Most pages on this question are written by a company selling one of the two channels. The useful data comes from somewhere less obvious: Belkins, a B2B appointment-setting agency that runs both, published separate 2025 studies of its own calls and its own emails. Same agency, same year, same kind of client. Put side by side, they answer the question with a ratio you can price.
The two studies, side by side
| Cold calling | Cold email | |
|---|---|---|
| Volume, 2025 | 175,000+ dials | 7,530,489 emails |
| First response | 9.9% of dials reach a person | 0.45% of emails get a reply |
| Response to meeting | 4.6% of conversations | about 3.5% of replies |
| Touches per meeting | about 370 dials | about 6,275 emails |
Sources: Belkins, cold calling benchmarks (175,000+ dials logged through 2025; outcome and seniority breakdowns from five anonymised client campaign exports) and cold email response rates (7,530,489 cold emails in Belkins client campaigns, January to December 2025). The email meeting figure divides 7,530,489 sends by the "over 1,200" appointments Belkins reports, so the true figure is somewhat better than one per 6,275.
Per touch, a dial produced about 17 times as many meetings as an email.
Two cautions before using that number. Belkins says its calls usually come as the third or fourth touch, after emails went unanswered, so the call figures describe prospects who had already seen the name. And Belkins' email reply rate divides by emails sent. Studies that report 5 percent and up divide by opens; Belkins notes that "a 5% reply rate against openers and a 0.45% reply rate against total sends can describe the same campaign".
Turning the ratio into a cost decision
The question becomes: does one dial cost you more or less than 17 sent emails?
What a meeting's worth of dials costs. 370 dials on a Twilio account bill about 191 minutes once voicemails are billed a full minute each, which is about $2.67 at Twilio's published $0.014 a minute. The telephony is trivial. The rep is not. At the 120 to 200 dials a day MRR Nerds estimates for a single-line power dialer, 370 dials are 1.9 to 3.1 rep-days. Dialing by hand at an estimated 35 to 50 a day, they are 7.4 to 10.6 rep-days. Those dial rates are editorial estimates, not measurements.
What a meeting's worth of email costs. About 6,275 sends: the contact data, the sending domains and inboxes, the warm-up and deliverability tooling, and whoever writes and monitors the sequences. We have not priced those, because the range across tools is wide and we have not verified it.
The comparison. Divide your loaded cost of one rep-day by your dials per day. If that cost per dial is less than 17 times your all-in cost per sent email, calling books meetings more cheaply. If it is more, email does, provided the list is large enough to absorb 6,275 sends per meeting.
That last condition settles it for a lot of teams. If there are 400 companies who could buy your product, you cannot send 6,275 emails per meeting without emailing every one of them many times over. A small market gets called.
Who answers which channel
The seniority data in both studies points the same way.
Email: founders and owners replied at 0.57 percent, C-level at 0.42 percent and VPs at 0.32 percent (Belkins).
Calls: every C-level positive outcome in Belkins' call data was a request for a follow-up by phone or email. None booked a meeting live. Directors produced the largest share of booked meetings (Belkins).
RAIN Group reports that 57% of C-level and VP buyers say they prefer to be contacted by phone (RAIN Group, 2025). Read with Belkins' data, the phone gets senior buyers to engage, and the meeting gets booked over email afterwards. Have the follow-up email written before you dial.
Which goes first
Email first, then call, for three reasons in the data:
- Belkins' own sequences run that way, and its 4.6 percent conversation-to-meeting rate was measured on calls placed after email silence.
- Calls feed email. In Belkins' call data, 9 percent of the outcomes that did not book a meeting were a request for a follow-up by email.
- Voicemail feeds email, up to a point. Gong's 2024 analysis found email replies rose from 2.73 percent with no voicemail to 5.87 percent after one or two, then fell to 2.2 percent after three or more. Gong's and Belkins' email rates come from different datasets and are not comparable with each other; the direction within Gong's data is the useful part.
The exception: call first on a trigger. A funding announcement, a relevant hire, a new location. Everyone else with a list emails about it within days. A call that names the trigger in the first fifteen seconds gets there first.
How many touches
Fewer than the old "six to eight" figure suggests for the phone. Cognism's 2026 report puts the average at 1.55 calls to reach a prospect, against 2.9 in its 2025 data, and Belkins reached 24.5 percent of prospects at least once across about three dials each. A sequence that alternates channels:
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Email, short, one specific observation |
| 2 | Email reply to the first, no new pitch |
| 3 | Call. Mention the email if they opened it |
| 4 | Call at a different hour, voicemail number one |
| 5 | Email following up the voicemail |
| 6 | Call on a different weekday, voicemail number two |
| 7 | Break-up email |
Two voicemails at most, per Gong. Three dials covers the averages Cognism and Belkins report.
Is either channel dead?
Neither, on 2025 and 2026 data. Cognism's 2026 report puts the cold calling success rate at 2.7 percent, up from 2.3 percent. Belkins' email reply rate drifted down through 2025 to a December low of 0.35 percent, and the same 7.5 million emails still booked over 1,200 meetings. Both channels work, and Belkins, the one source that measures both, runs them together.
The tooling implication
If you are running both channels, running them in two systems is where sequences go to die. The rep calls from one tool, emails from another, and the follow-up state lives in neither.
Tools that hold calls, emails and tasks on one timeline include Close, Apollo, DialSheet and JustCall. Dedicated parallel dialers like Orum, Nooks, Salesfinity and Koncert have no email at all and assume a sequencer underneath, which is a real cost when comparing their seat prices.
Frequently asked questions
- Is cold calling or cold email more effective?
- Per touch, cold calling. Belkins' 2025 data shows one meeting per 370 cold call dials and one per 6,275 cold emails, about 17 times the meetings per touch for calling. Email costs far less per touch and needs no rep time to send, so the answer for your team depends on whether a dial costs you more or less than 17 sent emails once rep time, data and sending infrastructure are counted.
- Should you cold call or email first?
- Email first, in most cases. Belkins, whose 2025 call data shows a 4.6 percent conversation-to-meeting rate, places calls as the third or fourth touch after email silence. Its C-level contacts never booked live on a call; every positive outcome was a request for a follow-up by phone or email. The exception is a fresh, specific trigger such as a funding round or a new hire, where calling first reaches the prospect before the emails about it do.
- Is cold calling outdated?
- No. Cognism's 2026 report, from 200,000+ calls, puts the cold calling success rate at 2.7 percent, up from 2.3 percent a year earlier, and Belkins booked a meeting for about every 370 dials across 175,000+ in 2025. RAIN Group reports that 57% of C-level and VP buyers prefer phone contact. What has aged badly is dialing without email in the sequence, since Belkins' calls follow unanswered emails.
- Is cold email still effective in 2026?
- Yes, at a low rate per send. Belkins sent 7,530,489 cold emails in 2025 and recorded a 0.45 percent reply rate, counted as replies over emails sent, with December the weakest month at 0.35 percent. The same campaigns booked over 1,200 appointments, about one per 6,275 emails. Reply rates quoted at 5 percent or more usually divide by opens, which Belkins says can describe the same campaign.
- How much does a cold call cost compared to a cold email?
- The telephony on 370 dials, one meeting's worth in Belkins' 2025 data, is about $2.67 on a Twilio account at $0.014 a minute. The real cost is the rep: at the 120 to 200 dials a day MRR Nerds estimates for a power dialer, 370 dials take 1.9 to 3.1 rep-days. Email's cost is data and sending infrastructure across about 6,275 sends per meeting. Multiply each by your own rates and compare.
How to cite this page
Abhi Chawla. "Cold calling vs cold email: one agency's 2025 data, both channels." MRR Nerds, 2026-10-11. https://www.mrrnerds.com/guides/cold-calling-vs-cold-email. Accessed 2026-10-20.
The underlying vendor data is published at /data under CC BY 4.0. Cite the dataset for numbers, this page for the analysis.