Cold email ROI calculator
From meetings booked to gross profit, with the break-even close rate stated plainly. Built to be checkable against your own history rather than to produce a flattering multiple.
Your numbers
Pipeline
If you do not know this yet, work it out from send volume and reply rate first.
Use your own figure. This is a neutral starting value rather than a benchmark: a sending platform cannot see whether a meeting was held, so it is not something our data measures.
Use your own number from meetings sourced this way, not your blended close rate. Cold-sourced deals close at a lower rate than referrals or inbound.
Used to show how long you fund the program before the first deal lands.
Deal economics
First-year contract value. Counting lifetime value here is the most common way this calculation flatters itself.
Revenue is not the return. Margin is what the program actually contributes.
Program cost
Inboxes, data, platform and the loaded cost of the people running it.
Result
Break-even
At $24,000 a deal and 70% margin, each win contributes $16,800. Covering $7,200 a month therefore takes 0.43 deals, which is a 6.7% close rate on 6.4 held meetings. You entered 20.0%.
The number this model is most sensitive to is the close rate, and it is the one people are least honest about. A blended close rate imported from inbound will typically overstate the return here by a multiple, not a margin.
If the meetings figure at the top is a guess rather than a measurement, build it from send volume first with the cost per meeting calculator, using the reply rate we measured across 1,413,405 sends.
How ROI models on this go wrong
Three substitutions do almost all the damage, and each of them is easy to make in good faith. Lifetime value stands in for first-year contract value. Revenue stands in for gross profit. A blended close rate stands in for the rate at which cold-sourced meetings actually close. Any one of them inflates the answer; together they can turn a program that loses money into one that appears to return several times its cost.
The defence is the break-even close rate. It converts the whole model into one testable question: has your cold-sourced close rate ever been that high? If the answer is no, nothing else in the model matters.
For the top of the funnel, the cost per meeting calculator builds a meeting count from send volume, and our benchmark report gives measured reply rates to build it from.
Questions
- Should I use revenue or gross profit to judge cold email ROI?
- Gross profit. Revenue counts money you have to spend to deliver the thing you sold, so a revenue-based return ratio flatters every program with a cost of delivery. This calculator reports return against gross profit for that reason, and shows revenue separately.
- Why does it ask for a cold-sourced close rate specifically?
- Because a blended close rate is dominated by inbound and referral deals, which arrive with intent already established. Cold-sourced opportunities close at a materially lower rate. Importing the blended number is the single most common way this calculation overstates the return, and it overstates it by a multiple rather than a margin.
- What is the break-even close rate?
- The close rate at which gross profit from won deals exactly covers the program cost. It is more useful than the return multiple because it is a single number you can test against your own history: if your cold-sourced close rate has never reached it, the program does not work at that cost and volume, whatever the upside case says.
- Why show the cash funded before the first deal?
- Because a program can be profitable in steady state and still fail because nobody budgeted for the sales cycle. At a three-month cycle you fund three months of cost before the first deal closes, on top of the warming period before the first meeting.