B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
12%
12% -- email response rate for targeted cold PR pitches (personalized to named beat editors) (2026)
Targeted cold PR pitches sent to personalized beat editors achieve a 12% to 18% response rate.
- Reported as a range (12% to 18%) based on author's analysis/tracking of client PR emails
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
12%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Sample Size
1,400
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
75
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
35
Freshness
95
Source
InstantPress
Primary
Tier B
https://www.instantpress.co/blog/email-outreach-guide ↗
Source Article
Email Outreach Guide for PR and Media (The 2026 Edition) | IP
The default answer in 2026 is that cold PR emails do not work. The actual answer is that cold PR emails work fine, but the median cold PR email is structurally broken in ways that guarantee deletion. Editors at major publications receive between 250 and 600 unsolicited pitches per week. They decide …
Original Research
InstantPress
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Source reports a range of 12-18%; midpoint 15% used. Derived from the author's first-party tracking of roughly 1,400 pitch emails sent or reviewed for clients over the last 14 months (approximately mid-2025 to mid-2026).
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
targeted cold PR pitches (personalized to named beat editors): 12% email response rate. Source: InstantPress (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/targeted-pr-pitch-response-rate-2026
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/targeted-pr-pitch-response-rate-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>12%</strong> -- email response rate for targeted cold PR pitches (personalized to named beat editors)<br><small>Source: InstantPress (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/targeted-pr-pitch-response-rate-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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