The State of Email Outreach in 2025

Relevancy and trustworthiness are the factors determining email outreach success in 2025. Our State of Email Outreach 2025 research shows why.

By surveying 217 decision-makers and analyzing a staggering 11 million cold emails sent in 2024, we've pinpointed what makes a cold email work. Here's a TL;DR breakdown:

• 61% of decision makers prefer cold email as the channel to reach them, leaving LinkedIn (29%) and cold calling (10%) behind.
• Decision makers receive a lot of cold outreach, with 37% getting over 10 emails/week, but most of these emails aren't relevant. Twenty percent claim they never receive relevant emails.
• 4.1% is the average campaign's reply rate.
• 71% of decision-makers named lack of relevancy as the primary reason they don't reply, followed by impersonality (43%) and lack of trust (36%.)
• Smaller campaigns perform better. Campaigns with 50 recipients or fewer get an average 5.8% reply rate, compared to 2.1% for campaigns with 1000+ recipients.
• Personalization is important for 73% of decision makers, and accordingly, campaigns without personalization get a mere 2.8% reply rate.
• Technical factors like using tracking pixels or using webmail (e.g., @gmail.com or @outlook.com) instead of custom inboxes are associated with lower reply rates.
• Campaigns with follow-ups have a higher average reply rate (4.9%) than campaigns without follow-ups (3%). However, excessive follow-ups are one of the main reasons for spam complaints.
• Content-related factors like word count or using images aren't significantly associated with cold email success–just as there are many use cases for email outreach, there are many effective email formats.
• 69% of decision makers say that time of year doesn't affect their willingness to respond.
• 2 in 3 decision makers don't care if AI was used to create the cold emails they receive.

How do decision-makers want to be contacted?

Outreach takes many forms, but the three channels that are predominantly used to reach prospects are cold email, cold call, and LinkedIn.

We asked decision-makers about their preferred channel, and 61% chose cold email, leaving LinkedIn (29%) and cold call (10%) far behind.

Even though decision-makers prefer cold emails, the average reply rate to a campaign is 4.1%. That means 95.9% of cold emails go unanswered.

Before we explore the factors associated with higher reply rates, let's consider how cold email shapes the day-to-day lives of decision-makers.

They receive a significant volume of cold emails every week.

However, most of these cold emails don't meet their expectations.

Only 24% say they receive a valuable email at least once a week.

20% claim they never receive relevant emails.

This shows that a large portion of email outreach is effectively spam–unwanted mail that decision makers receive in great quantity.

Luckily, we've also inquired about why decision-makers don't respond. Several factors stand out when it comes to influencing the choice to reply.

71% of decision-makers named lack of relevancy as the primary issue, followed by impersonality (43%) and lack of trust (36%.)

As you'll see later, our data confirms the importance of relevancy and trustworthiness.

What makes cold emails successful

Even though the average campaign reply rate is 4.1%, some campaigns are significantly more successful. Our analysis of 11 million cold emails sent in 2024 helped us pinpoint what influences success.

Segmentation

Smaller campaigns perform better. Campaigns with 50 recipients or fewer get an average 5.8% reply rate, compared to 2.1% for campaigns with 1000+ recipients.

That's not magic; it's because segmenting recipients into smaller groups helps create more relevant copy that speaks directly to a decision-maker's needs.

Personalization

Personalization is a great way to quickly prove to your recipient that you've researched them so you understand that your solution meets their needs.

Our survey shows that decision-makers truly value personalization.

There are two ways to make your cold email campaigns more personal.

Customer attributes

One is to use custom attributes (merge tags), which enables you to inject your prospects' data into your emails automatically.

These custom attributes can be as simple as company names and as complex as unique copy generated with AI for each recipient.

Manual edits

Another way is to manually edit the emails generated from a template–which is more time-consuming but gives you more control and space to be creative.

Both methods are associated with higher reply rates, and some campaigns achieve truly remarkable reply rates by using them together.

Sender domain

We've found that using webmail (free mailboxes like @gmail.com, @outlook.com, etc.) shows a negative association with reply rates.

This corroborates our findings on the importance of trustworthiness, but it might also point to a different treatment of webmail senders by Email service providers.

Over 80% of Hunter users use Gmail as the email service provider they connect to Hunter Campaigns, with a smaller cohort of Outlook users, and a minority use other providers. Using custom domains yields better results with any provider, but there are some differences in reply rates for custom domain users too. Outlook with custom sender domain comes out on top with a 5.9% average reply rate.

The extremely low average value for webmail mailboxes with other providers must be taken with a grain of salt: we’ve only analyzed fewer than 100 email campaigns using this setup.

Tracking pixels

Similarly, we found that the average reply rate is lower for tracked campaigns.

Tracking pixels collect information about when your emails get opened, but anecdotal evidence has long pointed to their harmful effects on deliverability.

While our data indicates this, we're running experiments to test it further.

Efficient follow-ups

Campaigns with follow-ups have a higher average reply rate (4.9%) than campaigns without follow-ups (3%).

Our survey showed that most decision-makers either appreciate (48%!) or don't mind follow-ups (27%).

At the same time, 25% said they find follow-ups annoying, and excessive follow-ups were mentioned as one of the main reasons for spam complaints.

Hunter's users see higher reply rates when following up, but there's a point at which follow-ups become excessive and annoying.

After the third follow-up, unsubscribe rates grow, meaning spam complaints will likely go hand-in-hand with that.

We've also used AI to analyze and classify follow-ups and find the most successful follow-up type.

Our analysis shows that referral requests are the most effective type.

What doesn't seem to matter as much

Our analysis also looked at email word count and image count, which are often associated with cold email success. The findings here were surprising.

After crunching the numbers, we found little relationship between word count and reply rates: the correlation coefficient is -0.09.

Images are similar. Emails without images attached don't show a statistically significant difference in reply rates compared to campaigns without images.

Other findings

Two other fascinating findings from our survey deserve mentioning:

• Decision-makers don't care when you reach out–just make it relevant.

• Most people don't care if AI is used to create the cold emails they receive.

Wrapping up

Cold emails can help grow any business by building meaningful relationships, but in 2024, an average cold email wasn't good enough.

Our research shows that many decision makers appreciate cold emails as long as they are relevant. Cold email isn't dead, but it's not a numbers game. Anything you can do to improve relevancy will improve your results - the most impactful being campaigns to fewer recipients. Focus on quality before scale, and you have a better chance at success.