Blog · Running outreach at scale
How many LinkedIn replies go unanswered?
The reply arrived. Nobody was home.
Upscale Outreach ·
42% of the LinkedIn replies worth answering never got a single message back, including 28% of the people who said they were interested. Quiet inboxes dropped more of them than busy ones.
Outscale benchmarks, from 112,149 prospects reached in real campaigns.
42% of replies worth answering never get one
Someone took the time to write back. They said they were interested. Or they asked a question, or handed over a colleague’s name. Then they waited.
Across real campaigns, 42% of the replies worth answering never got a single message back. No answer, no pleasantry, no calendar link. Silence.
- Said “thanks”57%
- Pointed to a colleague43%
- Gave their email or number42%
- Asked a question37%
- Said “come back later”33%
- Said they were interested28%
We left out the replies with no chance of a meeting: flat nos, the wrong person, the annoyed and the auto-replies. Answering those spends LinkedIn send quota you’d do better to spend on new prospects. Silence on a dead end is right. Silence on a maybe is the leak.
Look at where the silence falls. 28% of the people who said they were interested heard nothing. 43% of the people who pointed to a colleague heard nothing either.
Picture it from their side. You said yes. You waited a day, then a week. You decided they’d lost interest, or that you’d said something wrong. You won’t be the one to write again.
Quiet inboxes drop more replies than busy ones
You’d expect the busiest inboxes to drop the most. Split the inboxes in two by how many replies they get, and the quieter half left 46% unanswered. The busier half left 41%.
13%100%
From one inbox to the next, the share ran from 13% to 100%. Same campaigns, same offer, same kind of prospect. The difference is whether anybody is watching.
Outreach at scale runs from lots of LinkedIn profiles. A founder’s. A salesperson’s. One lent by somebody who has never sold anything. Every inbox belongs to someone, and replies land there between recruiter spam and birthday reminders. The owner thinks the campaign team is watching. The campaign team thinks the owner will flag anything good.
Psychologists call it diffusion of responsibility. The more people who could answer, the less likely anyone does. A busy inbox gets watched because it’s busy. A quiet one gets forgotten, and its replies with it.
The ones you lose are the ones that said yes
Got an answer Heard nothing
- Said they were interested11%2.7%
- Asked a question5.7%1.9%
- Said “come back later”2.7%0.3%
- Said “thanks”4%4.3%
Answer someone who said they were interested and 11% booked. Leave them, and 2.7% booked anyway, under their own steam.
The odd one out is “thanks”. Answering one booked about as often as ignoring it, because most answers to a thanks are just another pleasantry. What books after a thanks is a different story.
And these weren’t replies still sitting in a to-do list. The typical unanswered reply in our benchmark was 9 months old. Long gone.
What to do today
- Give every inbox an owner. One named person per LinkedIn profile, written down where the whole team can see it.
- Check the quiet ones first. The inbox that gets a reply a week is the one nobody opens.
- Go back for the yeses. Search last month’s replies for anyone who said yes, asked a question or named a colleague, and write to them today.
- Count your own silence. Pick one inbox and count the replies from the last month with nothing after them.
- Leave the dead ends. A flat no or a wrong person needs no answer. Spend the send on someone new.