Benchmarks · Measured 17 September 2026
Commercial outbound benchmarks: what cold email and SMS to commercial buyers actually return.
Measured from the campaigns we run for commercial service companies: 313 cold email campaigns, 765,556 emails to 277,036 prospects, and 379,654 texts to 281,308 prospects in the last 90 days. No survey, no estimates, no vendor-reported averages. Every number carries its sample size, and the page is refreshed quarterly.
5.6%
of prospects reply to cold email
277,036 prospects, 313 campaigns
15.5%
of email replies are positive
2,410 positive of 15,577 replies
6.1%
of texted prospects reply by SMS
17,224 of 281,308 prospects, 90 days
1.6%
bounce rate on 2026 campaigns
4.4% across all campaigns since 2025
74%
of replies land 10:00 to 15:59 Central
email 74%, SMS 75%
8
interested replies per client per month (median)
168 client-months, Jun to Aug 2026
Cold email
Email benchmarks for commercial service outreach.
A commercial-services cold email campaign that lands 5% to 7% replies per prospect is doing its job. Below 3.5% the list or the sending infrastructure is the problem, not the copy. Bounces are the number we watch hardest: campaigns started in 2026 bounce at a third of the historical rate because every list now goes through verification before it is loaded.
| Metric | Value | Sample |
|---|---|---|
| Reply rate per prospect contacted | 5.62% | 277,036 prospects |
| Reply rate per email sent (openers + follow-ups) | 2.03% | 765,556 emails |
| Positive replies as a share of all replies | 15.5% | 15,577 replies |
| Positive replies per prospect contacted | 0.87% | 277,036 prospects |
| Bounce rate, all campaigns since 2025 | 4.41% | 33,772 bounces |
| Bounce rate, campaigns started March 2026 or later | 1.56% | 11,435 emails, 7 campaigns |
| Reply rate on those 2026 campaigns | 8.56% | 4,382 prospects |
Reply rate spread across 85 campaigns with 1,000+ prospects
| Campaign | Reply rate | Positive per prospect |
|---|---|---|
| Bottom quartile campaign (p25) | 3.5% | |
| Median campaign | 4.9% | 0.79% positive |
| Top quartile campaign (p75) | 7.1% | 1.36% positive |
Email reply classification, last 90 days
| Class | Share | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Interested | 6.2% | 531 of 8,573 non-bounce replies |
| Not interested | 88.0% | 7,545 |
| Needs a human read (generic, residential, dismissed) | 5.8% | 497 |
By trade
Reply and positive rates by commercial trade.
Per prospect contacted, cold email only. Trades are labelled from the client's vertical. Rows marked small rest on fewer than 5,000 prospects and will move as the sample grows; the paving row is the one to benchmark against.
| Trade | Reply rate | Positive rate | Bounce rate | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asphalt, paving, concrete | 6.7% | 1.28% | 5.1% | 60 clients, 99,446 prospects |
| Facility maintenancesmall | 7.7% | 1.31% | 4.8% | 2 clients, 4,203 prospects |
| Commercial cleaningsmall | 9.1% | 1.58% | 1.6% | 1 client, 4,107 prospects |
| Landscapingsmall | 11.6% | 2.41% | 6.1% | 2 clients, 2,034 prospects |
| Commercial paintingsmall | 6.7% | 0.41% | 4.0% | 1 client, 729 prospects |
| Mixed and unlabelled trades | 4.7% | 0.55% | 3.7% | 30 clients, 137,449 prospects |
SMS
SMS benchmarks: a volume channel with a small, fast yes.
Six in a hundred texted prospects reply, and most of those replies are a no. That is the point: a no by text arrives in minutes and cleans the list, and the 3.6% of replies that are interested arrive from people who just told you they are. One texting number carries roughly 300 texts a day, so volume is a function of numbers, not copy.
| Metric | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Texts sent | 379,654 | 90 days to 17 Sep 2026 |
| Distinct prospects texted | 281,308 | |
| Prospects who replied | 17,224 (6.1%) | any inbound message |
| Carrier delivery rate | 89.4% | 358,657 delivered, 42,499 undelivered |
| Interested as a share of classified SMS replies | 3.6% | 1,368 of 37,553 classified replies |
| Not interested as a share of classified SMS replies | 83.5% | 31,368 replies |
Timing
When commercial buyers reply.
Share of inbound replies by hour block and weekday, US Central, last 90 days: 9,359 email replies and 45,775 SMS replies. These reflect when replies land inside our own sending windows, so treat them as reply hours, not proof that other hours are dead.
| Hour block (Central) | SMS | |
|---|---|---|
| Before 07:00 | 4.9% | 1.0% |
| 07:00 to 09:59 | 10.7% | 5.4% |
| 10:00 to 12:59 | 35.8% | 36.4% |
| 13:00 to 15:59 | 38.0% | 38.1% |
| 16:00 to 18:59 | 7.5% | 12.4% |
| 19:00 and later | 3.1% | 6.6% |
| Weekday | SMS | |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 19.4% | 14.9% |
| Tuesday | 19.4% | 18.1% |
| Wednesday | 20.1% | 17.8% |
| Thursday | 17.7% | 19.2% |
| Friday | 21.6% | 17.7% |
| Saturday | 0.8% | 8.7% |
| Sunday | 0.9% | 3.5% |
Interested replies follow the same shape: SMS interest peaks in the 10:00 hour, email interest in the 13:00 hour.
Pipeline output
Interested replies per client per month, and what each one costs.
168 client-months, June to August 2026, every active client counted, including the slow ones. Cost per interested reply is shown at the $2,500 per month Foundation plan; it is the number to compare against a shared-lead platform before the close rate is applied on either side.
| Client | Interested / month | Cost per interested at $2,500 |
|---|---|---|
| Bottom quartile client | 5 | $500 |
| Median client | 8 | $313 |
| Top quartile client | 11 | $227 |
| Mean | 8.2 | $305 |
Interested replies and delivery to clients by month
| Month | Interested | Active clients | Delivered to client |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2026 | 330 | 72 | 221 (67%) |
| July 2026 | 825 | 85 | 670 (81%) |
| August 2026 | 550 | 82 | 512 (93%) |
Delivered means reviewed by a human and handed to the client; the gap is replies still in review or filtered as residential or wrong-fit.
List quality
What a purchased or scraped commercial list looks like before cleaning.
Across 3,188 lists run through our free list cleaner, fewer than half of the emails came back confirmed valid, and a third were catch-all domains that no verifier can confirm. Seven percent of rows were already on a do-not-contact list. Send to a raw list and these numbers become your bounce rate and your complaint rate.
| Metric | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Emails verified | 1,231,445 | 3,188 uploaded lists |
| Valid | 45.2% | |
| Catch-all (accepts everything, cannot be confirmed) | 35.0% | |
| Invalid | 6.9% | |
| Phones verified | 880,132 | |
| Mobile | 70.0% | the only class we text |
| Landline | 1.1% | |
| Rows already on a do-not-contact list | 7.1% | of 4,348,132 uploaded rows |
Percentages that do not sum to 100 leave the remainder as unknown or unverifiable results.
Methodology
How this was measured, and what we left out.
All figures were queried from the production database behind our campaigns on 17 September 2026. Email campaign totals (emails sent, prospects contacted, replies, positive replies, bounces) are synced from the sending platform per campaign. Reply classes (interested, not interested, generic, residential) are the labels assigned in our human triage queue, after AI pre-classification. SMS counts come from the messaging log, and list quality from completed verification jobs in our list cleaner. Clients are anonymised; trades are inferred from each client's vertical, and clients that could not be labelled confidently are reported as mixed.
Left out on purpose: time from campaign launch to first meeting, because launch dates are recorded for too few campaigns to publish a median; cost per closed job, because close rates live in our clients' books, not ours; and any comparison to industry averages published by other vendors, because we cannot check how they were counted.
Refreshed quarterly. If you cite a number, cite the date next to it. The methodology and the numbers are free to reuse with a link to this page.
FAQ
Benchmark questions, answered with the numbers above.
What is a good cold email reply rate for commercial service companies?
What share of cold email replies are positive?
What reply rate should SMS outreach to commercial buyers get?
When do commercial buyers reply to outreach?
How many leads should an outbound campaign produce per month?
How were these benchmarks measured?
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