Does the first-email pattern hold no matter how the recipient feels?

The headline finding in this study, that 61.7% of all 1,857 cold email replies came from the first email in the sequence, could in principle be driven entirely by one kind of reply. Maybe interested prospects reply immediately and everyone else drags out the sequence, or maybe it's the opposite. The dataset lets us check, because every reply was also tagged with a sentiment segment: interested, neutral, not interested, unsubscribe or hostile, or unlabelled.

The first-email share does move by segment, and it moves in an intuitive direction. Among interested replies (123 total), the first email accounts for 52.8%, the lowest share of any segment, with follow-up 1 at 14.6%, follow-up 2 at 20.3%, and follow-up 3 or later at 12.2%. Among neutral replies (829 total), the first email rises to 60.4%. Among not-interested replies (391 total), it's 55.2%. And among unsubscribe or hostile replies (31 total, the smallest segment), the first email accounts for 87.1%, essentially all of them, with follow-up 1 at only 9.7%, follow-up 2 at 3.2%, and no unsubscribe or hostile replies at all attributed to follow-up 3 or later (0%).

Why the gradient? A recipient who is going to unsubscribe or reply with hostility is reacting to being contacted at all, and that reaction is strongest and most immediate on the first unsolicited message. There is little reason for irritation to build gradually across a sequence; if anything it should peak early, when the intrusion is freshest, which is consistent with the near-total concentration in the first email for this segment. Interested replies behave differently: a recipient who is on the fence, busy, or waiting for a better moment may need the second or third touch to prompt action, which is consistent with interested replies having the highest combined follow-up share (14.6% plus 20.3% plus 12.2%) of any segment, and the lowest first-email share.

A caveat on the smallest segment. The unsubscribe or hostile segment has only 31 replies in total, meaning its follow-up 2 count of 1 and follow-up 3 or later count of 0 are each based on very few or zero replies. A single reply moving between classes would swing that segment's percentages substantially. The direction of the pattern, first-email concentration, is consistent with the larger segments, but the exact magnitude in this segment should be read as suggestive rather than precise.

What this rules out and doesn't. Because the first email leads in every segment, including the unlabelled one (69.6% of 483 replies), the overall headline number isn't an artifact of one segment dominating the total reply count. It is a pattern that recurs at different strengths across every way this dataset can slice sentiment. What the segment breakdown cannot tell you is causation: whether a recipient's underlying sentiment was fixed from the first email onward, or whether the sequence itself changed a recipient's mind between the first email and a later reply. This dataset tags each reply once, at the point it was sent, and does not track a single recipient's sentiment shifting across multiple messages.