Where your prospect lives changes your cold email reply rate more than you'd think

Send the identical email, on the identical day, to two lists that only differ by country, and you will get two different reply rates — not because one list is better written to, but because the inbox on the other end has a different amount of cold email already sitting in it. That’s the finding buried in Belkins’ 2025 analysis of 7.5 million cold emails: reply rates ranged from 1.43% in Poland down to 0.51% in the United States, a gap large enough that geography alone explains more variance than most subject-line tweaks ever will.

The numbers, country by country

Belkins, What Are B2B Cold Email Response Rates? (2026 Study), based on 7.5M emails sent in 2025

Look at which countries anchor the two ends of that chart. Poland, Ireland, and Denmark, all smaller markets that see a fraction of the outbound volume aimed at the US or UK, reply at 0.63% to 1.43%. The US and UK, the two biggest, most heavily prospected English-language B2B markets on earth, sit at 0.51% and 0.48%, right around or just under the 0.45% overall average. That’s not a coincidence of culture. It’s a saturation effect, and it’s the same mechanism driving reply rates down everywhere over time, just measured across space instead of years.

Why the biggest markets reply the least

Every mailbox has a finite amount of attention to give unsolicited email, and that attention gets divided by however many senders are competing for it. A VP of Sales in Austin or London is one of the most heavily prospected job titles in the world — every SDR tool, every agency, every outbound platform on the planet has that inbox on a list. A logistics director in Warsaw or Copenhagen, doing a comparable job at a comparable company, is targeted by a much smaller slice of that same global sending volume, simply because fewer outbound campaigns are built with a Polish or Danish segment in mind.

The recipient hasn’t changed. What changed is how many other cold emails they’re triaging around yours, which is exactly the crowded-inbox effect Sopro’s research on B2B inbox volume describes at the level of a single senior buyer. Move that same buyer to a less-targeted market and the noise floor drops, and your email has a better shot at standing out simply by being one of fewer.

There’s a second, quieter effect layered on top of pure volume: tooling distribution. Most of the outbound stack — the list-building tools, the enrichment providers, the SDR playbooks copied from company to company — was built by and for the US market first, then expanded outward. A recipient in a market that adopted that tooling later is, mechanically, several years behind the US on the saturation curve those tools created. That gap closes over time as the same tools get sold into more markets, which is part of why treating any single country’s reply rate as a fixed constant, rather than a snapshot of how saturated that market happens to be right now, is the wrong way to read this data.

The volume effect isn’t the whole story

Saturation explains the shape of the pattern, but it doesn’t explain every outlier — Canada, at 0.63%, sits closer to Ireland and Denmark than to the US next door, despite sharing a language, a time zone overlap, and a lot of the same SaaS vendors targeting both markets. Buying culture plays a role too: some markets have a stronger norm of replying to a stranger’s email even to say no, where others default to silence as the polite option. None of the available data isolates how much of the country gap is inbox saturation versus that kind of cultural response norm, and Belkins doesn’t claim to. What the data does show cleanly is the direction and the rough size of the effect, which is enough to change how you read your own numbers.

Geography changes the rules, not just the reply rate

Reply rate isn’t the only thing that shifts when a list crosses a border — the legal ground under it shifts too, and it’s easy to miss because nothing about a lower reply rate tells you a compliance regime is different. A list built for Poland or Denmark still sits inside the EU’s GDPR framework, which treats unsolicited B2B email more strictly in several respects than US CAN-SPAM does, regardless of how good that market’s reply rate looks. A genuinely global list means genuinely different rules by country, layered on top of the reply-rate differences this post is about — worth checking before, not after, you lean harder into a market that happens to be under-saturated.

What about the rest of the world?

Belkins’ public breakdown names six countries, all in North America and Europe. It doesn’t cover Asia-Pacific, Latin America, or the Middle East, which means the “smaller, less-saturated market replies better” pattern in this post is verified for exactly the markets listed above, not extrapolated to everywhere else. There’s no reason to assume it doesn’t hold more broadly — saturation is a plausible mechanism anywhere outbound tooling has concentrated — but language barriers, different professional email norms, and different baseline comfort with unsolicited contact from a stranger are all real variables the available data doesn’t isolate outside of Europe and North America. If your own list reaches into a market this study doesn’t cover, that’s a reason to check your own numbers rather than assume the pattern above, not a reason to ignore geography as a variable altogether.

What this means for reading your own campaign data

If you run one segmented list across multiple countries and look at a single blended reply rate, you’re averaging together markets that behave differently for structural reasons that have nothing to do with your copy. A campaign that reads as “underperforming” at 1.2% blended might be a generic, unremarkable performer in the US slice and a genuinely strong performer in a European slice pulling the average up. Split your reporting by country before you conclude anything about a subject line, an offer, or a sender reputation issue — the geography is doing more of the work in that number than you’d expect.

This also changes where the marginal email is worth sending. If your total addressable market includes both a saturated market and a comparable less-saturated one, the same list-building effort produces more replies in the market that has fewer competing senders in it right now, at least until enough of the market catches on and the gap compresses the way it has in the US and UK over the years documented in the broader reply-rate decline.

Building the segment is the easy part; keeping it current is the work

None of this is actionable if “which country is this contact in” lives as a free-text field nobody trusts, or worse, doesn’t exist in your data at all. Norbelys’s audience segments let you build a dynamic segment on a real country or region field, not a spreadsheet column someone typed inconsistently, so a campaign built for “Nordics” or “North America” actually pulls the contacts that field says belong there, and stays current as new contacts get imported. Pair that with per-sender pacing that respects each recipient’s own time zone rather than blasting everyone at your 9 a.m., and a geography-aware campaign isn’t extra engineering, it’s just how the segment is defined.

If your list already spans more than one country, the fastest way to find out whether Belkins’ pattern holds for your own data is to split your reporting by that field this week rather than wait for a slower quarter. See how segments work on every Norbelys plan and start building a country-aware campaign today.

Cold email and geography — quick answers

Should I stop sending to the US or UK because reply rates are lower there?+

No — those markets still carry the largest addressable audiences for most B2B products, and 0.48-0.51% on millions of contacts still produces real pipeline. The finding is about calibrating expectations and reading blended numbers correctly, not about which markets to avoid.

Does this mean I should personalize less for less-saturated markets?+

No. The country effect describes the noise floor a recipient is triaging against, not a license to send lower-effort copy. Personalization depth remains the larger, more controllable lever in every market — see the benchmark breakdown for how much it moves the number.

Is this pattern likely to hold as more senders discover less-saturated markets?+

Probably not indefinitely. The same dynamic that compressed US and UK reply rates over the past several years — more senders competing for the same attention — would be expected to compress a currently less-saturated market's advantage too, as more outbound programs add it to their target list.