We run LinkedIn and email for most of our clients, so we can compare them like for like: same client, same months, same kind of buyer.
From 1 May to 26 October 2026, across 16 clients:
- Email: 175,398 people approached, 1.8% replied.
- LinkedIn: 59,272 people approached, 4.2% replied.
LinkedIn beat email for 15 of the 16.
Meetings
From 18 September we classified every reply on both channels the same way and counted meetings per channel. Thirteen clients, five and a half weeks:
| People approached | 43,695 | 20,880 |
| Replies from real people | 1.72% | 4.62% |
| Positive replies | 0.60% | 2.01% |
| Meetings per 1,000 people | 1.21 | 3.02 |
| Meetings | 53 | 63 |
LinkedIn booked more meetings from less than half the people.
So Why Keep Sending Email?
Reach. A LinkedIn profile can only send so many connection requests a week. Email scales with the number of healthy mailboxes you run.
Email reached three times as many people in those five and a half weeks and still booked 53 meetings.
And an interested email reply is a little more likely to turn into a meeting: 20%, against 15% on LinkedIn.
The Exception
One client did better on email: a Danish creative technology studio, 5.2% on email against 2.0% on LinkedIn.
So test both before you decide.
What We Do
LinkedIn converts, email scales. We run both, one channel at a time per person, so nobody hears from us on two channels at once.
Across 19 client teams we’ve sent 98,719 connection requests since June 2025. 21.3% were accepted, and 20% of accepted connections replied.
The full comparison is on the results page.