Does company size change LinkedIn reply rates?
Small companies talk. Big ones go quiet.
Upscale Outreach ·
Yes. 24% of people at companies of 1 to 10 replied once messaged, about one and a half times the 15% at companies of over 1,000. Both accepted connection requests at much the same rate.
Outscale benchmarks, from 112,149 prospects reached in real campaigns.
Everybody accepts. Small companies reply.
Send a connection request to someone at a ten-person company or a ten-thousand-person one, and the odds they accept are much the same: 42% at companies of 1 to 10, 44% at companies of over 1,000.
Then you send a message, and the two part ways.
- Companies of 1 to 1024%
- Every size together20%
- Companies of over 1,00015%
24% of people at the smallest companies replied, about one and a half times the 15% at companies of over 1,000, and that held inside the same campaigns too. In between, the rate falls as companies grow. The band-by-band picture is in Agency IQ, for your own campaigns.
Why big companies go quiet
At a six-person company, the person reading your message is the owner, the buyer and the inbox, all at once. There’s nobody to check with. A useful idea costs nothing to answer, and it might change their quarter.
At a five-thousand-person company, a reply creates work. A new supplier to get approved. A meeting to justify. A manager to loop in. Their inbox is also everybody’s target, so your message sits in a queue of identical ones. Silence is the safe answer, and it’s the one they give.
Accepting a connection costs nothing at any size. That’s why acceptance barely moves while replies fall by about a third.
What to do today
- Split campaigns by company size. Mixed together, the small companies’ replies hide the big ones’ silence in the average.
- Make the first ask smaller as companies get bigger. A question they can answer in one line, with no meeting attached.
- At small companies, get to the point. The person reading can say yes on the spot.
More in targeting
Which job titles accept LinkedIn connection requests?
The people who sign the cheques accept the least.
Board members and partners accept the most, at 59% and 56%. Chief executives, presidents and finance chiefs accept the least, at 35% to 37%.
Read itLinkedIn acceptance rates by country
America and Ireland have heard every pitch before.
Italy, South Africa and Spain are among the warmest for LinkedIn connection requests, at 56% to 67%. The United States and Ireland sit near the bottom, at 26% and 31%.
Read itHow to find your best LinkedIn audience in campaigns you’ve already run
Your best audience was in every campaign. A few replies at a time.
Pool every campaign you’ve already run and compare audiences across all of them, because one campaign is too small to show a winner. Founders matched or beat chief executives on replies campaign after campaign, usually by a handful of replies, and only together did it read 23% against 9%.
Read it