LinkedIn Message Response Rate by Industry: 2024 Benchmark Data

LinkedIn message response rates are not uniform. A 7% reply rate in one industry represents strong performance, while the same number in another signals a poorly targeted campaign. The difference between the highest-performing and lowest-performing industries is more than double.

This article presents the most complete benchmark data available for LinkedIn outreach in 2024, drawn from two complementary datasets: Belkins' analysis of 14,077 individual contact records and Expandi's study of 15.1 million outreach touchpoints across thousands of campaigns run throughout 2025.

The benchmarks below are organized by industry, role, geography, campaign type, and timing. They give sales teams and agencies the context to diagnose what good looks like, where their own campaigns sit relative to the baseline, and which variables to adjust first.

What is a good LinkedIn message response rate?

A good LinkedIn message response rate depends entirely on your industry, target seniority, and campaign type. The overall baseline sits at 7.2% across all industries and message types, measured across 15.1 million contacts reached in 2025.

For teams running standard connector campaigns (connection request followed by messages), 6 to 7% is the expected range. Exceeding that threshold requires tighter audience targeting, stronger messaging, or both.

Messenger campaigns, which target people you are already connected to, perform significantly better. The total reply rate for messenger campaigns is 12.2%, split between 8.7% on first touch and 3.5% on subsequent messages. This is the highest-performing campaign structure in the dataset.

Geography matters more than most teams realize. The United States, which accounts for 5.3 million of the 15 million contacts in the Expandi dataset, shows a 6.0% reply rate. That trails the Netherlands (10.5%), Canada (7.1%), the UK (6.1%), and Australia (6.4%). US-focused teams should not benchmark against the global 7.2% average; doing so will consistently make domestic performance appear weaker than it actually is.

How do LinkedIn response rates compare across industries?

Industry produces the widest performance variation of any variable measured. The gap between the most responsive and least responsive industries is more than double.

Venture capital and private equity lead the table at 10.5%, followed by staffing and recruiting (10.4%) and professional services (9.6%). These are industries where LinkedIn is deeply embedded in day-to-day work, decision-makers are active on the platform, and relevant outreach is expected rather than resented.

At the bottom of the table sit outsourcing and offshoring (4.2%), retail (4.6%), consumer electronics (5.0%), and luxury goods and jewelry (5.2%). These sectors skew toward B2C-heavy professional communities, longer buying cycles, or audiences where LinkedIn is less central to how business gets done.

The practical implication: a 6% reply rate in outsourcing represents strong performance relative to the industry baseline. The same rate in VC would be well below par. Use this data as a calibration tool, not just a target.

Which job roles and seniority levels respond most often?

Role and seniority create meaningful differences in reply behavior. HR and talent professionals respond at the highest rate of any functional group: 10.9%, well above the platform average.

This likely reflects the nature of their work. People in HR are accustomed to fielding outreach, tend to be active LinkedIn users by necessity, and are often evaluated on responsiveness. The channel is native to how they operate.

C-level executives sit in the middle of the distribution at 7.0%, not the bottom. They are harder to reach in absolute terms (lower connection acceptance rates, busier inboxes), but those who do engage appear to do so at a reasonable rate.

Founders and owners trail at 6.4%, suggesting that founder-targeted campaigns need particularly strong messaging to overcome the volume of noise they receive daily.

Marketing and finance professionals are the most difficult to engage, both sitting below 6%. These functions receive high volumes of vendor outreach and have developed strong filters.

Does timing affect LinkedIn message response rates?

Timing creates measurable differences in reply behavior, though the effects are smaller than industry or message quality.

Thursday and Monday are the highest-performing days, each delivering reply rates just above 7.4%. Friday and Saturday are the lowest at 6.9%. The range across the full week is less than one percentage point, which means day selection is a secondary lever compared to targeting and personalization.

The pattern aligns loosely with professional availability: early and mid-week tend to find people in more active professional modes, while Friday activity drops as attention drifts toward the weekend.

Month-to-month variation is slightly wider. April delivered the strongest performance of 2025 at 7.9%, and Q2 as a whole (April through June) ran meaningfully above average. September stands out as the weakest month at 6.3%, mirroring the post-summer re-engagement lag familiar from email outreach.

LinkedIn appears less sensitive to calendar seasonality than email. Monthly fluctuations exist, but they are smaller in magnitude and less likely to materially affect campaign planning. Volume, targeting, and message quality outweigh timing for most teams.

How do different LinkedIn campaign types perform?

Campaign structure drives significant performance differences. The Expandi data covers four distinct campaign types with sufficient volume to benchmark.

Messenger campaigns deliver the highest reply rate: 12.2% total (8.7% first action, 3.5% subsequent actions). Messenger campaigns target people you are already connected to, which explains the elevated performance. The audience has already cleared the acceptance hurdle, and a direct message to a first-degree connection carries more weight than a cold request.

Connector campaigns, the most widely used workflow, achieve a 7.9% total reply rate (4.0% first action, 4.0% subsequent actions). This is the standard LinkedIn prospecting motion: send a connection request, follow up with messages after acceptance. Performance is split evenly between first-touch and follow-up replies. Follow-up messages carry meaningful weight even on LinkedIn.

Builder campaigns, which do not lead with a connection request but instead build warmth through profile visits, follows, and engagement before messaging, show a 5.4% total reply rate (0.06% first action, 5.3% subsequent actions). Almost all reply activity comes from subsequent actions rather than first touch. This aligns with the longer nurture arc of this structure.

Open InMail campaigns, which reach prospects you are not connected to at the cost of InMail credits, achieve a 7.5% reply rate. InMail volume in this dataset is much lower (13,600 contacts), so treat this figure as directionally useful rather than conclusive.

Should you include a note with your connection request?

Including a personalized note with your connection request creates a trade-off. Requests with a note achieve a 25.3% connection acceptance rate; requests without a note achieve 27.6%. The blank request gets accepted slightly more often.

This makes intuitive sense. There is no friction, no pitch to evaluate, nothing to reject before clicking accept. But the downstream engagement tells a different story.

People who accepted a note-accompanied request are meaningfully more likely to reply once the conversation starts: 8.2% versus 5.3%. That is a 55% difference in reply rate.

The interpretation is straightforward: a note acts as a soft filter. Prospects who accept despite knowing what the outreach is about are self-selecting into engagement. Those who accept a blank request may simply be LinkedIn-active people who accept connections broadly and have no particular reason to reply when a sales message arrives afterward.

For teams optimizing for meeting volume rather than just connection volume, including a note is the better strategy despite the marginally lower accept rate.

How do LinkedIn response rates vary by country?

Geography creates meaningful differences in LinkedIn engagement. Among the 17 countries with 100,000 or more contacts reached in 2025, the United States ranks second-to-last among named major markets with a 6.0% reply rate.

This is not a volume or methodology artifact. The US accounts for 5.3 million of the 15 million contacts in the Expandi dataset, making it the figure with the largest sample size in the table.

The relatively lower US rate likely reflects a combination of factors: higher outreach saturation on LinkedIn, more defensive inbox behavior among US professionals, and the platform's longer history as a prospecting channel in North America, leading to more tuned-out recipients.

The Netherlands leads the table at 10.5%, followed by Denmark (9.8%) and Belgium (8.6%). Continental European markets show notably higher engagement rates overall. South African professionals also show high engagement at 9.2%.

For US-based teams, 6% is a reasonable baseline, not a floor. Beating 7 to 8% in a US-focused campaign would represent strong performance. Benchmarking against the global 7.2% average will consistently make domestic performance appear weaker than it is.

Does AI-assisted messaging improve LinkedIn reply rates?

The Expandi dataset includes a direct comparison between campaigns that used AI-generated or AI-assisted message prompts and those that did not, across 3,431 AI campaigns (389,925 contacts) versus 62,103 non-AI campaigns (13.9 million contacts).

Campaigns using AI prompts returned a 7.3% total reply rate (3.7% first action, 3.6% subsequent). Campaigns without AI prompts returned a 7.0% total reply rate (2.8% first action, 4.2% subsequent).

The results show a real but modest advantage for AI-assisted campaigns. The more interesting finding is where the difference shows up. AI-assisted campaigns perform better on first-touch replies (3.72% versus 2.78%), suggesting that AI-enhanced opening messages may be more engaging or better personalized.

Non-AI campaigns slightly outperform on subsequent actions (4.2% versus 3.57%), possibly reflecting more natural, human-feeling follow-up messages.

The net gap is 0.3 percentage points. That is real at scale; across millions of contacts, the difference compounds. For individual campaigns, it is not a decisive factor on its own. AI-assisted messaging appears to be a useful tool: it can sharpen first-touch performance, but it does not replace the fundamentals of audience targeting and message relevance.

What do InMail response rates look like in 2024?

InMail, LinkedIn's premium messaging feature that allows you to contact people you are not connected to, continues to outperform cold email by a significant margin.

LinkedIn reported InMail response rates ranging from 18% to 25% in data covering May 2023 through April 2024, with the highest rates appearing in specific industries. By comparison, cold email averages around 3.4% according to broader outreach benchmarking.

The oil, gas, and mining industry saw InMail response rates 24% above the global average, while utilities came in 17% above average. Both industries experienced sharp declines in year-over-year hiring rates during the measurement period, which may explain why candidates responded at such high rates: fewer opportunities made each one more valuable.

Other top-performing industries for InMail included retail, accommodation and food services, and manufacturing. Interestingly, nearly all five of these industries are based around in-person roles whose day-to-day work does not lend itself easily to remote work.

On the recipient side, quality assurance professionals responded to InMails at a rate 16% higher than the global average, while HR professionals responded at 15% above average. Program, project, and product managers provided response rates ranging from 11% to 15% above average.