New Report: Apollo.io Exceeds Industry Benchmarks for Data Quality and Cold Email Outreach

Independent study achieves 2.37% email-to-meeting conversion, surpassing 0.5-1.5% industry average using Apollo's AI-native GTM platform

SAN FRANCISCO, April 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Apollo.io, a leading AI-native go-to-market platform, today released its 2026 Go-To-Market Effectiveness and Data Quality Report, a firsthand independent evaluation of Apollo's platform and database, as well as a competitive analysis against industry benchmarks and Apollo's peerset. The report, conducted by The Tolly Group, highlights how Apollo's unified, AI-powered GTM platform materially improves outbound performance for email deliverability, and produces conversion rates that exceed industry benchmarks.

Apollo commissioned the Tolly Group to evaluate its platform by running a real, "from scratch" live GTM campaign. Over the course of a month-long campaign, using the Apollo platform, Tolly contacted 384 target users at 205 companies, with three sequences being completed for 169 customers. In doing so, Tolly was also able to evaluate the quality of contacts, AI benefits, the graphical user interface (GUI), and other factors. Key findings from the campaign and analysis include:

• A 2.37% cold-to-meeting conversion rate, far outpacing the industry average of 0.5-1.5%.
• A 45% open rate, exceeding the industry standard of 27-40%.
• Zero time wasted toggling between different sales tools, as Apollo provides a single, unified platform for all GTM functions and eliminates the need for a fragmented GTM stack.

Further reinforcing the quality of the results, the campaign was conducted for a completely new product, coming from a vendor with which most of the recipients did not have any prior experience or familiarity. It was also conducted without the standard 4-6 week period of email warming. In spite of these factors, which would typically depress response rates, the campaign far exceeded industry benchmarks.

As part of its evaluation, Tolly also conducted a cost and feature comparison with Apollo and several leading competitors. It concluded that Apollo is the most cost-effective and simply priced solution, and the only vendor offering full-stack capabilities with its standard model.

These findings are the latest testament to the value and impact of Apollo's AI-native approach to GTM. Apollo was recently recognized on a number of G2's 2026 Best Software Award lists, including Best Sales Software, Best AI Software and Best Global Software. Apollo was the only sales intelligence platform ranked on G2's Best AI Software Products list.

"Independent validation from third parties like Tolly is critical for understanding how our platform performs," said Marcio Arnecke, Chief Marketing Officer at Apollo. "While we hear positive feedback from customers every day, these evaluations are exceptionally strong indicators of the value we're delivering to our millions of users."

To learn more about how Apollo's industry-leading, AI-native GTM platform is transforming the sales funnel, visit: https://www.apollo.io.

About Apollo.io

Apollo.io is the AI-powered end-to-end go-to-market platform that empowers sales, marketing, and revenue teams to find prospects, engage customers, and close deals with intelligence and efficiency. Trusted by millions of users and hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide, Apollo uniquely combines the industry's largest B2B contact database with an AI-native GTM platform to help teams of any size deliver revenue growth at scale. Learn more at https://apollo.io.

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SOURCE Apollo.io