The Hunter.io State of Email Outreach report, based on 31 million emails, found that the average cold email sequence reply rate currently sits at 4.5%, a slight improvement from 4.1% in 2024. Average open rates sit at roughly 30%, which is below where most teams should be targeting, partly reflecting the impact of tightening spam filters at Gmail and Outlook.

The Benchmark Gap Apollo Claims to Beat

The significance of the Tolly findings comes into sharper focus against those baselines. According to Instantly's 2026 Cold Email Benchmark Report, which analyzed billions of cold email interactions from over 700,000 businesses, the average reply rate across campaigns is 3.43%, with only top performers exceeding 10%.

Typical cold email open rates in 2025 and 2026 cluster around 42%, with reply rates averaging 3% across industries, though highly targeted and personalized campaigns can push that figure to 8 to 10%. Apollo's Tolly-validated performance, the company says, beats these numbers.

The report also coincides with Apollo earning recognition across several of G2's 2026 Best Software Award lists, including Best Sales Software, Best AI Software, and Best Global Software. It was the only sales intelligence platform to appear on G2's Best AI Software Products list.

What This Means for Marketers and Growth Teams

The practical implication for business owners and email marketers is straightforward: platform choice directly affects whether your emails arrive and get read. In 2026, email infrastructure and deliverability have become critical factors that determine the success or failure of cold email campaigns. No matter how strong your subject lines or personalized your content, emails that land in the spam folder will not be seen.

The direction of travel in high-performance cold outreach is shifting from volume to precision, with elite teams using intelligence-led outbound and hitting prospects at the right moments using intent signals. AI agents now handle roughly 80% of research and sequencing work for top-performing teams, freeing people to focus on positioning and high-value conversations.

For teams evaluating whether a unified platform like Apollo actually delivers on its deliverability claims, the Tolly report gives a data point grounded in a real campaign rather than vendor marketing. The core finding: Apollo's unified, AI-powered GTM platform materially improves outbound performance for email deliverability and produces conversion rates that exceed industry benchmarks. Whether that holds across different verticals, list sizes, and sending volumes is a question each team will need to test against its own baseline, but the independent methodology makes these results a credible starting point.

The Hunter.io State of Email Outreach report, based on 31 million emails, found that the average cold email sequence reply rate currently sits at 4.5%, a slight improvement from 4.1% in 2024. Average open rates sit at roughly 30%, which is below where most teams should be targeting, partly reflecting the impact of tightening spam filters at Gmail and Outlook.

The Benchmark Gap Apollo Claims to Beat

The significance of the Tolly findings comes into sharper focus against those baselines. According to Instantly's 2026 Cold Email Benchmark Report, which analyzed billions of cold email interactions from over 700,000 businesses, the average reply rate across campaigns is 3.43%, with only top performers exceeding 10%.

Typical cold email open rates in 2025 and 2026 cluster around 42%, with reply rates averaging 3% across industries, though highly targeted and personalized campaigns can push that figure to 8 to 10%. Apollo's Tolly-validated performance, the company says, beats these numbers.

The report also coincides with Apollo earning recognition across several of G2's 2026 Best Software Award lists, including Best Sales Software, Best AI Software, and Best Global Software. It was the only sales intelligence platform to appear on G2's Best AI Software Products list.

What This Means for Marketers and Growth Teams

The practical implication for business owners and email marketers is straightforward: platform choice directly affects whether your emails arrive and get read. In 2026, email infrastructure and deliverability have become critical factors that determine the success or failure of cold email campaigns. No matter how strong your subject lines or personalized your content, emails that land in the spam folder will not be seen.

The direction of travel in high-performance cold outreach is shifting from volume to precision, with elite teams using intelligence-led outbound and hitting prospects at the right moments using intent signals. AI agents now handle roughly 80% of research and sequencing work for top-performing teams, freeing people to focus on positioning and high-value conversations.

For teams evaluating whether a unified platform like Apollo actually delivers on its deliverability claims, the Tolly report gives a data point grounded in a real campaign rather than vendor marketing. The core finding: Apollo's unified, AI-powered GTM platform materially improves outbound performance for email deliverability and produces conversion rates that exceed industry benchmarks. Whether that holds across different verticals, list sizes, and sending volumes is a question each team will need to test against its own baseline, but the independent methodology makes these results a credible starting point.