# Reply-Rate Calibration — what actually moves cold email, line by line

Field-calibrated guidance for judging a draft. Rates are directional (B2B, decision-maker targets); the *ordering* of what matters is the durable part.

## The hierarchy of what matters (most → least)
1. **Who it's from and to** — right person ≈ 10× the best copy edit. A mediocre email to the right owner beats a brilliant one to the wrong department.
2. **The first line in the preview pane** — it's the real subject line. If it could open an email to anyone, it opens replies from no one.
3. **The specific observation** — one verifiable fact about *them* (their pricing page, their job post, their outage last Tuesday). This is the line that proves a human looked.
4. **The size of the ask** — replies scale inversely with commitment. "Worth a look?" out-pulls "Can we book 30 minutes?" roughly 2-3×.
5. Subject line cleverness — last, despite the folklore.

## Line-by-line judgments
- **Subject:** 2-5 words, lowercase-adjacent, zero adjectives. Internal-forward energy ("data pipeline question") beats marketing energy ("Transform your data stack!") every measured time.
- **Opener:** never "I hope this finds you well" (reads as merge-field), never your company's founding story. The observation goes first.
- **The bridge:** one sentence connecting their situation to why you exist. If it needs two sentences, the targeting is wrong.
- **Proof:** one number with a name attached ("cut Meridian's close time 40%") — unnamed numbers read as invented.
- **Ask:** one question, answerable with one word. Two asks = zero answers.
- **Length:** 50-100 words. Above 120, reply rates fall off a cliff — it signals the sender's time matters more than the reader's.

## Honest expectations to set in the output
Good cold email to well-researched lists: 3-8% reply. Anything promising 20%+ is selling something. Two polite follow-ups (day 3, day 8) roughly double cumulative replies; the fourth email converts relationships into spam reports.
