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Score your sales email for AI — reply rate before send.

Paste the cold open, the warm follow-up, or the whole Outreach, Salesloft, or Apollo sequence. Get a 0-100 score in thirty seconds. The score predicts how a prospect will read the message: as a hand-written note worth a reply, or as the forty-seventh templated AI pitch in their inbox today. Sentence-level colour highlights show which lines are killing reply rates so SDRs, AEs, and founders can revise the generic phrases before the sequence goes live.

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The reply-rate collapse

Why reply rates collapsed on AI outreach.

Reply rates on cold outreach fell off a cliff once buyers started seeing the same templated AI pitch every day. The cause is not algorithmic. It is recognition. The reader has learned the shape of a generated email and archives it before reading the substance underneath.

Buyers learned to spot the patterns

The opener that once signalled a human SDR spent a few minutes on a LinkedIn profile now signals a generated sequence and the rest will not be worth reading. Senior buyers and procurement teams who get a steady stream of cold emails a day pattern-match almost instantly, archive the message, and never see the substance underneath. The substance might be genuine. The prose decides whether it gets read.

Inbox providers compound the problem

Modern spam systems do not run an AI classifier on inbound mail, but they do track per-domain spam-flag rates. When recipients hit Report Spam instead of replying, deliverability degrades. Generic AI outreach gets flagged more often because the recipient has nothing concrete to attach to. The sending domain absorbs the cost of the templating shortcut over weeks.

Short emails amplify signal

A typical cold sales email is short, often under a hundred words. In a message that brief, a single templated opener and a generic closer can account for a large share of the entire email. Signal density per word is far higher than in long-form content, which is why a short outreach email has to read cleaner than a blog post to clear the same bar.

Sequence fatigue compounds across steps

SDRs running multi-step cadences face a second failure mode. Even if step one lands, the later steps often share the same AI register, and the recipient tunes out by the third touch. The sequence-level read matters more than any single email because the cumulative pattern across the cadence is what wears down the reply rate over time.

Seven tells

Seven sales-email AI tells that murder reply rates.

The patterns that drop an Authenticity Score the most across cold outreach, warm follow-ups, and re-engagement sends. Fix the top three on every email and most sequences move from the mixed band into the reply-worthy band.

1. "I hope this email finds you well"

Universally dead. The single most recognised AI-flavoured opener in B2B. Most senior buyers archive on this line alone because it signals zero personalisation. Even hand-written outreach that uses this phrase reads as templated. Replace with a specific reference to the prospect or skip the pleasantry entirely.

2. "I was browsing your LinkedIn and noticed"

Without specifics, this is the second-most flagged opener. Saying you noticed something on LinkedIn without naming what (a specific post, a recent role change, a product launch) signals a generated sequence. If you genuinely looked at the profile, quote the thing you actually saw.

3. "I wanted to reach out about"

Passive, vague, and dominant in ChatGPT's training distribution. The phrase delays the actual point of the message by one sentence and signals filler prose. Lead with the point itself: what you do, what you noticed, what would matter to this prospect.

4. The four-sentence pitch with three bullet points

Setup sentence, problem sentence, here is how we help sentence, three bullet points, ask sentence. This structure is the dominant output shape when you ask any LLM to write a cold email. Recognisable inside two seconds. Real human SDRs structure messages less predictably: sometimes two sentences, sometimes seven, occasionally a single question.

5. Generic value props (save time, increase efficiency)

Save time, increase efficiency, streamline workflows, drive growth, unlock potential. Every prospect has read these phrases five hundred times this quarter. They are the linguistic equivalent of static. Replace with a specific outcome a comparable customer actually got, with a number attached.

6. "Would love to hop on a quick fifteen-minute call"

Three flagged phrases stacked: would love to, hop on, and quick fifteen-minute call. One sentence, three of the most generated phrases in B2B outreach. The intent is fine. The phrasing is borrowed. Try: "If this lands, I can send the two-page version Tuesday" or "Worth twelve minutes this week?"

7. "Looking forward to hearing back"

A closer that adds nothing. Real human emails just end. If a closer is needed, make it a concrete next step (I will follow up Thursday if I do not hear back) rather than a generic well-wish. The standard LLM closers recur in a narrow set of variants, so the scorer flags them consistently.

Score bands

Score bands tailored for outreach.

Five bands that describe how a cold or warm send reads and what to do about it. The bands are calibrated for short-form outreach, where one templated line carries far more weight than the same line buried in a long article.

80 to 100 — Reads like a real SDR wrote it

Specific references, varied sentence lengths, no generic openers or closers, at least one concrete outcome or number. This is the kind of message a busy buyer stops on instead of archiving. It is the target band for any cold first-touch in a high-value account, where the prose has to read hand-written or it never gets opened.

65 to 79 — A few tells but reply-worthy

One or two AI-flavoured phrases survived the edit, but the message has enough specifics to read as legitimate. Worth one more pass on the flagged sentences before sending to a high-value account. Acceptable for second and third touches in a warm sequence where the recipient already has context.

45 to 64 — The template is showing

The template structure is visible. Senior buyers and procurement teams who see high cold-email volume tend to archive on the second sentence. Edit the red sentences before sending. If the message has a template opener and a generic closer both intact, fixing those two lines alone usually moves the score the most.

25 to 44 — Recognisable as generated

Reads as generated almost immediately. Most recipients delete without finishing the second sentence. Do not send at this score. The fix is structural, not wordsmithing: replace the opener, cut the bullet points, rewrite the call-to-action around a real reason for the email.

0 to 24 — Spam-flag risk for your domain

Raw or barely-edited LLM output. Recipients are more likely to flag as spam than reply, and sustained spam reports can throttle deliverability for the sending domain over time. The fix is a complete rewrite, not an edit. Use the AI rewriter workflow or rewrite by hand from the prospect-specific angle outward.

Plans & pricing

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Free covers twelve to twenty-five cold emails per day on the 10K daily detect budget. Active SDRs and AEs running larger volume usually run on Pro. RevOps teams running sequence-level audits across an SDR floor start on Business for the REST API. Full details on the pricing page.

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The TextSight workflow

Draft, score, revise — the AI-assisted outreach loop.

A four-step loop that fits between draft and send. Most SDRs run it on every cold first-touch and on the lowest-scoring step of every active sequence. Total time under four minutes per email after the first run.

1. Draft from a real angle

Start with the prospect-specific reason you are emailing. A recent funding round, a podcast they appeared on, a job posting on their team, a product launch, a public hire. Generate the body from that anchor, not from a generic template prompt. If the anchor does not exist, do not send.

2. Score the draft

Paste into TextSight. Inspect the sentence-level highlights. Take note of red sentences and the overall Authenticity Score. Anything under eighty on a cold first-touch needs revision before send; anything under seventy-five on a warm follow-up needs the same.

3. Revise the red sentences first

Red sentences move the score the most. Rewrite each one with a specific reference or a concrete number. If a sentence resists manual editing, run it through the AI rewriter in Light or Balanced mode. Skip Maximum for sales emails because aggressive rephrasing can soften pricing or deliverable claims.

4. Re-score and ship

Re-paste the revised version. Target eighty or higher for cold opens, seventy-five or higher for warm follow-ups. Send. Track reply rate against your own historical baseline so you can see whether a cleaner score moves results on your list. Run it against your real numbers rather than trusting any single benchmark.

Sequence audit

Once a quarter, score every email in your existing Outreach, Salesloft, or Apollo sequence. The lowest-scoring step is usually a follow-up copied from a template library. Replacing that one step often lifts sequence-level reply rate measurably. Re-audit any sequence that has been running unchanged for more than six weeks.

The fix

The specific opener — the single highest-leverage edit.

If you change one thing about your outreach, change the opener. It is the heaviest-weighted line on a short email and the first thing a buyer reads. Senior buyers decide whether to keep reading almost at a glance, and the opener is most of what they see in that glance.

Event anchor

Reference something the prospect did recently. A talk, a post, a hire, a product launch. Example: "Saw your Q3 deck on attribution modelling, the bit on email being undervalued matched what we are seeing across mid-market B2B." The specificity does the work; the opener earns the second sentence.

Mutual anchor

Name a shared connection, a shared customer, a shared event. Example: "Maria suggested I reach out after Tuesday's panel." A real mutual is the highest-trust opener available; a fake mutual destroys the conversation if discovered, so only use this when the connection is real.

Problem anchor

Lead with the specific problem you suspect they are facing, based on observable signal. Example: "Your team is hiring three more SDRs, usually that means the current sequence is hitting reply-rate compression." The problem has to be one you can actually solve; otherwise the opener lands and the body deflates.

Outcome anchor

Lead with a concrete result a comparable customer got. Example: "We helped a ninety-person B2B platform recover twenty-two percent of attributed revenue inside a quarter after they cut email by forty percent." Numbers beat adjectives. A real outcome beats a generic claim every time.

Why this single edit moves the score the most

Any of these four anchor types tends to lift a sales email's Authenticity Score sharply, because the opener is the heaviest-weighted signal on short-form content. The body still needs work, but the opener is the highest-leverage single edit you can make. Many SDRs revise nothing but the opener and the closer on every email, and most of the reply-rate lift comes from those two edits.

Subject lines

Subject lines — where AI ruins opens.

The subject line decides whether the body matters. LLMs produce a narrow distribution that recipients pattern-match faster than any other signal. Subject-line scoring is the cheapest win available on any active sequence.

The AI subject distribution is small

Quick question, Idea for [Company], Following up on [Topic], Helping [Company] with X. These have been used so heavily that recipients recognise them at a glance and skip past, so open rates on the worst patterns tend to be poor. The distribution is small. A large share of cold subjects collapse into the same handful of generated shapes.

Paste the subject as line one of your scan

The scorer treats the subject as a sentence and assigns a colour. Red subjects are recognised from the standard LLM distribution. Yellow subjects have one or two AI markers. Green subjects look like something a human typed for this one prospect. The subject and the opener together decide most of whether the email gets opened and read at all.

Strong subjects share three traits

Specific to the recipient (a name, a project, a recent event). Short, four to seven words. They hint at the body without promising it explicitly. "Idea for Acme's email program" is fine. "Re: the Maria podcast Q3 attribution thread" is better. "Quick question" is dead on arrival. Test new subjects on small segments before scaling to a full sequence.

Who benefits

Use cases by sales role.

Each role has a different reply-rate failure mode and a different way the scorer fits into the day. SDRs ship volume; AEs ship targeted exec-level notes; founders ship investor and partnership outreach; freelance pitchers ship single-shot proposals.

SDRs and BDRs

High-volume outbound where any reply-rate lift compounds across hundreds of sends per week. Score every step in the active sequence each Monday and rewrite the lowest-scoring two. Track the sequence-level Authenticity Score average as a leading indicator of reply-rate health over the next three weeks.

Account Executives

Lower volume, higher value. Targeted exec-level outreach where one templated opener tanks the relationship before the first call. Score every bespoke message before sending to a target account. The scoring step adds two minutes; the cost of one templated opener to a CFO is much higher than two minutes.

Founders and operators

Investor outreach, partnership outreach, candidate outreach. Generic AI-flavoured prose reads as "this founder did not bother." Score the message and rewrite anything that does not sound like the founder talking. Investor outreach in particular is where one templated phrase ends a relationship before it starts.

Freelance pitchers and consultants

Cold pitching is the entire pipeline. Each message is high-stakes. Score every pitch before sending. A fifteen-minute revision can be the difference between a reply and silence on a five-figure project. The free tier handles this volume comfortably for most independents.

RevOps teams running sequence audits

Quarterly sequence audits across an SDR floor. Score every step in every active sequence in one batch, surface the lowest-scoring steps across the org, and rewrite the bottom five percent. The REST API on Business automates this so the audit happens inside the existing sequence-management tool rather than in a separate dashboard.

FAQ

Sales-email scoring frequently asked.

Will the score predict whether prospects reply?
Not on its own. The Authenticity Score measures how human the prose reads, which is one input into reply rate alongside targeting, timing, offer, and list quality. A cleaner score removes the AI-pattern reason a buyer archives on sight, but it cannot fix a bad list or a weak offer. Track the score against your own reply-rate baseline to see how much it moves results on your specific list rather than relying on a published benchmark.
What is a passing score for a cold sales email?
Aim for eighty or higher on cold outreach. Cold emails are short, typically four hundred to eight hundred characters or roughly sixty to one hundred and thirty words, so signal density is high. A seventy might be acceptable on a long-form newsletter but the same seventy on a ninety-word cold email almost always means a template opener and a generic closer survived the edit.
Do warm follow-ups need the same score as cold opens?
Slightly looser. Warm follow-ups have context, so a recipient is more forgiving of AI patterns. A seventy to seventy-five on a warm reply is usually fine. On a cold first-touch where the recipient is deciding within three seconds whether to read or archive, push for eighty or higher.
Can I score every email in a sequence on the free tier?
Yes for typical sequences. A standard cold sales email runs four hundred to eight hundred characters, and the free tier allows ten thousand detect characters per day, so an SDR can comfortably score twelve to twenty-five emails per day. Teams running large sequences on Outreach, Salesloft, or Apollo should move to Pro at $19.99 monthly or $14.99 on yearly.
Does TextSight score subject lines too?
Yes. Paste the subject line as the first line of the email body. The scorer treats it as a sentence and assigns a colour just like the body sentences. Subject lines under eight words rarely trigger AI signal individually but contribute to the overall composition score.
Can rewriting damage my pitch accuracy?
Use Light or Balanced AI rewriter mode for sales emails. Maximum mode rewrites aggressively and can soften specific value claims or numbers, which matters more in sales than in blog content. Light keeps your accuracy intact and just smooths the AI-flavoured phrasing.
Will high AI-scored emails hurt domain reputation?
Indirectly. Modern inbox providers do not run an AI-detection classifier on inbound messages, but they do track spam-flag rates per sending domain. Generic AI outreach gets reported as spam more often because recipients recognise the patterns and flag rather than reply. Sustained spam reports can throttle deliverability for the whole domain. Lowering the AI score lowers the reason a recipient flags rather than ignores.
Is this useful if I already write outreach by hand?
Yes. Hand-written sales emails often score fifty-five to seventy because sales prose conventionally borrows AI-flavoured phrases such as hope this finds you well or would love to hop on a call. The scorer surfaces those phrases so you can swap them, which raises reply rates whether or not you used AI to draft.
Related

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