Research on how B2B companies find customers
Carroway Research measures outbound email, lead lists, events and sponsorships, and publishes the dataset behind every note.
Latest notes
- Note 11
Cold emails with an exclamation mark drew half the interested replies of those without, across 1.1 million first emails
We counted 102 spam trigger phrases in the bodies of 1,116,744 first cold emails sent from October 2025 to October 2026. 8.8% carried at least one, and they drew 0.75% human replies against 0.69% for emails with none.
- Note 11
Of 19 physician email list sellers, 5 print a price on their own pages and 2 state all five things a buyer needs to compare them
We read 19 sellers' physician-list pages on 6 October 2026 and scored what each states: a printed price, a free sample, a named data source, a written remedy for bad emails and a US count.
- Note 10
6 of 15 services that find newsletter sponsors don't say what they take from a publisher
We read the pricing, fee and help pages of 15 services newsletter publishers use to find sponsors on 6 October 2026, re-checked them on 7 November 2026, and scored each on 8 published criteria. 9 state what they take, 5 charge a flat price or nothing, and 2 state a figure for money earned or outcomes.
- Note 09
Only 2 of 6 conference sponsor databases list sponsors by event, and only 1 publishes sponsorship package prices
We read the home, pricing and product pages of 6 sources of conference sponsor and exhibitor data on 6 October 2026 and scored each on 6 criteria. 5 publish a price, 4 list trade show exhibitors and 4 sell named contacts.
- Note 08
Brands seen buying newsletter ads grew 3.4 times from June to September, but ads per issue in a fixed set of 3,381 newsletters rose 9%
We counted brands with an ad in a newsletter issue in four 30-day windows from 2 June to 29 September 2026 and followed 3,381 newsletters read in every window: brands seen grew from 589 to 2,015 while newsletters read grew 6.8 times and ads per issue 9.0%.
- Note 07
Medicare's August 2026 file counts US doctors in 30 specialties, from 46,004 emergency physicians and 29,847 cardiologists to 3,608 allergists
Medicare's clinician file dated 18 August 2026 lists 29,847 cardiologists and 13,599 dermatologists. We counted 30 specialties and profiled each by gender, degree, graduation year, telehealth and group size.
- Note 06
Newsletters list a main sponsor slot at a median $399, and small lists ask 8 times as much per subscriber as large ones
We read 1,055 newsletter advertise pages and booking storefronts on 29 September 2026 and kept 1,133 prices for one placement in one issue: the median main slot lists at $399, and the median price per 1,000 subscribers is $23.62, falling from $62.50 under 5,000 subscribers to $7.77 at 100,000 or more.
- Note 05
Human replies to B2B cold email fell from 0.55% to 0.40% of sends between May and August 2026
We measured reply rates month by month on 736,078 prospect emails sent by 42 B2B outbound programs from May to August 2026: 2.2% drew a reply, 0.48% a reply from a person and 0.18% a positive reply, and the human and positive rates fell every month while monthly sends rose from 102,525 to 255,675.
- Note 04
US conference sponsorships run from a median $2,225 entry package to a median $16,000 top package
We read the published sponsorship prices of 569 US conferences and trade shows and the public sponsor lists of 944 events dated 2025 to 2028, and found that the median event names 6 sponsors while Microsoft, Google and Amazon are each named at 44 or more events.
- Note 03
86.4% of the 4,195 brands seen sponsoring newsletters appeared in only one newsletter
We analyzed a database of newsletter sponsorships collected from 260,443 newsletter issues published between June 1 and September 22, 2026, and found 4,195 brands in 10,482 sponsor placements, most of them in a single newsletter, with larger lists, beehiiv newsletters and tech, AI, business and marketing titles running sponsors most often.
- Note 02
Recent-launch lists drew 4 times the positive reply rate of firmographic lists in B2B cold email
We compared positive replies per send across cold email lists from outbound programs run for 416 B2B companies (5.59M sends), and lists built on a recent launch or a named event beat plain firmographic lists while job-post hiring and customer-lookalike lists fell below them in both periods studied.
- Note 01
35.5% of US small-business email addresses are on free providers like Gmail and Yahoo
We counted 559,231 business email addresses across 33 professions. Hair salons are highest at 67.7%. Financial advisors are lowest at 4.3%.