The Cold Outreach Cemetery · A BIGM Project · Last refreshed: Q2 2026

Most cold messages
die alone.

In 2024 more than 200 million cold outreach messages were sent across LinkedIn and email. The vast majority got no reply. Below is the sector-by-sector burial map, compiled from public industry data.

Sector burial map · 2024 industry data, compiled from public sources
1.9%
reply rate
Sent~24M
Buried~23.5M
Apollo 2024 + Lemlist 2024 cold email reports
2.4%
reply rate
Sent~18M
Buried~17.5M
Lemlist 2024 staffing-vertical cold email
3.1%
reply rate
Sent~12M
Buried~11.6M
Apollo 2024 real-estate vertical
1.6%
reply rate
Sent~10M
Buried~9.8M
Lavender 2024 email benchmark report
4.2%
reply rate
Sent~8M
Buried~7.7M
Apollo 2024 financial-services vertical
5.1%
reply rate
Sent~7M
Buried~6.6M
Apollo 2024 financial-services vertical
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Numbers shown are conservative midpoints from the cited public sources (Apollo 2024 vertical breakdown, Lemlist 2024 cold-email report, Lavender email benchmark report). We are not publishing original research yet; that comes from the diagnostic dataset we are accumulating. When the primary-sourced numbers are higher than what the public reports say (which we expect, given our sample skews to teams already in trouble), the table updates with a methodology note.
Why we are publishing this

Cold outreach didn't die. It got industrialized, and stopped working at volume.

Every SDR team is sending more messages than ever. Every prospect is getting more cold pings than they have time to read. The result is a quiet catastrophe: an entire industry's pipeline running on a reply rate that would get a TV campaign cancelled in week one.

We built BIGM because we got tired of watching teams burn through warm accounts to chase numbers the algorithm was never going to give them. The answer is not more volume. The answer is reply rate.

Cold outreach is not dead. Cold outreach run from one templated account by one human is dead. The teams that beat the cemetery are doing the opposite: aged-account pools, AI per-prospect messages, live inbox triage, sequences that respect intent signals. That is the modern stack, and that is what BIGM is built for.

The Cemetery is our way of putting the real number on the wall. So nobody has to pretend anymore.

Get notified when the dataset is refreshed

Quarterly cemetery report, in your inbox.

One email per quarter when the dataset is refreshed. Includes your sector's burial rate + the top three things teams that beat it are doing differently.

No spam. We're the team that thinks most cold email is garbage, so we won't be sending much of it.