--- title: "Lead generation calculator" description: "Work back from a meeting or revenue goal to how many people to email, how many emails and inboxes that takes, and your cost per lead. Free, no sign-up." canonical: https://www.acquisity.ai/tools/lead-generation-calculator --- # Lead generation calculator > Work back from a meeting or revenue goal to how many people to email, how many emails and inboxes that takes, and your cost per lead. Free, no sign-up. Enter the meetings you want each month and your reply and booking rates to see how many people to email, how many emails that takes and how many inboxes to send them from. Add what you spend to see your cost per lead and per meeting, or start from the new business you want instead. Use the tool in a browser at [/tools/lead-generation-calculator](https://www.acquisity.ai/tools/lead-generation-calculator). It is free and needs no sign-up. ## How to work out how many leads you need Start from the goal and work back one step at a time. If 30% of the people who reply interested book a meeting, 10 meetings take 10 ÷ 0.30 ≈ 33.3 interested replies, so 34. If 2% of the people you email reply interested, 10 meetings take 10 ÷ 0.30 ÷ 0.02 ≈ 1,666.7 people, so 1,667. With 3 emails each, that’s 5,001 emails a month. To start from revenue, divide the new business you want by what a client is worth, then divide by the share of sales meetings you win. $20,000 a month at $5,000 a client is 4 clients, and at a 25% win rate that’s 16 meetings. ## What cost per lead means Cost per lead is what you spend on lead generation divided by the leads it brings in. Here a lead is someone who replies interested, so $3,000 a month for 34 interested replies is $88.24 per lead. The same spend gives a cost per person emailed ($1.80) and a cost per meeting ($300.00). Count everything the work costs: contact data, tools, inboxes and domains, and the time of whoever writes and sends the emails. If an agency charges per lead or per meeting, compare its price with yours. To see what each new client costs, use the [CAC calculator](https://www.acquisity.ai/tools/cac-calculator). ## What a good positive reply rate looks like A positive reply shows interest. Out-of-office replies, “not interested” and “remove me” don’t count. Your total reply rate counts every reply, so it’s always higher than your positive reply rate, and this calculator needs the positive one. Rates vary with the list, the offer and the market. Acquisity’s campaign analytics call a positive reply rate above 2% healthy. Use that as a starting guess, not a promise, and switch to your own rates once you have them. ## How many inboxes you need Divide the emails you send in a month by what one inbox sends. Acquisity plans for up to 30 campaign emails a day per inbox, Monday to Friday, so one inbox sends about 650 emails a month: 30 × 260 sending days ÷ 12 months. Sending is capped per inbox because an inbox that sends a lot of cold email is more likely to be flagged as spam, and then its emails stop reaching inboxes. Spreading the same volume over more inboxes keeps each one low. 30 a day is what Acquisity’s campaigns plan for each inbox. Change it under More options. ## Leads and contacts A contact is anyone on your list: a name and an email address. A lead is a contact who has shown interest, here by replying interested. You email contacts to get leads, and leads become meetings. Lists sold as “leads” are usually contacts. The calculator’s people count is how many contacts you need each month. ## Questions ### How do I calculate how many leads I need? Divide the meetings you want by the share of interested replies that book one, then by the share of people who reply interested. 10 meetings at 30% and 2% is 10 ÷ 0.30 ÷ 0.02 ≈ 1,666.7, so you email 1,667 people. ### How do I calculate cost per lead? Divide what you spend by the number of leads. $3,000 a month for 34 interested replies is $3,000 ÷ 34 ≈ $88.24 per lead. ### What is a good cold email response rate? It depends on the list, the offer and the market. Acquisity’s campaign analytics call a positive reply rate above 2% healthy. Your total reply rate is higher, because it also counts replies that aren’t interested. ### How many emails can one inbox send a day? Acquisity plans each campaign for up to 30 emails a day for every inbox it sends from, and at most 70% of a campaign’s emails go to new contacts: 21 a day for one inbox. The rest are kept for follow-ups. So if each person gets only one email, plan on about 1.4 times the inboxes shown here. ### Why does the number of emails matter? Each person gets every email in your sequence until they reply, so 1,667 people with 3 emails each is up to 5,001 emails a month. That sets how many inboxes you need. ### How does this calculator round? You can’t email part of a person or book part of a meeting, so every count is rounded up to the next whole number. Costs are rounded to the nearest cent, with half a cent rounded up. In the working, a division that gives a count is shown to one decimal place, with = when it’s exact, ≈ when it’s rounded and < 0.1 when it’s too small to show. When one decimal place would show the whole number below the count, it shows up to 4, like 651 emails × 12 months ÷ 7,800 ≈ 1.002, so 2 inboxes, and > 1, so 2 inboxes when even 4 would show 1. A cost that isn’t whole cents shows its exact value, up to 4 decimal places, then its rounding to the cent: $1.00 ÷ 8 people = $0.125, rounded to $0.13. A cost with more decimals shows ≈ and 4 of them, like ≈ $1.7996, rounded to $1.80, or more when 4 would round to other cents, like ≈ $0.20495, rounded to $0.20. One too small for 4 decimals shows < $0.0001. ## Want your real rates instead of guesses? Acquisity’s campaign analytics show your positive reply rate and how many replies became booked calls, step by step. Acquisity plans for up to 30 campaign emails a day per inbox. [Cold Email Agent](https://www.acquisity.ai/agents/cold-email). --- Web page: https://www.acquisity.ai/tools/lead-generation-calculator Site index for agents: https://www.acquisity.ai/llms.txt