The Teams Using AI the Most for Outbound Email Are the Ones Saying It's Getting Harder, New Folderly Research Finds

A survey of 100 B2B sales professionals shows 70% use AI for outbound email but delivery is collapsing, with 79% finding a prospect never received their email.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, June 18, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Folderly, the email deliverability platform for B2B outbound teams, today published Fixing B2B SaaS Outbound Email Deliverability in 2026, a report combining original survey research with platform benchmark data. The headline finding cuts against the prevailing assumption that AI has made outbound easier: the professionals leaning hardest on AI to write their emails are the same ones reporting that outbound is getting harder.

Across a survey of 100 B2B SaaS sales and email marketing professionals in tech and finance, 70% now use AI for at least some outbound emails and 20% use it for all or almost all of them. Yet 82% believe AI-written emails are detectable by recipients, and only 7% think recipients can't tell. The pattern deepens in the data: among respondents who said outbound has gotten "a little harder," 75% use AI to write their emails. Among those who said it has gotten "a lot easier," 32% use no AI at all - proportionally the largest no-AI group in the study.

"Lower barriers to writing more email are not the same as more email reaching the inbox," said Anastasiia Ivannikov, CEO of Folderly. "AI-generated outbound is flooding inboxes and triggering new filtering heuristics at exactly the moment Gmail and Microsoft have raised the bar. The volume goes up, the quality signal goes down, and deliverability starts to degrade."

Deliverability is failing silently as teams scale

The report frames a problem most outbound teams can't see. Without a deliverability layer, emails land in spam with no error, no bounce, and no signal that anything is wrong. The survey suggests the experience is already widespread: 79% of respondents have been told a prospect never received their email, with roughly one in five saying it happens "often." Separately, 65% have had cold email sequences suddenly stop getting replies and 95% agree that inbox placement matters to sales success.

The data points to a structural cause rather than a content one. Only 11% of organizations have a dedicated deliverability function. Ownership most often falls to sales, which is named as the responsible team 38% of the time - ahead of IT at 22% - while a combined 16% either don't know who owns deliverability or admit no one does. When sales managers answer for themselves, 48% say it lands on them, reinforcing what Folderly hears repeatedly from customers: the problem falls to one person who doesn't have the tools to fix it.

Recovery is possible - and measurable

The report's benchmark section, drawn from 32 teams running strong sending infrastructure, shows that high performance is attainable and sustainable. Those teams hold a 99.0% median inbox deliverability rate and an average 45.2% open rate - roughly 1.6 times the 2026 industry average of 27.7%. For teams that came to Folderly in crisis, the average deliverability recovery is 70.5 percentage points, often achieved in as little as six to eight weeks. In one case, Adhesive Media sustained a 25% reply rate - more than four times the elite cold-outreach benchmark of 5.8% - which the company credits with tripling its revenue.

Folderly's position is that these results come from treating deliverability as continuously managed infrastructure rather than a one-time warm-up. "Stop thinking about email health as something you fix once and forget," Ivannikov said. "If you want your outbound to scale, treat deliverability as infrastructure. Monitor it, fix the root causes, and make sure someone is genuinely accountable for the outcome."

About the research

The Fixing B2B SaaS Outbound Email Deliverability in 2026 report draws on three distinct data sources: active deliverability recovery data from Folderly's platform, benchmark data from 32 teams with strong infrastructure practices, and original survey research from 100 sales professionals and email marketers across the tech and finance industries, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

About Folderly

Folderly is an email deliverability platform for B2B SaaS outbound teams that need to scale without losing pipeline to spam. Where other tools treat deliverability as a one-time fix, Folderly diagnoses why emails fail, fixes the root causes, and monitors continuously so sending performance compounds over time. Learn more at folderly.com.

Adam Henshall
Folderly Inc
adam@folderly.com
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