Hey folks — wanted to share a quick test I just ran. I took 20 of our highest-performing sales emails from the last quarter (all had above 25% reply rates) and dropped them into Grammarly to check the “engagement” score.
I was expecting a strong correlation — high-performing emails should, in theory, score high on engagement, right? But the results were… mixed at best.
Here’s what stood out:
* About half the emails scored in the “good” or “excellent” range for engagement, which tracked.
* But the other half scored surprisingly low — some were flagged as “hard to read” or “too formal,” even though they consistently drove replies and meetings.
* One of our top performers (a short, punchy, slightly casual email) got a middling score because Grammarly suggested it needed more variety in sentence length and more compelling word choices. Yet it’s our most reliable opener.
I’m a big fan of tools that help polish communication, but this makes me wonder if the engagement metric might be over-indexing on certain stylistic norms rather than actual effectiveness in a sales context.
Has anyone else done similar checks? I’m especially curious if those in sales engagement or outreach have found the same disconnect. Maybe we need to treat it as a baseline clarity check rather than a true performance predictor.
— Dan
spreadsheet ninja