Positive reply rate

Not every reply is good news. Out-of-office messages, "please remove me", "wrong person" and "not now" all count as replies, and a campaign can have a healthy reply rate made mostly of those. The positive reply rate keeps only replies that move towards a conversation, often called warm leads or interested replies, which makes it a better measure of whether the targeting and the message are working.

Classifying replies takes judgment. "Not now, try in Q3" is not positive today but is worth a reminder later; "who else should I talk to?" with a colleague's name is positive even though it declines. Decide the categories before the campaign and apply them the same way every time. The positive reply rate is the step between replies and meetings, and the one most affected by research and personalization.

• Outlevo's estimate: We assume 2 to 6 warm leads (interested replies) and 1 to 4 meetings per 100 contacts: our estimate for researched emails, not a measured average.