Reply Rate Cheat Sheet

What is Reply Rate?

“Reply” denotes the response received from a prospect during the campaign period and “Reply Rate” denotes the ratio of Replies to the total number of prospects contacted. The higher the Reply Rate the better.

What are the reasons for a low or declining reply rate?

While it can be difficult to achieve a reply rate above 20%, it is very important to understand the reasons for low replies

Time of sending an email
Over-promotion
Length of the content
Confusing or wrong use of CTAs (Call to Action)
No personalization
Not staying updated with latest outreach trends
Sent without initial test - Content seems broken
No proofreading
No consistency
Low open rates

How to Increase Reply Rates within SmartReach Environment?

The reply rate can be significantly increased by following the below strategies with SmartReach:

Your CTA should be clear and straightforward. It should be placed correctly.
Follow up on a regular basis. Set up unlimited follow-ups with SmartReach, the follow-ups auto stops when a prospect or someone from the prospects domain responds. A gap of 3 to 5 days between follow-ups is recommended. Best to limit your campaign to 5 follow-ups. Do not ask prospects why they aren't responding.
Sending emails when the prospects are active, increases the chance of getting replies. Use our “Best time to Send” report and accordingly tweak your campaign settings.
Your outreach playbook doesn't involve Multi channel or Omni Channel outreach. Using added on channels like Linkedin, WhatsApp, Calls, Sms increase the chances of getting a reply, as you build a soft trust with your prospects. Market reports say that by just adding Linkedin with your email campaigns you can double your reply rates, and boost your sales pipeline. If you're not using multi channel, you are not updated with market trends as most of the sales teams now have adopted an omnichannel strategy.
Ensure that you add the prospect's time zones during the upload of prospects. You should then send emails preferably during working hours.
Set up your campaign by Sending Holiday Calendar. It's a list of days for which you do not want to send emails from your campaigns.
Personalize your emails - SmartReach provides an option to create a custom merge tag. Alternatively, pre-defined merge tags can also be used as a personal touch to the email.
Increase open rates.
A/B test with one subject line and different email body templates. Then analyze our template report and share the working template with your team.
Limit your daily email sending to 150 emails per email ID. The lesser the number of emails sent, the better the email deliverability.

Other External Factors that Improves Reply Rates

Reply rates could be increased by following these simple strategies

Email body content should be engaging, short, crisp and to the point
Proper segmentation of prospect list - Imagine sending a proposal for accounting software to the “Head of Content”. Proper segmentation increases the chance of getting a response
Discounts should be clearly mentioned
Usage of a personalized video
Building soft trust with your prospects - contact them on Linkedin and get more replies.
Incorporating an interactive question at the end of your email would encourage the prospects to respond. Eg: “So do you want to reduce your sales cycle? Would like to get your take on this”
Business email id should be used while sending mails
An email signature should be used as it makes the email look more professional and creates brand recognition.
Grammatical mistakes and typos should be avoided