What is an
interested reply?
A real human writing back with intent, counted against the number of people written to rather than the number of messages sent. It is a deliberately harder measure than a reply rate, and this page shows by how much.
Updated
An interested reply is a reply from a real person expressing intent to continue the conversation. Out-of-office messages, unsubscribes, referrals to a colleague and replies classified as not interested are all excluded, and opens and clicks are not tracked at all. The denominator is contacts reached, not messages sent, so a six-touch sequence counts each person once.
What counts and what does not
| Reply | Counts | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Asking for a call, pricing or more detail | Yes | Intent to continue, from the person written to. |
| "Not now, come back in Q3" | Yes | Intent with a date attached. The message reached someone it was written for. |
| A substantive objection | Yes | Engagement with the offer is intent, even when the answer is eventually no. |
| Out-of-office and auto-responses | No | No human read it. |
| Unsubscribe requests | No | Intent to stop is not intent to continue. |
| "Talk to my colleague" | No | Useful, but the person who replied is not the buyer. See below. |
| Replies classified as not interested | No | Classified by hand against this definition. |
| Opens and clicks | Not tracked | No pixel is used, and a pixel would not measure reading anyway. |
Why referrals are excluded
Excluding referrals is the choice most agencies would not make. A referral to the right colleague is commercially useful and often turns into a deal. It is excluded here because the measure is meant to answer one question: did the message reach someone it was written for and move them. A referral says the opposite, that the message reached the wrong person who was polite about it. Counting it would inflate a figure whose whole purpose is to test targeting as well as wording.
The practical consequence is that GrowthPal's published interested-reply figures are lower than the same campaigns would report under a looser definition. That is the intended trade.
The denominator, and why it is the harder half
Interested replies are counted against contacts reached: distinct people written to, each counted once however many messages the sequence sent them. Most published reply rates use messages sent instead, which is a larger denominator and therefore a smaller, friendlier-looking percentage, or they use contacts without saying so.
One documented month shows the size of the difference. 67,934 contacts were reached with 162,867 messages, producing 955 replies of which 449 were interested. That month is a campaign Prabesh Khanal led at a previous agency, published here with written permission, and it is not a GrowthPal client engagement. It is used because it is the only campaign on this site where every denominator is published.
| Measure | Arithmetic | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Replies against messages sent | 955 / 162,867 | 0.59% |
| Replies against contacts reached | 955 / 67,934 | 1.41% |
| Interested replies against contacts reached | 449 / 67,934 | 0.66%, or 1 per 151 |
| Interested replies against messages sent | 449 / 162,867 | 0.28% |
Four figures, one campaign, a five-fold spread. A vendor quoting 1.41% and a vendor quoting 0.28% can be describing identical work. The full working is in how GrowthPal measures cold email.
The benchmark this measure is read against
GrowthPal targets one interested reply per 200 to 350 contacts reached once a message is dialled in. The baseline for an untested message is roughly one per 800 to 1,000 or more. Both numbers use the same numerator and the same denominator, which is what makes them comparable with each other and with nothing else.
They are specifically not comparable with the 11.4% reply rate from the 412-campaign study, which is a total reply rate counting every reply rather than only interested ones, and whose own denominator the study does not state. Mixing the two produces a number that means nothing.
How to count it on your own campaigns
- Count distinct people written to in the period, not messages sent. That is the denominator and it is the step most often skipped.
- Pull every reply received in the same period.
- Remove auto-responses, out-of-office messages and unsubscribes before classifying anything.
- Classify the rest by hand into interested and not interested, using a written rule, and decide the referral question before you start rather than case by case.
- Divide and state both halves: the numerator definition and the denominator. A figure published without both is not reusable by anyone, including you in six months.
Why opens and clicks are not part of this
No GrowthPal cold email carries a tracking pixel or a wrapped link, so no open rate exists to report. Even where a pixel is used it no longer measures reading: Apple states that Mail Privacy Protection "downloads remote content in the background by default" and does so "regardless of whether you engage with the email". The pixel fires on mail nobody opened. A measure that cannot distinguish a read from a fetch is not a measure.
Frequently asked questions
How is an interested reply different from a positive reply?
Interested replies and positive replies are often the same classification under different names, but the denominator usually differs. Several case studies on this site count positive replies against emails sent, while the interested-reply figures count against contacts reached. The two sets are listed side by side with their denominators in every published result, precisely so they are not read as a ranking.
Who decides whether a reply is interested?
A person, against the written definition above. It is not a keyword rule and it is not done by the model that wrote the message, because a classifier marking its own homework is the failure mode this definition exists to avoid.
What is a good interested reply rate?
One per 200 to 350 contacts reached once a message is dialled in, against roughly one per 800 to 1,000 or more for an untested message. Any figure you compare that with must use interested replies as its numerator and contacts reached as its denominator, or the comparison is void.
Does an interested reply mean a booked meeting?
No. GrowthPal publishes a general range of 25 to 40% of interested replies becoming booked meetings with same-day follow-up, and deliberately does not apply that range to any specific campaign figure, because doing so would turn a measurement into a calculation.
This page expands the short definition at the interested reply glossary entry, and the counting rules it belongs to are in the methodology block.
Sources for this page
- Apple, Mail Privacy Protection & Privacy (primary source). Accessed 2026-10-24.
Last reviewed 2026-10-24. A plain-text version of this page is at /what-is-an-interested-reply.md, and the site index for language models is at /llms.txt.