Reply rate is the percentage of outbound messages that receive a response. It applies to email, text, and social outreach, and it’s the earliest signal of whether your messaging is landing with the people you’re sending it to.
How Do You Calculate Reply Rate?
Divide replies by messages delivered, then multiply by 100. Two hundred delivered emails producing 14 responses is a 7% reply rate.
Use delivered rather than sent. A message that bounced or was filtered never had a chance to be answered, so including it inflates your denominator and hides a deliverability problem inside a messaging problem.
Reply rate also differs by channel in ways that make cross-channel comparison useless. Text reply rates run far higher than email, so the only meaningful comparison is against your own history on the same channel.
What Counts as a Reply?
This is where the metric gets soft. Out-of-office replies, unsubscribes, and one-word brushoffs are all technically responses, and counting them produces a number that looks fine while the pipeline says otherwise.
Most teams that use this metric well split it in two. Total reply rate measures whether messaging provokes any reaction at all. Positive reply rate counts only responses that move something forward, and that’s the figure worth reporting. A rising total reply rate with a flat positive rate usually means you’ve found a way to annoy people efficiently.
What Does Reply Rate Tell You?
Read against delivery, it isolates where outreach is failing. Low reply rate with strong delivery means the message or the targeting is wrong. Low reply rate with weak delivery means nothing arrived, and no amount of copy testing will fix that.
It’s also the fastest metric in the outbound chain. Connect rate and talk time tell you about phone activity, but replies come back within hours, which makes reply rate the first place a broken list or a bad sequence shows itself. Teams testing cadence changes usually see it here before anywhere else.
How Conquer Makes Reply Rate Actionable
Most teams calculate reply rate in the tool that sent the message. That tool knows a reply came in. It doesn’t know which account sent it, what stage that deal is at, or whether the reply ever became revenue.
Conquer runs natively on Salesforce, so replies land on the record. Reply rate sits next to pipeline and stage, and you can ask a better question: which sequences get responses from accounts that close. Text replies can advance or pause a cadence on their own, so a response changes what happens next.
Which of your sequences gets replies from the accounts you actually want?