The end of spray and pray

By Anna Fontanes | March 2026 | 9 min read

Cold outreach response rates have fallen off a cliff. Twenty years ago, a 5% response rate to cold email was standard. Today, 1% is considered decent. Some benchmarks put average cold email open rates below 20%, and reply rates below 2%.

LinkedIn InMails - which were supposed to be higher-touch than email - are hitting all-time lows. Sellers report single-digit reply rates on InMails to first-degree connections.

This isn't because email is broken. It's because when something is free and easy, everyone does it.

When supply is unlimited, attention becomes worthless

Cold outreach works on one basic principle: the recipient hasn't heard from you, so a message from you carries novelty and attention. The recipient sees your name, reads your message, and decides whether to reply.

That's only true when cold outreach is scarce.

The moment you could send 1,000 cold emails in an afternoon without breaking a sweat - and the moment everyone figured out how to do it - the equation changed. Now the recipient's inbox is full of cold messages. The novelty is gone. The attention is gone.

You're not competing with other salespeople for the recipient's attention. You're competing with thousands of other salespeople, plus their actual work email, plus their calendar updates, plus their Slack notifications. Your email is signal in a sea of noise.

This is straightforward supply and demand. When cold outreach was expensive and difficult (you had to find contact info manually, you had to write each email individually, you could send maybe 50 per day), only serious salespeople did it. The ones who did it well stood out.

When it became free and trivial (one click, a hundred emails, templated copy), everyone did it. Response rates collapsed because recipients built immunity.

The commoditisation of spray and pray

There's an entire category of tools now built to make cold outreach easier. Find contacts, write emails, send them, track opens, follow up automatically. All of it fully automated. You sign up, paste in a list, and the system spams 10,000 people on your behalf while you sleep.

This is undeniably efficient. You can reach a lot of people very quickly.

It's also become the baseline. If your selling motion is "find a list and send automated emails," you're doing the same thing as a thousand other companies. You're in the sea of noise.

Sellers often respond to this by sending more emails. If 1% reply, send 1,000 emails and get 10 replies. That math works. But it also assumes that the recipient isn't getting fatigued and that escalating volume will maintain response rates.

It won't. Eventually, recipients don't just ignore your email - they unsubscribe, they mark you as spam, they tell their company's IT team that you're harassing them. Your reputation suffers.

The cost of spray and pray has gone up. It's just invisible.

Why precision is the only remaining advantage

When the cost of reaching people dropped to near-zero, the economics of outreach inverted.

In the old model (expensive outreach): you needed high conversion rates to make the math work. So you were selective. You only reached out to people where you saw a real fit. Conversion rates were high because you were already filtering for quality.

In the new model (free outreach): you can afford low conversion rates. Send 1,000 emails, get 10 replies. The math still works. So precision doesn't matter. Spray and pray works.

Except it's starting not to. Here's why:

First, recipients are drowning. They're not just ignoring you - they're actively filtering. Many corporate email systems now have machine learning filters that identify cold outreach and either delete it or quarantine it. Salesforce, Hubspot, and most corporate CRMs have "block unsolicited emails" settings. When recipients see a lot of similar emails from different senders, they report them as spam, and deliverability gets worse for everyone doing spray and pray.

Second, there's reputation cost. If you're blasting 10,000 people and 50 of them report you as spam, your email domain gets dinged. Your subsequent emails are less likely to land in inboxes.

Third, and most importantly: precision is now the only signal that you've done your homework.

When everyone is sending personalised-looking templates ("Hi [FirstName], I noticed you work at [Company]..."), a message that shows you've actually understood that person's role, their company's situation, and why you're reaching out specifically to them stands out.

It stands out because it's rare.

The shift from quantity to signal

The best sellers right now aren't the ones sending the most emails. They're the ones sending the fewest emails with the most context.

Instead of "I found your name in a database," they're saying "I noticed you were appointed as Finance Director at [Company] in [Month]. Your company filed accounts showing [signal], which suggests you're probably evaluating tools to help with [problem]. We work with companies like yours."

That's not better copy. It's not a better template. It's a different category of message. It shows you've done research. It shows you understand their specific situation. It shows you're not blasting a template to a thousand people.

The recipient might still not reply. But the calculus of whether to read the message has changed. It's not "another cold email," it's "someone who seems to know something about us."

That's worth opening. That's worth 10 seconds of attention.

Multiply that across your outreach, and your reply rate stops collapsing.

The problem with being precise at scale

Here's the trap: being genuinely precise requires genuine research. You can't fake it at scale.

You could theoretically hand-craft 100 researched emails per week. That's manageable. You could do that and maintain high relevance.

But most sales organisations can't function with 100 outbound touches per week. They need 1,000. They need volume.

So they use spray and pray tools. The tools promise "personalisation" - they fill in a name here, a company there - but it's not real personalisation. It's templated personalisation. It's spray and pray with curly brackets.

And it's becoming visibly ineffective. Recipients can tell the difference between "this person researched me" and "this person ran my name through a template."

What precision at scale actually looks like

The only way to maintain precision at scale is to have a system that does the research for you. Automation that doesn't automate the outreach (the easy part), but automates the research (the hard part).

That looks like: define your ideal customer once. The system continuously finds accounts matching that profile. For each account, the system does the research - reads the website, scans the Companies House filing, checks job postings, identifies the buying signal - and presents you with a ready-to-use angle.

You still write the email. But you're not writing it blind. You're writing it based on concrete context. You can reference a specific recent hire, a specific Companies House filing, a specific strategic priority you've identified.

That's precision at scale.

Is that harder than spray and pray? Yes. Does it require better systems? Yes. Does it require you to actually know your ICP? Absolutely.

But it's also the only motion that works anymore.

Why the best sellers know this already

Talk to a good seller, and they'll tell you something that data supports: they don't care about response rates as a metric. They care about who they're reaching out to.

A 30% reply rate from 50 researched emails is better than a 1% reply rate from 5,000 templated emails. Not just because of the numbers, but because the 50 replies probably include qualified opportunities, and the 50 conversations probably include actual, solvable problems.

Spray and pray converts a small percentage into qualified deals. Precision converts a smaller percentage into much larger deals.

The collapse of cold email response rates isn't a failure of email. It's a signal that the method stopped working. The fact that most sellers haven't noticed - they're still trying to make spray and pray work by adding more volume - just means there's an advantage available for teams that understand the shift.

Precision wins. It's just harder.

FAQ

Q: Are you saying cold email doesn't work anymore?

A: No. Cold email works fine if you're precise and you're reaching out based on real signals. What doesn't work anymore is spray and pray - volume-based outreach with minimal research. When everyone's doing that, recipients stop reading the emails.

Q: How do I define precision? What counts as "researched"?

A: Real precision means you've found a specific reason to reach out to that specific person at that specific time. You can point to something real - a Companies House filing, a job posting, a funding round, a director appointment - and explain why that means they might need what you're selling.

Q: Won't precision just mean fewer conversations, which means less pipeline?

A: Short term, yes. You'll send fewer emails. But they'll convert at higher rates, and you'll have fewer dead-end conversations. Over time, precision usually results in more qualified pipeline, not less.

Q: How do I find signals at scale if I'm not using automation?

A: You don't. That's why systems that automate research (not email sending) matter. You define your ideal account, the system identifies signals, you respond.

Q: What if my ICP is really broad? Can I still be precise?

A: Precision gets harder the broader your ICP. But even a broad ICP can be made more specific by using signals. Instead of "all SaaS companies," it's "SaaS companies that have hired a VP of Sales in the last six months."

Q: Isn't it risky to reference specific data in outreach? What if I get it wrong?

A: Yes. That's why signal-based outreach requires accuracy. But the risk is overstated. If you're reading from a public source (Companies House, LinkedIn, a press release), it's verified. And if you're wrong, recipients can correct you - and they usually do, because they're now engaged in a conversation instead of ignoring another templated email.

Author Bio

Anna Fontanes is a revenue operations consultant who has built account scoring and ICP frameworks for UK B2B sales teams across SaaS and professional services. She specialises in making structured prospecting work for teams without dedicated ops resource.