The Decline, Point by Point
Martal Group’s 2025 figures put the recent baseline at a 27.7% open rate and a 5.1% reply rate for 2024, itself down from roughly 7% in 2023. Instantly’s Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026, drawing on what it describes only as “billions of cold email interactions across thousands of active workspaces” between January 1 and December 18, 2025, found a platform-wide average reply rate of 3.43%, with a 5.5%-plus reply rate for the top quartile of senders and 10.7%-plus for the elite top 10%.
Saleshandy’s own platform data for the first half of 2026, built from 53.1 million cold emails sent across 60,000 sequences, puts the average reply rate at 3.7%, a small uptick from Instantly’s 2025 figure but still well below the 2023 and 2024 levels above.
Three Vendors, One Rough Trend Line
Martal Group, Instantly, and Saleshandy are three separate companies measuring three separate customer bases with their own send volumes and their own definitions of what counts as a reply. Stringing their numbers together into a single 2020-through-2026 line is useful for showing direction and rough magnitude, roughly 7% down to 3.7%, but it is not the same as one company tracking one consistent metric across six years.
Woodpecker’s own blog compares the 5.1% figure directly against the 3.43% figure, attributing the drop to inbox saturation, tighter Gmail and Outlook spam enforcement, and a rising volume of AI-generated outreach competing for the same inbox space. That specific comparison pairs Martal Group’s 2024 figure against Instantly’s 2025-dated report, two different platforms rather than one continuous series, so treat the named causes as plausible drivers of a real trend rather than proof of a single unbroken benchmark.
The Numbers
Cold email reply rates averaged roughly 7% in 2023 and 5.1% in 2024, alongside a 27.7% open rate in 2024, per Martal Group.
Martal Group 2025, via shno.co, “Client Acquisition Statistics for Agencies”
Instantly’s Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026, covering data from January 1 through December 18, 2025, put the platform-wide average reply rate at 3.43%, with 5.5%-plus for the top quartile and 10.7%-plus for the elite top 10% of senders.
Saleshandy’s own platform data for the first half of 2026, drawn from 53.1 million cold emails and 60,000 sequences, puts the average reply rate at 3.7%.
Woodpecker’s own analysis frames a decline from 5.1% in 2024 to 3.43% in 2026, attributing it to inbox saturation, tighter Gmail and Outlook spam enforcement, and AI-generated outreach volume, while itself comparing two different platforms’ data rather than one continuous series.
Woodpecker, “Cold Email Statistics Based on Sending Over 20M Cold Emails”
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Martal Group 2025, via shno.co, “Client Acquisition Statistics for Agencies”
- Instantly, “Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026”
- Saleshandy, cold email statistics report
- Woodpecker, “Cold Email Statistics Based on Sending Over 20M Cold Emails”