What is Reply rate?
Reply rate is the share of people emailed who replied, usually counted per prospect across a whole sequence rather than per message.
Also called: response rate.
Reply rate is the honest top-line metric for cold email. Open rates have become unreliable because mail apps load tracking pixels automatically, and click rates are low by design when the goal is a conversation. A reply is a person.
Count it per prospect: if someone gets three messages and answers once, that is one reply from one person. And split it into positive and negative replies, because an unsubscribe request is technically a reply too.
Published averages vary widely with targeting and method. One 2026 benchmark report puts the overall average reply rate at 3.43%. Treat any average as a planning assumption, not a goal: a narrow list of businesses with a specific, visible need can do far better, and a broad list far worse.
Working backwards from meetings is the useful planning step: meetings divided by show rate gives meetings booked, divided by the interested share gives replies, divided by reply rate gives people to reach, and dividing by one minus the bounce rate gives leads to buy. The cold email calculator runs that chain and the ROI calculator prices it.