How long do LinkedIn prospects take to reply?
The no’s come fast. The maybes take their time.
Upscale Outreach ·
Within hours: the median reply came 4 hours after our message, 72% within a day and 95% within a week. But the fastest are the most negative: 40% of replies inside the first hour were a plain no, against 24% of those that took over a week.
Outscale benchmarks, from 112,991 prospects reached in real campaigns.
Most replies land the same day
The median reply came 4 hours after our message. 72% arrived within a day, and 95% within a week.
- Within an hour27%
- 1 to 24 hours46%
- 1 to 3 days15%
- 3 to 7 days7.9%
- 1 to 2 weeks2.4%
- Over 2 weeks2.5%
The no’s come fast
A fast reply is usually a quick no. 40% of replies inside the first hour were a plain no. Of replies that took over a week, 24% were. And the slow ones were more often worth answering: 53% against 42%.
Worth answering A plain no
- Within an hour42%40%
- 1 to 24 hours44%38%
- 1 to 7 days49%33%
- Over a week53%24%
It held inside the same campaigns too: the pattern runs across audiences.
A no costs nothing. You read it, you know, you type “not for us” before your next meeting. A maybe takes thought: a look at the diary, a word with a colleague, a check on the budget. So the considered answers come later, and they’re better for it.
After the sequence goes quiet
A few replies arrive long after the last message: 2.5% came more than two weeks later. 54% of those were worth answering, more than replies overall. And they got answered no more often than the fast ones: 56%, against 57%. By then, nobody is watching the campaign.
What to do today
- Don’t judge a campaign on day one. The first replies are the quickest no’s. Give it a week, by which time 95% of the replies are in.
- Keep watching after the sequence ends. The late replies are the considered ones.
- Answer the slow ones as fast as the quick ones. How fast to answer is in how fast should you reply to a LinkedIn message.
More in messages and sequences
Is there a best time of year for LinkedIn outreach?
The holiday slump lives in the sender’s diary.
No. Across two years of real campaigns, messages sent in August got replies at 8.1%, the same as the average month, and December’s at 9.6%. Against each campaign’s own average, every month landed within 11%.
Read itHow long should you wait between LinkedIn follow-ups?
Anything from a day to a month. Past that, you’re a stranger again.
Anything from a day to four weeks. Compared within the same campaign and step, every gap in that range landed within 12% of the campaign’s usual reply rate. Wait more than a month and replies fell by 19%.
Read itWhat day and time get the most LinkedIn replies?
Whenever they’re awake. The day barely matters.
Barely any day or hour stands out. In the prospect’s own time and compared within the same campaigns, every weekday landed within 6% of the usual reply rate, Monday the slowest. The one time that cost replies was overnight: messages landing between midnight and 7am got 12% fewer.
Read itHow many follow-up messages should you send on LinkedIn?
More than feels polite.
Don’t stop before the fifth message. In real campaigns, 26% of replies came to message three, four or five, and they were as often worth answering as replies to the first. About one follow-up in 2,000 drew an annoyed reply.
Read it