Cold email calculator

Your meetings goal, divided by the reply, interested and booked rates. The first email draws the most replies and each follow-up half as many as the one before, so at the defaults 9% of prospects reply over 3 steps and each meeting takes about 63 prospects. Each added step helps less.

Prospects times sequence steps gives the emails to send. Each mailbox sends its daily amount every weekday until your date, less while it ramps up, and the emails divided by what one mailbox sends in that time give the mailboxes.

Mail providers distrust a new mailbox that suddenly sends a lot. Ramp-up starts at 5 a day and climbs to 20 over three weeks, then the mailbox sends its full daily amount. Turn it off for mailboxes already sending cold email.

So trouble on one domain, such as a spam listing, reaches only its few mailboxes. 2 or 3 per domain is the common advice.

The 3% reply rate rounds down Instantly's 2026 cold email benchmark: 3.43% of emails sent get a reply, follow-ups included, and 58% of replies come from the first email. We found no published figures for the other two, so 35% interested and 50% booked are our own estimates. Your own results, once you have them, are better.

No. Mailboxes send Monday to Friday, as campaigns do in the app, so 5 of every 7 days count. Ramp-up runs through weekends too.