What's a Good Reply Rate and Open Rate for a B2B Cold Email Campaign?

In a well-targeted B2B cold email campaign, a 4-8% reply rate counts as typical, and roughly 30-40% of those replies are interested. The open rate is broader and more volatile (loosely 20-40%), but on its own it's misleading - the real measure is how many people reply, and of those, how many actually want to talk. This article walks through what counts as a good number, what it depends on, and what our own publicly stated campaign figures show.

Open rate or reply rate - which one matters?

A lot of people watch the open rate, because it's the biggest number and looks good in a report. The trouble is it says very little. Opening a message signals no intent whatsoever - the recipient may have glanced at it for a second and moved on.

The reply rate, by contrast, is real action: someone took the trouble to write back. That's the first genuine sign that the targeting and the message are working. More important still is the share of interested replies: those are what turn into conversations.

What counts as a good number?

The ranges below are a solid starting point for a well-targeted, personalized B2B campaign. Important: these are indicative ranges, not guarantees - the industry, the accuracy of your targeting, the offer, and the timing all move them significantly.

Metric	Typical B2B range	What it means
Open rate	~20-40%	How many opened it - an increasingly unreliable metric (see below)
Reply rate	4-8%	How many replied - the most important early signal
Interested reply	~30-40% of replies	This is what becomes a real business conversation
Bounce	Under 2%	Above this, the targeting or the data is inaccurate

If a campaign sits at the low end of the reply range, that's not necessarily a problem: for a high-value offer, even a few good conversations pay off. Always measure the numbers against the business value, rather than looking at them in isolation.

What we see in our own campaigns

We don't like to promise numbers we don't hit ourselves, so we publish our own campaigns transparently too. Over a roughly five-week window, across more than a thousand approaches, we measured about 26% opens and a 5% reply rate overall, running roughly 4-7% replies and 19-33% opens per campaign. You can see the detailed, campaign-by-campaign breakdown - with real client examples - on our results page.

These numbers sit squarely in the typical range described above. What's behind them: per-recipient research, personalized messages, and a clean technical setup - not high-volume, impersonal blasting.

What does the reply rate depend on?

The reply rate isn't down to luck. Four things move it the most:

• Targeting. Even the best message is useless if it goes to the wrong person. Good decision-maker targeting is half the battle by itself.
• Relevance and copy. The message has to be about the recipient, with a single clear ask. We covered this in detail in how to write a cold email that gets replies.
• Deliverability. A great message is worthless if it lands in spam. Without authentication and warmup, the numbers will be poor even when the copy is excellent.
• The offer. If what you're offering is genuinely relevant to the recipient's current situation, the reply rate rises on its own.

Why is the open rate increasingly unreliable?

Opens are usually measured with a tiny, invisible image (a tracking pixel). In recent years, though, several email systems - for privacy reasons - automatically load these images or hide the actual open. As a result the open rate often skews upward: it reports opens that don't reflect real human attention.

That's why we too look mostly at replies and interested replies. You can't accidentally "open" those - they show genuine intent.

Summary

In a well-targeted B2B cold email campaign, a 4-8% reply rate is typical, and 30-40% of that is interested; the open rate is broader and increasingly unreliable. The numbers are good when they turn into real business conversations - and that's decided by targeting, relevance, and deliverability.

If you're curious what's realistic in your own market, book an intro call - we'll go through it together and give you honest numbers.