/ Outreach
An honest benchmark for wine producers. What a realistic reply rate looks like, what drives it, and why the number matters less than who is replying.
/ The short version
If you are going to reach importers directly, it helps to know what success actually looks like, so you can tell a good campaign from a disappointing one. The honest answer is less exciting than the promises you will hear, and far more useful.
Across business-to-business outreach, reply rates have fallen steadily for years, from around eight or nine percent back in 2019 to low single digits today; broad platform averages now sit around three to four percent, and even the better-run providers report something closer to five to six on well-built campaigns. The reasons are simple: inboxes are fuller, spam filters are stricter, and a flood of low-effort automated email has made everyone warier.
For well-matched outreach in the wine trade, a realistic range sits in that same band, around three to five percent, with sharp, small, tightly targeted lists doing better and big scattered ones doing worse. Put plainly, one reply for every twenty to thirty importers reached is a solid campaign. Twenty positive replies in a month puts you at the top of the benchmark. If anyone promises you dramatically more, be skeptical, or ask what they are counting, because automatic out-of-office replies and bounces are often quietly included to inflate the figure.
Three things, in order of importance.
First, targeting. Reaching the right importers, the ones whose book already fits your region, style, and price, matters more than anything else. The numbers bear this out bluntly: small, well-matched lists reply at several times the rate of big indiscriminate ones, and the most carefully personalized outreach can climb into the high teens. A smaller, sharper list beats a big, scattered one every time. This is the single biggest lever, and it is the one most under your control.
Second, deliverability. Your email has to reach the inbox, not the spam folder. None of your copy matters if it never arrives. This is a technical job, governed by warmup, authentication, and sending discipline, and it is where a lot of self-run campaigns quietly fail without the producer ever knowing the message was filtered before a human saw it.
Third, your story. Appellation, price, the strength of what you make and how it is told. A clear reason for an importer to care lifts the response.
The honest answer is less exciting than the promises you will hear, and far more useful.
Notice what is not on that list: clever tricks and aggressive subject lines. They do not move the number, and in the wine trade they can do real damage to how you are perceived. A gimmicky subject line that earns an open and then disappoints is worse than no open at all.
The reply rate is only the first stage of a funnel, and the later stages tell you more. Of the replies you get, only some are positive rather than a polite no, so it is worth tracking your positive reply rate separately. Of those, only some become a real conversation or a sample request, and only some of those become a listing. As a rough shape, reaching a few hundred well-matched importers might yield a couple of dozen replies, a dozen genuine conversations, a handful of serious sample requests, and a small number of listings that actually stick. That is a successful campaign, and notice how small the final number is and how little the opening reply rate alone predicted it. Watching each stage also tells you where a campaign is leaking. A decent reply rate but no meetings points to a story or fit problem; almost no replies at all is usually targeting or deliverability.
A reply rate is a useful health check, not a goal in itself. What matters is who replies. One serious importer in the right market, building your wine into their list, is worth more than a dozen polite maybes. This is relationship outreach, not advertising. It takes time. A first reply often lands around week five, once the groundwork is done and the sequence has reached enough of the right people more than once.
It also helps to read the number in context rather than in isolation. Five percent off a list of three hundred well-chosen importers is fifteen real conversations, which is a strong month. Five percent off a careless list of three thousand is noise that came at the cost of your sending reputation. The rate alone does not tell you which you have. Judge a campaign by the conversations it starts and the quality of the buyers in them, not by a percentage. The percentage is how you know it is working.