What is a good reply rate for cold email?

Reply rate

A total reply rate between three and seven percent is normal for a reasonably targeted campaign. Above ten percent usually means either an unusually good match between offer and audience, or a very small and very well researched list.

Below one percent normally points at targeting rather than copy.

Positive reply rate

This is the number that matters. Total replies include people declining, unsubscribing, and telling you they are the wrong person. Positive replies are those worth a conversation.

One to three percent positive is a healthy campaign. It sounds small until you apply it to volume: a thousand well targeted emails at two percent is twenty real conversations.

Why open rates are close to useless now

Open tracking relies on an invisible image loading. Privacy protection in Apple Mail and elsewhere loads those images automatically whether or not anyone read the message, which inflates opens badly.

Treat open rate as a rough signal of deliverability, not of interest. Judge campaigns on replies.

What moves the number

In order of impact: who you are contacting, what you are offering them, and only then how the email is written. Most underperforming campaigns are targeting problems being treated as copywriting problems.