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Reply rate

Reply rate is the share of people who answered your outreach out of everyone it reached. You count answers written by people, leave out auto-replies and bounces, and track positive replies beside the total.

Updated November 2026 · 3 min read · GetSales team

How to calculate reply rate

Divide the people who replied by the people who received at least one message, and multiply by 100. If 500 people got your first email and 22 of them answered at any step of the sequence, your reply rate is 4.4%.

  • Count each person once. A sequence sends several emails to each person, so a rate per email can fall when you add a follow-up, even though more people answered.
  • Take bounces out of the base. A message that never arrived reached nobody.
  • Fix the window. Count replies over the same period for every campaign you compare, since late replies keep arriving after the last step.

What counts as a reply

  • Any answer a person wrote. A no and a request to stop writing both count, since someone read the message and wrote back.
  • No automatic answers. An out-of-office note is software talking. RFC 3834 asks automatic responders to mark their messages with an Auto-Submitted header set to auto-replied, which gives you one way to filter them out.1
  • Positive replies, tracked apart. The share of people who answered with interest is the number closest to your pipeline.

Why reply rate beats open rate

Apple Mail's Protect Mail Activity loads an email's remote content in the background by default, whether or not the person engages, and hides from the sender when the email was opened. Open counts built on that content overstate who read your email.2 A reply is the one result a person has to write.

In GetSales the Dashboard shows each sender profile's replies and reply rate over the period, and each sending step in a workflow shows what it sent, who replied and the rate. On threads the AI SDR works, a new reply gets one of 15 labels, plus one of yours when it fits, with how sure it is and why.

  • Reply classification: a label on each new reply the AI SDR reads, how sure it is and why.
  • Unified inbox: every LinkedIn and email reply from every sender profile in one list.
  • AI SDR: reads every reply and plans the answer.
  • Cold email outreach: the list, the email and the follow-ups that earn the replies.

Sources

  1. IETF, RFC 3834: Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail, section 5, August 2004. Read 28 October 2026.
  2. Apple, Mail Privacy Protection & Privacy, 12 December 2025. Read 28 October 2026.

Last updated: November 2026

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