Reply Rate
Reply Rate is the percentage of sent outbound messages that received any reply — positive, negative, or neutral — from the recipient.
What is Reply Rate?
Reply Rate is the workhorse outbound metric. It's more reliable than Open Rate (which is corrupted by mail-client prefetching) and earlier in the funnel than Meeting Booked. Healthy reply rates: 4-8% on truly cold outbound, 8-15% on signal-triggered outbound, 15-25% on warm follow-up. Reply Rate alone is incomplete — a high reply rate of mostly negative replies is worse than a moderate reply rate of mostly positive ones. Mature teams track Reply Rate paired with Positive Reply Share.
Why it matters
- More reliable than Open Rate — less affected by mail-client prefetching.
- Leading indicator of meetings and pipeline 1-2 weeks ahead.
- Must be paired with Positive Reply Share — total replies alone hides quality.
Use cases
- Outbound program health. Weekly Reply Rate trend reveals whether the program is working.
- Sequence A/B testing. Reply Rate is the primary metric for testing new sequence variants.
- Targeting diagnostic. Reply rate by ICP segment reveals which segments respond.
How turgo helps
turgo tracks Reply Rate alongside Positive Reply Share and downstream meetings — so the metric is contextualized rather than used in isolation.
See turgo in action →
