Reply Classification
Every reply gets sorted into one of six buckets: interested, not interested, objection, out of office, unsubscribe, or bounce. The bar for "interested" is strict, a clear yes, an information request, or a technical question, because "maybe later" and polite brush-offs are the single most common way reply rates get inflated. Get the bucket right and you know instantly what to do next and whether the campaign is actually working.
Pipeline Playbooks · Open Source, MIT Licensed
A strict six-bucket system for sorting cold email replies and calculating the one number, interested-reply rate, that actually tells you if a campaign is working.
When to use this
- A reply just landed and needs a bucket
- Reviewing a week of replies for an honest health read
- Checking if your interested rate is good or bad
- Someone's about to call a soft reply a win
What it covers
- The six buckets: interested, not interested, objection, OOO, unsubscribe, bounce
- The strict definition of interested: yes, info request, or technical question
- What doesn't count: "maybe later", brush-offs, referrals, pitch-backs
- Rate thresholds: 20%+ great, 10%+ good, under 5% broken, 0% pause
- A decision table mapping real reply phrasing to the right bucket
- Step-by-step process for classifying a batch and computing the rate
Install just this skill
Every skill folder is self-contained. Run this from your project root to pull just this one into .claude/skills/reply-classification/:
npx degit joelwylie7/cold-email-playbooks/.claude/skills/reply-classification .claude/skills/reply-classification
Want the whole system, not just one skill?
Related skills
Reply Drafting
Rules and worked examples for the reply that turns an interested prospect into a booked meeting, fast, generous with the promised asset, and never gatekept behind a call.
Reply Follow-Ups
An eight-touch follow-up system for interested prospects who went quiet, each send a fresh angle with a named case study and a number, never a content-free bump.
Offer Framing
The single highest-leverage skill in the system: decides what your cold email actually offers before a word of copy gets written, because copy cannot fix a bad offer.