Four touches capture 93 percent of the replies. The fifth costs you the domain.

How many follow-ups, spaced how far apart. The question arrives in every outbound plan and the answers on the internet range from two to eleven. Both extremes are defended with data from somebody's SaaS campaign in North America, which tells you nothing about a German procurement lead.

Here is what the numbers look like in European B2B, and the reasoning that should set your number rather than a benchmark.

Where the replies actually come from

Across our European campaigns, the distribution of replies by touch is consistent enough to plan against.

Four touches capture 93 percent of everything you were going to get. The fifth adds 5 points. The sixth and seventh together add 2, and they cost you complaints, suppressions and the reputation of the domain that has to carry the next campaign.

Four is the number for European B2B. Five if the fourth is a genuine breakup message with no ask.

Why the American answer does not transfer

Eight-touch sequences are standard in US outbound and they work there, in a market where a prospecting email is an accepted part of business life. Europe is not one market and it does not have one norm.

A German recipient on the fifth unsolicited message has grounds for a cease and desist letter, and persistence counts against you in the assessment. A Dutch buyer will tell you directly to stop. A French recipient covered by the CNIL's guidance is entitled to a prospecting message related to their profession, not to seven of them.

Volume of touches is a compliance variable in Europe, not only a performance one.

Spacing

Three to four working days between the first and second touch. Five to seven between each of the rest. The sequence runs about three weeks end to end.

Two failure modes bracket that range. Under two days reads as pressure and produces unsubscribes rather than replies. Over ten days breaks continuity, because the recipient has no memory of the first message and each touch arrives as a fresh cold email.

Send between 08:00 and 10:00 local to the recipient, Tuesday to Thursday. Monday competes with the weekend backlog and Friday afternoon disappears. This matters less than the copy and it costs nothing to get right.

Local to the recipient, not local to you. A campaign into Portugal, Poland and Finland spans three timezones, and sending everything at 09:00 Vilnius time puts your Portuguese messages in the 07:00 pile.

What each touch should carry

The most common structural mistake is four messages that all say the same thing at different lengths. Each touch needs its own job.

Touch one: the observation and the ask. The dated signal that put them on the list, the problem it implies, one sentence of proof, and a small ask. Under 120 words.

Touch two: the proof. Reply in the same thread. Add the evidence the first message did not have room for: a named customer in their sector, a number with a source, a specific piece of the work. Under 80 words.

Touch three: a different angle. New thread, new subject. If the operations framing did not land, try the finance framing. This touch exists to test whether the problem was wrong rather than the timing.

Touch four: the close. One or two lines. No pitch, no link, no ask. "Reading this as bad timing. I will stop here. If it changes, I am easy to find."

Touch four outperforms touch three in most of our campaigns, which surprises people. Removing the pressure produces answers from the people who were interested and busy.

Threading

Replying in the same thread for touch two keeps context and reads as a person following up. Threading all four is worse: the recipient sees a stack of their own non-responses, which reads as an accusation.

Two threads across four touches works well. One and two together, three and four together with a fresh subject line.

Length

Under 120 words for the first touch. The recipient reads it on a phone, and anything longer gets deferred to a desktop session that never happens.

The compression test: cut every sentence that is about you. What survives is the observation, the implication, one piece of evidence, and the ask. Most first emails lose 40 percent to this and improve.

When to stop entirely

After touch four, that contact is done for this campaign. Not done forever, done for this reason.

Re-approach when you have a new reason: a new signal at their company, a new customer in their sector, a genuine product change, or the date they told you to come back on. Six months is the minimum gap without one of those, and running the same sequence again with a new subject line is how you get reported.

Seventeen days, four messages, 93 percent of the available replies, and a domain that survives to run the next campaign. The teams that push to eight touches are buying the last 7 percent with the asset the whole programme depends on.