Glossary Metrics
What is reply rate in cold email?
Reply rate is the percentage of people you emailed who wrote back, counted per person rather than per email, and it is the most reliable measure of whether cold outreach is working.
Reply rate is people who replied divided by people emailed. Some teams also track positive reply rate, which counts only replies that show interest.
It reflects everything upstream: who you chose, whether the address was right, the opening line, the ask and the timing.
Why it matters
- A reply is a real person engaging, unlike opens, which are unreliable.
- Replies are a positive signal to mailbox providers, which helps deliverability.
- It is the clearest feedback on targeting and writing.
How Reach Crew handles it
Reach Crew watches for replies, not opens. When someone replies, Courier stops every follow-up to them at once and the reply lands in your own inbox. Reach Crew sorts replies as yes, a question, later or no, and can draft an answer for you to check.
Related terms
- Open rate. Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails recorded as opened, usually measured with a tiny invisible...
- Personalization. Personalization in cold email is writing each message around something specific and true about the recipient...
- Email sequence. An email sequence is a planned series of messages to one person, a first email followed by timed follow-ups...
- Guide: How to write a first cold email someone answers