How We Measure Positive Reply Rate: Clique Outreach Benchmark Methodology

When we say our clients average a 4.1% positive reply rate, 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 instead of reporting a standard reply rate or 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 / Emails Delivered (not sent)

We use delivered, not sent, to exclude hard bounces from the denominator. A high bounce rate inflating your delivered count the other way would understate performance.

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. Open rate is unreliable post Apple Mail Privacy Protection (launched late 2021), which pre-loads email tracking pixels regardless of whether the recipient actually opened the message. We do not report open rate as a primary performance metric.

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 4.1% figure is calculated across a sample that meets the following criteria:

• Minimum 200 emails delivered per campaign (campaigns below this threshold are excluded as statistically unreliable)
• Campaigns run between Q4 2022 and Q1 2026
• 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 74 campaigns published in the public Benchmarks tool are a representative cross-vertical sample drawn from this broader dataset.

Why the Per-Campaign Numbers in Benchmarks Look Higher

The Benchmarks tool shows per-campaign positive reply rates ranging from roughly 22% to 34%. These numbers are not the same metric as the 4.1% company-wide average, and that distinction matters.

The per-campaign figures in the Benchmarks tool represent the positive reply rate for a specific campaign sequence within a single engagement. A single client engagement typically runs multiple sequences targeting different ICPs, testing different angles, or operating in different sub-verticals. Some of those sequences perform well above average. Some underperform.

The 4.1% is the aggregate across all delivered emails across all engagements, including sequences that underperformed, verticals with lower response rates, and ramp periods where deliverability is still stabilising. Think of it as the population average, not the peak.

Why We Report It This Way

We could report a higher number by excluding ramp periods, cherry-picking top-performing sequences, or using a looser definition of "positive reply." Most agencies do some version of this.

We report the aggregate because we think it is more useful to a buyer evaluating whether cold email is worth trying. An average that includes underperformers tells you more about what to expect than a figure drawn from the best 20% of campaigns.

Where This Number Appears

The 4.1% figure appears throughout the Clique Outreach blog and in the benchmarks tool. All uses of this stat refer to the metric and methodology defined on this page.

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