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Glossary term

Reply rate

Reply rate is the share of delivered cold emails that receive a response, positive or negative. It is the most honest cold email metric because, unlike open rate, it reflects whether the message actually earned attention.

Why it beats open rate

Open tracking is unreliable, so reply rate is a truer read on relevance. A campaign with a strong reply rate is connecting the message to a real priority.

What moves it

Targeting, timing, and message quality move reply rate more than volume. Sending more generic emails rarely improves it.

See how reply rate works in a real outbound system.

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