Cold email ROI calculator
What does outbound actually return? Put in your volume, rates and deal size to get replies, meetings, customers and — the useful one — the reply rate you need to break even.
Your own number. We don't publish a benchmark — see below for why.
Most replies are not interest. This is the share that books time.
Use first-year value if you sell a subscription.
Platform, mailboxes, domains and data combined.
11,900% return
$18,000 of new business against $150 of cost.
60
replies/mo
18
meetings/mo
3.6
customers/mo
- Cost per meeting
- $8
- Cost per customer
- $42
- Emails needed to break even
- 17
The number that matters
At 2,000 emails a month, you break even at a reply rate of 0.03%. Everything above that is profit.
The arithmetic
replies = 2,000 × 3% = 60.0 meetings = 60.0 × 30% = 18.0 customers = 18.0 × 20% = 3.60 revenue = 3.60 × $5,000 = $18,000
Output is only as good as the rates you put in. We deliberately publish no benchmark reply rate — see our methodology. If you have not run campaigns yet, run a few hundred sends first and use your own numbers rather than anyone's averages.
Why we don't give you a default reply rate
Every cold email vendor publishes an average reply rate, and every one of those numbers is self-reported, measured on an undisclosed sample, and unverifiable. They also vary by an order of magnitude between markets: selling enterprise security software to CISOs and selling bookkeeping to local trades are not the same activity, and no single figure describes both.
Putting a benchmark in the box as a default would dress a guess up as data, and you would reasonably assume we had measured it. So the fields start at neutral placeholders and the arithmetic is shown, which means you can check the output rather than trust it. If you haven't run campaigns yet, send a few hundred emails and use your own numbers.
The break-even reply rate
Of everything the calculator produces, this is the number worth writing down. It converts an abstract question — is this tool worth $150 a month? — into a concrete one: can I get replies from 0.4% of the people I email? That is a question you can answer from a single test campaign.
It also reframes tool pricing sensibly. Arguments about $25 versus $47 a month matter far less than they feel like they do when a single closed customer is worth thousands. The expensive mistakes in outbound are a burned domain or a bad list, not the subscription.
Costs people forget
- Mailboxes. Volume needs many inboxes, and they are usually billed per mailbox by your email provider — often more than the sending platform itself. The mailbox calculator works out how many you need.
- Domains. Several sending domains, renewed annually, kept separate from your primary domain.
- Data. Contacts and verification credits, which are consumed faster than the headline number suggests because finding and verifying both draw on the pool.
- Your time. Not free, and usually the largest line item in the first month.
Put the combined figure into the monthly cost field rather than just the platform price, or the return will look better than it is.
Before spending anything, check the sending domain is set up correctly with the SPF/DKIM/DMARC checker — no reply rate survives landing in spam. Then find the platform that fits.