Gong · Cold email analysis
What one meeting costs in cold emails
This is a unit cost, not a trend. It says outbound is expensive. It does not say outbound got worse.
Cold emails the average rep sends to land one meeting
343 of them reach someone who did not ask
Cold emails analysed to produce the figure
No date range and no prior baseline published
Because Gong publishes no earlier baseline, this number cannot show a decline. Read alongside Instantly's 2026 benchmark, which reports reply rates holding steady rather than falling.
Source: Gong, Does cold email even work any more? (2025). Reply-rate comparison: Instantly, Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026.