when a sender contacts several people at the same company within one campaign, does that company become more likely to reply than a company where they contacted just one person?

The obvious trap is that senders who contact more than one person per company might just be better senders, with better lists, better copy, and better everything else. 

Comparing their campaigns to everyone else's would tell you about the senders, not the tactic.

So every comparison in our study was based inside the same campaign. 

We only used campaigns that contained both single-contact and multi-contact companies, so the sender, the template, and the offer are identical, and compared the two groups against each other.

A few more rules: 

• Only delivered emails were counted (bounces don't count against anyone)
• Personal inboxes like Gmail were excluded
• Out-of-office autoreplies were removed from the reply counts. 
• "Company" means the recipients' email domain.

What the data says

Companies where one person was contacted replied 1.61% of the time. 

Companies where two or more people were contacted replied 3.35% of the time.

That's a 2.1x improvement that we saw across 25,000 campaigns.

But before you start adding everyone with a pulse to your sequences, look at the full curve:

Each individual email gets less effective as you add colleagues: 

• 1.61% reply rate for solo contacts
• 1.36% per person in a trio. 

They share the same spam filter, irrelevant offer, and sometimes the same forwarded thread.

That leads to the one piece of math you need to do. 

• If your target market is small, contact 2-3 people per company. You double your odds at each account. 
• If your market is effectively unlimited, one person per company squeezes the most total replies out of your sending volume. 

TL;DR: Contact more than one person per company when accounts are scarce, otherwise stick to one person per company.

Who to add

We enriched 25,506 of these recipients with job data to see which combinations work.

The headline is that it’s more difficult to get replies from executives, and stacking them doesn’t change that.

On the flip side, contacting people in different departments boosts your odds of getting a reply.

Going down the org chart doubles your reply rate compared to going straight to the top. (Of course, not all replies are equally valuable!)

Different departments beat the same department, 2.30% vs 1.65%. Emailing two people who don't sit in the same meetings gives you two independent shots.

The generic inbox tactic

While cleaning the data, we found something we didn't go looking for. A big share of real-world "multi-threading" is just people adding info@ or contact@ next to their named target.

Adding the company's info@ address outperforms the much harder work of finding a second named contact. It makes sense once you see it: answering that inbox is often someone's job.

My first reaction was that these must be gatekeeper replies, polite dead ends from whoever monitors the inbox. So we checked where the replies actually come from. In companies that replied to a named-plus-generic pair, only the generic inbox answered 43% of the time, only the named person 33%, and both 23%.

What I didn't expect is that the named person replies more often when the generic inbox is CC'd into the campaign: 2.09% versus 1.30% when they're paired with another named colleague. 

A possible explanation is the oldest routing system in business. Someone reads info@, forwards your email, and now your target has received it twice, once from you and once from a coworker.

There is a cost, though. Generic inboxes unsubscribe almost twice as often as named people (2.06% vs 1.18%), because the person triaging info@ handles your email one way or another.

What to do with this

Contact 2-3 people per company when your market is small. Pick two non-executives from different teams. Add the info@ inbox if a gatekeeper reply is worth anything to you. And when you have more prospects than sending capacity, skip all of it.

If you want an easier way to make this happen, use this prompt from our prompt library, and let your AI assistant set up a sequence that’s optimized based on this data:

• Multi-threaded outreach list from your companies
• Multi-threaded outreach list from an ICP description