How We Measure Positive Reply Rate: Clique Outreach Benchmark Methodology

When we say roughly 1 in 457 people we contact replies with genuine interest, that number means something specific. This page explains exactly what it means, how we calculate it, what we exclude, and why we report it this way rather than as a headline percentage or an open rate.

What "Positive Reply Rate" Means

A positive reply is a response that expresses genuine interest in continuing a conversation. That means the recipient either asked a clarifying question about the offer, requested more information, asked to schedule a meeting, said yes to a next step, or made a referral to the right person.

What does not count as a positive reply:

• Auto-replies and out-of-office messages
• Unsubscribe requests
• Neutral replies such as "not the right time" or "already have a vendor"
• Negative replies
• Replies from people outside the target ICP

The formula is: Positive Reply Rate = Positive Replies / People Contacted

We divide by people, not emails. A three step sequence sends up to three emails to the same person, so dividing by emails roughly halves the number and, worse, makes it look better every time you add another follow-up. Per person is the denominator that cannot be gamed. Across 287 campaigns it works out at 0.22 percent, or 1 in 457. On the emails-delivered basis the same data reads 0.12 percent, or 1 in 842.

What It Is Not

It is not total reply rate. Total reply rate includes out-of-office messages, unsubscribes, and negative responses. That number is typically 2x to 3x higher than positive reply rate and does not measure anything useful for pipeline.

It is not open rate. We do not track opens at all, on any campaign, and never have. Open tracking means loading a pixel from every email, which is one of the things that gets a sending domain flagged, and since Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads those pixels anyway the number it produces is close to meaningless. Every campaign in this dataset shows zero opens recorded, because the tracking is switched off, not because nobody opened anything.

It is not meeting booked rate. Some positive replies convert to booked meetings; others go cold in the follow-up. Positive reply rate measures intent signals, not calendar outcomes.

Sample Criteria

The figure is calculated across every campaign that meets the following criteria, with no campaign excluded for performing badly:

• Minimum 200 people contacted per campaign (anything smaller is too small to read)
• Campaigns run between 2019 and 2026, which is 287 campaigns, 534,652 people contacted and 1,170 positive replies
• All 12 verticals included: financial services, SaaS, consulting, staffing, real estate, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, logistics, cybersecurity, education, marketing
• Both Done-For-You and Done-With-You engagements included
• Campaigns with atypical targeting (single-account ABM campaigns, internal testing campaigns) excluded

The Benchmarks tool publishes the same dataset, broken down by market.

Why Single Campaigns Vary So Much

Individual campaigns in the Benchmarks tool range from nothing at all to several times the average. That spread is the honest picture, and it matters more than the average does.

One client engagement usually runs several sequences at once, aimed at different buyers, testing different angles, in different parts of a market. Some of those land well. Some produce nothing. A quarter of our campaigns sit below 0.03 percent and the best tenth sit above 0.48 percent, both measured per person contacted.

The headline figure is the aggregate across every campaign, including the ones that underperformed, the markets that respond less, and the ramp weeks where deliverability is still settling. It is the population average, not the peak.

Why We Report It This Way

We could report a much higher number by dividing by emails rather than people, by excluding ramp periods, by cherry-picking the sequences that worked, or by counting any reply at all as a positive one. Every one of those is common, and stacked together they turn this number into something ten or twenty times bigger.

We report the aggregate because a percentage is not what anyone is buying anyway. What matters is how many real conversations arrive in a month. Across 72 documented months the median is 29 and the best single month was 128, and the quarterly contract commits us to 50 in a quarter or we keep working free. Those are the numbers to judge us on.

Where This Number Appears

Any positive reply figure on the Clique Outreach blog or in the benchmarks tool refers to the metric and methodology defined on this page.

For per-vertical performance data, see the Cold Email Benchmarks tool.