What cold email actually does
Every figure here is counted from mail Kamu sent itself, on behalf of real products. It is not a survey, not an industry report, and not gathered from anybody who had a reason to make it look good.
Not yet. Kamu has sent 345 cold emails, and nothing is published here under 500, from at least five products.
A reply rate from a few dozen emails is noise with a decimal point on it, and one product's numbers are that product's, not an industry's. Publishing early would make every other figure on this page worth less. It fills in on its own.
How it is counted
The denominator is every first-contact email Kamu has sent that left the building. Replies to a conversation somebody started are excluded, because counting them would make the reply rate a measure of how chatty existing threads are.
A reply counts once per person. Somebody who answers three times is one person who answered, and the alternative inflates the one number a reader is most likely to check against their own experience.
Delivery is what the email provider confirmed, not what we hoped. There is no open tracking anywhere in this: it needs a tracking pixel, and a pixel is what makes a plain-text email look like marketing, so Kamu does not use one and cannot report an open rate.
Nothing is broken down by customer, and nothing is published from fewer than five products. A benchmark computed from one product tells that product's competitors what its outreach is doing.
Wake up to work you didn't do
Paste your URL and go back to building. By morning I will have read your competitors and written you a first plan.