Article

How Many Cold Email Follow-Ups Should You Send to Increase Your Replies?

lemlist Free Beginner

A practical, no-nonsense breakdown of the tradeoff between too few follow-ups (leaving replies on the table) and too many (diminishing returns), based on lemlist's own campaign data. Good for calibrating the upper bound on your sequence, not just the lower one.

  • Lemlist's campaign data points to 4 to 9 follow-up emails as the sweet spot, well past where most people stop
  • Reply rates fall per email but keep adding up: the first email averages about 4.5% replies, a full 10 email sequence reaches roughly 22% total
  • Space early follow-ups closer together (every 2 to 4 days) and widen the gap as the sequence goes on

The question it answers

  1. How many times should I follow up before giving up on a cold prospect?

Read with it

  1. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  2. This is the book most modern cold outbound advice quietly borrows from, so reading the source is worth it. Its "Cold Calling... Amazon Book · ~208 pages Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler
  3. If you want to fix the follow-up mindset for good, this is the book, and this is the author's own page for it. Blount is blunt... jebblount.com (official) Book · ~320 pages Fanatical Prospecting Jeb Blount
  4. This is the canonical structure for the investor cold email, written by a YC partner who reads them from the other side. It is... Y Combinator Startup Library Essay · 5 min read How to Cold Email Investors Aaron Harris
  5. An Indian founder story where the early demand test was manual, cold emails and direct outreach to find the first customers... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~50 min How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a Global SaaS Leader Prime Venture Partners
  6. A short, practical guide you can lift straight into your own process: how many times to follow up, what to say at each touch,... Close Template The Follow Up Formula Steli Efti
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →