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Reply data by sequence step from four live 2026 cold email campaigns, 91,000+ sends. Where follow-ups stop paying and why we run four to five, not nine.
By Moe Alhosni · Published 13 October 2026 · Updated 27 October 2026 · 12 min read
Short answer: Four to five emails. In four live 2026 campaigns, 91,000+ sends, the first email produced 14-39% of all human replies, follow-ups 1-3 produced 41-68%, and the steps after follow-up 3 produced a fifth to a third where they were tested. We run four steps by default, five when the list is big enough to read step 5, and a sixth only while the fifth is still producing. The step-level data is below.
I run a lead generation agency. We are paid per qualified meeting, not per email, so I have no reason to send a ninth email to a list I will need again in six months. That is my bias. Keep it in view.
Three of the pages ranking for this question, as of October 2026:
Four to nine, or at most five, or nobody knows. Two of the three sell the software that sends the emails; BounceZero sells list verification, as of October 2026. None of them is paid by the reply. None shows replies by step on a named campaign. I can.
Read this before the table. These are human replies of any sentiment: interested, not interested, a question, "take me off your list". They are not positive replies and they are not meetings. The step-level split for positive replies is not in these campaign analytics. A separate dataset has it, and it sits further down, kept apart from this one. Autoreplies and out-of-office are excluded. No open data, because we do not track opens.
| Campaign | Sends | Replies | Rate | 1st email share | FU 1-3 share | FU 4+ share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A — P1 EU/Turkey, 7 steps | 46,201 | 360 | 0.78% | 24% | 44% | 32% |
| B — P1 Caribbean, 7 steps | 2,196 | 22 | 1.00% | 14% | 68% | 18% |
| C — PR Noir ICP1, 4 steps | 38,254 | 123 | 0.32% | 32% | 68% | — |
| D — P1 Indian Ocean, 8 steps | 4,558 | 41 | 0.90% | 39% | 41% | 20% |
P1 is P1 Communications, a UK hospitality PR agency prospecting hotel and travel brands. PR Noir is a US PR agency prospecting jobs and employment brands.
Three things are true in every row. The first email is never the majority of replies. Follow-ups 1-3 are the biggest block, by two points in campaign D and by a wide margin elsewhere. After follow-up 3 the answer depends on the campaign, and that is the whole argument.
The big one. 8,227 contacts entered the first email; 46,201 emails went out across seven steps; 360 people replied, 4.4% of the cohort.
Reply rate per email sent, by step: 1.07%, 0.88%, 0.81%, 0.65%, 0.68%, 0.76%, 0.48%.
Follow-up 5 produced 45 replies on 5,953 sends, 0.76%. Better than follow-ups 3 and 4. Only follow-up 6 fell away, at 0.48%. On this list, with this copy, the sixth email was worth sending and the seventh was marginal. This is the campaign that contradicts the claim that every follow-up does worse than the last. It is roughly flat for six emails.
PR Noir's first ICP. 11,551 contacts, a colder list than A, 0.32% overall. Per step: 0.34%, 0.33%, 0.33%, 0.28%. Follow-ups 1 and 2 matched the first email per send. 68% of replies came from follow-ups.
It was built as a four-step sequence, so I cannot tell you what a fifth would have done. That is the honest limit of this one.
967 hotel contacts in one region. First email: 16 replies, 1.65%. Follow-up 1: 11 replies, 1.95%. Those two emails produced 66% of all replies.
Then 4, 2, 7, 1, 0, 0. Follow-up 4 had a blip of seven. Follow-ups 5-7 produced one reply on 1,474 sends, 0.07%. Three emails to about 490 people each, for one reply. They spent sender reputation on a small list we wanted to keep clean and bought nothing.
Campaign B, 2,196 sends and 22 replies, is too small to read on its own. It is here because I checked the pattern on a second segment, and follow-up 1 was again the strongest single step, 9 replies of 22.
So the rule we run now: four steps by default. Five when the list is large enough that step 5 has sends you can read, which in practice means a few thousand contacts. Six and beyond only while five is still producing, checked weekly. Not nine.
In our own campaigns, 32% of positive reply events from August 2025 to July 2026 came from the first email, so 68% did not. For a B2B PR client running four steps, not PR Noir, 66% came from the first email, so 34% did not.
These are not the replies in the tables above. Those are human replies of any sentiment from 2026 campaign analytics, counted per email sent. These are positive reply events only: replies marked Interested in our Instantly workspace between 7 August 2025 and 24 July 2026. The file has no send counts, so there is no per-email rate here. Different date range, different numerator: do not divide one by the other. The counting rule is in the positive reply rate benchmark.
Share of each sender's positive reply events, by the step that drew them:
| Step | Our own campaigns (6–7 steps) | A B2B PR client, not PR Noir (4 steps) |
|---|---|---|
| 1st email | 32% | 66% |
| Follow-up 1 | 25% | 14% |
| Follow-up 2 | 11% | 8% |
| Follow-up 3 | 12% | 10% |
| Follow-up 4 | 8% | — |
| Follow-up 5 | 8% | — |
| Follow-up 6 | 2% | — |
| Not the 1st email (100% minus row 1) | 68% | 34% |
The step rows add to 98% in both columns, not 100. That is how the dataset has them, and I have not spread the gap. So the last row runs 2 points above the follow-up rows: 66% and 32% came from a numbered follow-up.
Campaign A's first email ran three variants on the same list, same weeks. Variants 0 and 1 share a subject line; variants 1 and 2 share a body:
| Variant | Sent | Human replies | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 3,141 | 42 | 1.34% |
| 1 | 2,543 | 26 | 1.02% |
| 2 | 2,543 | 20 | 0.79% |
Best beat worst by 1.7x, with subject line and body both different. Follow-up 5, the sixth email, added 45 replies from 5,953 sends. If you have a list of that size and a week to spend, spend it on the opener's subject line, not on a sixth email. Cold email for PR agencies goes further on what to put in that subject line.
"Just bumping this" is a repeat, not a follow-up. Every step needs its own job. Each step is also one more email to every contact, so daily sends grow with every step you add; the cold email capacity calculator shows how many inboxes that takes.
A follow-up 1, written for a PR agency prospecting a hotel group. Same thread, no new subject line:
[First name], one more angle. Most hotel groups we speak to are well covered in the trade press and absent from the titles their guests read on a Sunday. If [Hotel] is the same, that gap is the thing we fix. Worth a short call, or is this the wrong quarter?
The brackets are yours to fill. The angle only works if the gap is real for that hotel, so check before you send.
Both datasets come from ROI Maximizer's own Instantly workspace, run by Moe Alhosni, who wrote this page. The campaign tables are Instantly's step analytics for four client campaigns, with auto-replies and out-of-office left out. The positive-reply table counts replies marked Interested, mostly by Instantly's AI classifier, so a few labels are wrong both ways.
Pay per qualified meeting, no retainer required on the per-meeting plan, no minimum spend, nothing charged for a no-show. The published terms are a one-off setup fee of $1,000–$3,000, then $200–$500 per qualified meeting — billed in arrears, only for meetings that happened and you approved, nothing for a no-show — or, if you would rather carry the volume risk yourself, a flat $5,000 a month with no per-meeting fee. Where in each range depends on deal size; the full terms are on the pricing page. Why that model and not a retainer is in pay-per-meeting vs retainer.
About three days. The two guides below put the gap at two to five days. Smartlead's reply-timing benchmark, drawn from 850 million+ emails sent in the first half of 2026, found 64% of replies arrive within an hour of an email, 88.5% within 24 hours and 93.9% within 72 hours. It recommends waiting about three days. Lemlist's follow-up guide, updated 10 August 2026, suggests two days before the first follow-up, four before each of the next two, then five or more. I checked both on 21 October 2026.
Our step data has no timing field, so our own numbers can't tell you which gap works best. Going by Smartlead's figures, a much longer wait buys little: by 72 hours almost every reply to the last email is in. A longer gap spaces out the asks. It does not collect more answers to the previous one.
What our data does settle is that the step itself matters. Follow-up 1 was the best or second-best step in all four campaigns above, so wait the three days, then send it with a new angle.
No. Two is fewer than our data supports. In four 2026 campaigns, 91,209 sends, follow-ups 1 to 3 produced 41% to 68% of all human replies, and follow-up 1 was the best or second-best step in every one. In our own campaigns from August 2025 to July 2026, follow-ups 1 and 2 drew 25% and 11% of positive reply events. Stopping at two leaves follow-up 3 unsent, and it drew 12%.
A rule of thumb with no data behind it. Spotler splits a cold email's success into 30% targeting, 30% message and 50% follow-up. Tario makes it 30% personalisation, 30% value and 50% follow-up. Both add up to 110%, and neither cites a source for the split (both read 21 October 2026). Our measured version: in four 2026 campaigns, 61% to 86% of human replies came after the first email. If the 50 means follow-ups carry half the result, ours carried more.
Get three things in writing, from us or from anyone else:
If you want the definition we use, it is written out in what counts as a qualified meeting.
Then run your own deal size through the ROI calculator before the first call, so you know what a meeting is worth to you before anyone tells you what it costs.
About the author: Moe Alhosni, founder of ROI Maximizer. He runs the campaigns behind the first-hand data on this site. LinkedIn
Or run the free GTM teardown on your own site for the ICP, cold email and numbers specific to your company.
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