Our newsletterVendor reportSopro, 2026
The ten industries that receive the most B2B cold emails turn only 1.0–3.0% of them into leads (2025)
Cold outreach
| Industry | % of 2025 emails | Lead rate (%) |
|---|---|---|
| #1 IT & Services | 6.1% | 1.4% |
| #2 Financial Services | 5.7% | 1.6% |
| #3 Construction | 5.1% | 3% |
| #4 Computer Software | 4% | 1% |
| #5 Hospital & Health Care | 3.4% | 1.7% |
| #6 Retail | 3.3% | 1.6% |
| #7 Marketing & Advertising | 3.2% | 1.4% |
| #8 Automotive | 2.2% | 2.2% |
| #9 Real Estate | 2.1% | 1.9% |
| #10 Pharmaceuticals | 2.1% | 2.1% |
B2B cold email lead rate by industry: top 10, with YoY change
B2B cold email lead rate by industry: top 10, with YoY change- Reader Note:
- For comparison, the ten industries with the highest lead rates reached 3.1–5.4% in the same data.
- 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
Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.
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 says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
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