Vendor reportSopro, 2026

B2B cold emails to Retail prospects had a 1.6% lead rate in 2025

Cold outreach

1.6%

lead rate on B2B cold emails sent to Retail prospects in 2025

Reader Note:: This industry appears in the report's top 10 by share of cold email sent, not by performance: it took 3.3% of Sopro's 2025 sends, sixth largest, and slipped three places on that ranking from 2024. Lead rates in this list run 1.0% to 3.0%, below the 3.1-5.4% of the industries that head the report's separate lead-rate ranking. 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).

Good for

Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.

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 says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

45.7%

Difference in lead rate between cold emails that open by naming a problem and those that don't — problem-led openers convert worse

Narrow follow-up questions keep the conversation going, while broad ones do not

54%

of surveyed B2B SaaS companies use partners to help with outbound prospecting and lead enrichment

Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

52.5%

Lift in lead rate for cold emails that promise a fast, near-term result — the strongest-performing message pattern tested

An offer in the subject line makes 77% of B2B prospects more likely to open a cold email, while shocking subject lines put off 32%

Cold email subject line type and likelihood to open
Subject line type	% More likely to open	Makes no difference (%)
An offer	77%	14%
Personalised (name/company name)	71%	22%
A question	69%	19%
Intriguing/mystery	64%	22%
Topical/trend/current affairs	64%	26%

Longer product conversations are more persuasive