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Outreach

Reply rate

Reply rate is the share of contacted businesses that answer, positively or not. For cold B2B outreach to a well-targeted list, somewhere between 2% and 8% is a realistic range.

It is the only cold-outreach metric worth optimising, because it is the one the measurement cannot fake. Open rates depend on a tracking pixel that a growing share of mail clients load automatically or block entirely, which makes the number roughly meaningless in either direction.

Count negative replies too. A campaign generating 6% replies of which most are refusals is a targeting problem you can see and fix; a campaign generating 0.3% replies gives you nothing to learn from at all.

Related terms

Cold email
A cold email is a message to a business that has had no prior contact with you. It is lawful in most B2B contexts under specific conditions, and it works only when the list is right and the message is specific.
Email sequence
A sequence is a planned series of messages to the same contact over days or weeks, stopping as soon as they reply. Most replies to cold outreach arrive after the first message, not on it.
Outbound sales
Outbound sales is contacting businesses that have not asked to hear from you. It is the only acquisition channel whose volume you control directly, which is also why it is the easiest to do badly.
Lead
A lead is a business that might buy from you, together with a way to reach it. Without a working contact method it is not a lead, it is a name.