Reply rate, positive reply rate and why your cold email numbers never match

Here is a made-up campaign to show the effect. These numbers are illustrative, not real data.

• 1,000 prospects received the first email.
• Across the whole sequence, 2,400 emails were sent.
• 40 prospects replied. Of those, 6 were automatic out-of-office replies.
• 8 prospects are marked as opportunities.

Same campaign, same replies, and the headline figure more than doubles depending on the definition. Nobody made an error. A client comparing your 3.4% with a benchmark built on emails sent would conclude you are far ahead, and the comparison would be meaningless.

Instantly’s analytics help page defines the terms as follows (quoted or closely paraphrased from the page when we read it for this article):

• Reply rate: the percentage of recipients who replied to a sequence email, calculated as replies ÷ total sent.
• Opportunities: replies your team has marked as an opportunity, usually a meeting booked or a qualified lead.
• Positive reply rate: the percentage of replies marked as an opportunity, calculated as opportunities ÷ replies.
• Auto-replies: counted in reply rate by default. A setting excludes them, and the page says the setting applies to the current device only.
• Time zone: reporting is in UTC.

Two practical consequences. First, the auto-reply toggle is a per-device view setting, so two people on your team can look at the same campaign and see different reply rates. Second, “positive reply rate” in Instantly answers “of the people who replied, how many were interested?”, which is a different question from “of the people we contacted, how many were interested?”

There is no single correct choice. There are trade-offs, and your clients should know which one you made.

Our recommendation: report the share of prospects contacted, because it is the easiest for a client to picture, and show the raw counts next to it so anyone can recompute it. This is an opinion, not a standard.

Open rate

Instantly’s own article on open tracking (March 2026) says Apple pre-loads images through proxy servers whether or not the recipient reads the email, and that when security gateways scan a message, no human is involved when the tracking pixel fires. The article recommends reply rate and booked meetings as more reliable measures. Instantly sells cold email software, so weigh the framing accordingly, but the mechanisms it describes are why many agencies leave open rate out of client reports.

Bounce rate

Instantly’s help page describes workspace bounce rate as the average of each workspace’s percentage of emails sent that bounced. Whether a count of bounces refers to bounced prospects or bounced emails changes what a percentage means. Klaroh shows the bounce count and withholds a bounce rate for exactly this reason: we have not been able to confirm which unit Instantly’s count uses. If a tool gives you a rate without saying what it divides, ask.

Small samples

A rate from 40 prospects moves a lot when one person replies. Say so in the report. Klaroh flags campaigns with fewer than 100 prospects contacted as low volume and shows emails-per-positive only from five positive prospects. Those thresholds are our own judgement calls, not industry rules; choose your own and write them down.

Date ranges

Instantly lets you choose a date range; its help page notes that longer windows give a more complete picture of a campaign. A tool that shows lifetime-to-date figures will not match a dashboard filtered to last week. Klaroh currently shows lifetime-to-date only, so when comparing the two, set Instantly to a range that covers the whole campaign.

Sync timing

If numbers are copied or synced from Instantly into another tool, they are only as fresh as the last sync. A reply that arrived this morning may not be in a report built last night. Klaroh syncs on a daily schedule and when you open the app, and shows the last sync time. It is not real-time.

1. Every rate has its numerator and denominator written or one click away.
2. The auto-reply setting is the same for every client and is stated.
3. The time range and time zone are stated.
4. “Positive” says who decided: your team, a tool, or the prospect.
5. Low-volume campaigns are labelled as such.
6. Open rate is absent, or accompanied by the caveat that it can be inflated by software.
7. The report shows when the data was last updated.
8. You are not comparing against an outside benchmark whose method you cannot see.

Klaroh reads the raw counts from Instantly and defines every business metric in one place. Today these are the definitions it uses:

“Positive” is whatever is marked in Instantly, set by your team or by Instantly itself. Klaroh does not classify replies. Because the denominator differs from Instantly’s headline reply rate, Klaroh’s reply rate will usually not equal the figure on Instantly’s dashboard. That is by design, and the definitions are shown in the product.

Want to see the definitions in context? Explore the product tour, or join the beta waitlist.