How to read a cold campaign result
Read replies first, complaints second and opens last, then divide what the send cost by the number of real replies. That figure, the cost per reply, is the only number that tells you whether repeating the campaign is worth the money.
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A cold campaign produces a lot of numbers and only two of them survive scrutiny. Most people read them in the wrong order, act on the least reliable one and conclude that cold email does not work.
Why are opens the weakest number?
Because an open is recorded when a tracking image loads, and images are loaded by mail clients, security scanners and preview panes that no human ever looked at. The number is inflated by an amount you cannot measure.
It is also inflated inconsistently, so comparing the open rate of two campaigns sent to different audiences tells you very little. Opens are a subject line signal and nothing more.
What makes replies the number to trust?
A reply is a person choosing to spend time on your message. Nothing automated produces one, and nothing inflates it.
Replies are also the number your business actually runs on, because a conversation is the thing that becomes revenue. Count every human reply, including the polite refusals, and count the hostile ones separately because they mean something different.
How do you work out cost per reply?
Divide what the campaign cost by the number of genuine replies it produced. If sending a hundred thousand messages costs three hundred dollars and brings sixty replies, each reply cost five dollars.
Then compare that against what a conversation with a prospect is worth to you. That single comparison decides whether to repeat the campaign, and it is a far better decision than any open rate ever supported.
| Number | How much to trust it | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Opens | low, inflated by machines | the subject line, loosely |
| Clicks | moderate, also scanned | whether the offer was legible |
| Replies | high, no automation produces one | whether to repeat the campaign |
| Complaints | high, and it is a warning | whether the list was right |
| Cost per reply | the number to act on | whether it is worth the money |
What does a high complaint rate tell you?
That the audience was wrong, almost always before it tells you the copy was wrong. People complain about messages they cannot see a reason for receiving, and a well targeted message with a plain explanation rarely provokes it.
If the complaints came in here the practical cost is contained, because the unsubscribes and the spam reports land on our sending infrastructure rather than on an address your business runs on. That is what makes a bad result survivable rather than expensive.
What do you do with a good result?
Repeat it with a larger list before you change anything. The most common mistake after a working campaign is to improve it, which resets the only evidence you had.
Point the reply address at your own marketing inbox so the answers arrive where you already work and the results are yours to read directly, as described on reply routing to your own inbox. Then work out the arithmetic against what bulk email costs per thousand, check the current figures on pricing, and browse the rest from the answers hub.