Your outreach report is measuring the wrong number.
Nearly 3x the reply rate. The same meetings.
Here is the study
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The asset
What's in the study
Around twelve pages. Five pieces of standard outreach folklore put against the outcome that pays, plus the anatomy of the messages that produced meetings and a scorecard for your own.
- Specificity against personalisationWhat one verifiable observation about the recipient is worth, measured against plain name and company merge fields.
- How many questions a message should carryWhether none, one or several changes who answers, and whether it matters where in the message the question sits.
- Length, by temperatureWhy the right length for a cold message and a warm one are not the same number, and where each one stops working.
- The closing askHow the shape of your close changes the quality of the replies it earns, not only how many of them arrive.
- Where replies and meetings part companyThe campaign metric that tracked revenue in this data, and the louder one that did not.
- The follow-up windowWhat a single follow-up is worth, and the point at which sending it stops helping.
- Warm against cold, judged properlyHow conversations that began warm compare per message and in total, and what each lane is actually for.
- Anatomy of a winning messageThe six-part skeleton shared by the 85 conversations that reached meeting intent or better, in order.
- Score your last tenA seven-line scorecard for grading your team's recent outreach against the data, with banded results.
The dataset
2,279 cold LinkedIn conversations, started by senior people at professional and financial services firms across Africa, Europe and the Middle East. 1,082 of them had been live for at least seven days when the numbers were run, and every rate in the study comes from that mature set.
Every reply was read and classified by a human across five tiers, from no reply through to a meeting held, rather than scored by a sentiment model. Each conversation is joined to what happened afterwards, which is why the study can report meetings instead of stopping at replies.
It is observational data, not a controlled experiment, so correlation is not causation. Every figure quotes its sample size, anything under roughly n=20 is flagged as directional, and every campaign appears as a sector descriptor so no client, sender or recipient is identifiable.
The proof
The two campaigns behind the number at the top
One worked example, so you can see the shape of the evidence before you decide whether to read the rest.
| Campaign | Sends | Replies | Reply rate | Meeting intent | Per 100 sends |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A fiduciary-services campaign into a new European market | ~83 | 11 | 13.3% | 8 | 9.6 |
| A trade-credit insurance campaign | 66 | 24 | 35.9% | 6 | 9.1 |
Drawn from the 1,082 mature conversations described above. The first lane's sends are inferred from its 11 replies at a 13.3% reply rate, so read roughly 83 rather than exactly 83. The second lane's 66 is a recorded figure.
Questions
Before you download it
What do I get, and what does it cost?
The full study, free. Five pieces of standard outreach folklore tested against booked meetings, the warm against cold comparison, the anatomy of the messages that produced meetings, and a scorecard for grading your team's last ten. The link opens the moment you submit the form, and a copy goes to your inbox.
How reliable are these numbers?
2,279 cold LinkedIn conversations started by senior people, of which 1,082 had been live at least seven days when the numbers were run. Every rate comes from that mature set and every reply was classified by a human, not a sentiment model. It is our own client programmes, anonymised to sector descriptors so no client is identifiable. Observational data, not a controlled experiment, and every figure in the study quotes its sample size.
What happens to my email address?
It is added to the AscendAI list so we can send you the study and, from time to time, the newsletter this research came out of. You can unsubscribe from any email in one click. We do not sell or share your details. See our privacy policy for the full position.