Our newsletterVendor reportSopro, 2026
Industries with clear operational needs have a higher B2B email lead rate, with Public Safety leading at 5.4%
Cold outreach
| Industry | Lead rate (%) |
|---|---|
| Public Safety | 5.4% |
| Government Administration | 5.2% |
| Civil Engineering | 4.6% |
| Mining & Metals | 4.3% |
| Market Research | 4.3% |
| Oil & Energy | 4% |
| Higher Education | 3.5% |
| Chemicals | 3.4% |
| Utilities | 3.3% |
| Renewables & Environment | 3.1% |
B2B cold email lead rate by industry: top 10
B2B cold email lead rate by industry: top 10- Reader Note:
- The ten industries in this ranking run from 5.4% down to 3.1%: Public Safety, Government Administration 5.2%, Civil Engineering 4.6%, Mining & Metals and Market Research both 4.3%, Oil & Energy 4.0%, Higher Education 3.5%, Chemicals 3.4%, Utilities 3.3% and Renewables & Environment 3.1%. The reading that operational need drives the rate is the report's own interpretation rather than something the data tests, and two of its own ten do not fit it: Market Research at 4.3% and Higher Education at 3.5% are neither operational nor heavy industry. The report's separate top 10 by share of email sent is a different set of industries, with lead rates of 1.0-3.0%, so the best-answering industries are not the most-targeted ones. Neither list gives the number of emails sent per industry. These are Sopro's own client campaigns rather than a market sample, and Sopro sells B2B prospecting services.
- Evidence:
- Observed behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- High — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- Sample:
- Survey: 442 senior B2B decision-makers (self-reported). Also draws on ~126M emails / 25M multichannel touchpoints and a 650,000-email 2025 send corpus for the message-pattern analysis, plus 2025 campaign benchmark data (lead rates by company size/industry).
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
Getting a rough orientation, and deciding what to check yourself.
Not for
- Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
- This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
- The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
- This result turned up while the researchers were searching the data. It has not been tested a second time.
- The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
Related cards
Idea
Go deeper on this topic
Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.
Open full graph