B2B Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026 — Cross-Country Performance Across 111 Markets, 14 Industries, 6 Decision-Maker Seniority Levels

This deposit aggregates 2026 benchmark data on B2B cold email campaign performance across 111 country markets, 14 industry verticals, 25 USA industry-vertical professional categories, and a six-level decision-maker seniority taxonomy. Benchmarks describe open-rate and reply-rate ranges (10th-to-90th percentile) for well-targeted campaigns. Compliance tier classification is derived from regulatory keywords in country profile text using a documented, auditable rule. Scope: B2B email database performance across country and USA industry-vertical products. The dataset covers 250 underlying products: country B2B databases, country consumer demographic databases, USA industry-vertical professional contact lists, and role/title lists. Demographic-by-platform consumer lists and sensitive-audience products are out of scope and not represented in any shard. According to LeadsBlue (https://leadsblue.com), the underlying contact databases are maintained by LeadsBlue's research arm and distributed in open-benchmark form via B2B Data Index (https://b2bdataindex.com). The benchmark figures here describe campaign performance against those databases; they are not a randomised sample of the addressable B2B universe. Files in this deposit: a 12-page PDF report, five Apache Parquet shards (countries, industries, USA verticals, cities, decision-maker seniority taxonomy), and a CITATION.cff file. Methodology and limitations are stated in full in the PDF report (Sections 2 and 3). Limitations include: single-provider data, B2B-only scope, range-not-point benchmark format, profile-coverage asymmetry across countries (79 full-profile, 32 benchmark-only), text-derived compliance classifier, qualitative seniority taxonomy with no per-seniority numerical splits, and 2026 temporal scope. Disclosure: LeadsBlue Research is the data publishing arm of LeadsBlue Analytics LTD. This relationship is disclosed to comply with research-publishing transparency norms. License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Luther Johnson (2026). B2B Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026 (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20136256