iMessage Delivery States and Reporting
The short answer
Blue Reacher writes a delivery state on every message you send: queued, sent, delivered, read, replied, or undelivered. Those states roll up into campaign reporting that shows reply rate, conversion rate, and results by funnel stage. Delivery states tell you what happened to one message. Reporting tells you which campaigns deserve more money. This page covers both, plus the case for judging iMessage on replies and conversions instead of opens.
Key takeaways
- Delivery states are per-message status labels: queued, sent, delivered, read, replied, undelivered.
- Blue Reacher reports six states in real time: queued (waiting), sent (left line), delivered (on device), read (thread open), replied (live thread), undelivered (rejected).
- Useful for prioritizing conversations, misleading as a campaign metric.
- Campaign reporting rolls per-message states into rates by campaign, step, list, and funnel stage.
- Reply rate and conversion rate predict revenue.
- Teams use delivery states as branch conditions inside their automations, so a state change fires the next action without anyone watching a dashboard.
How a message falls back
What are iMessage delivery states?
Delivery states are per-message status labels: queued, sent, delivered, read, replied, undelivered. Each carries a timestamp and channel (iMessage, RCS, SMS). State plus channel is enough to drive automation.
- Email gives you send logs and guesses. Delivery states give you the real events. A delivered state says the message reached the device.
Which delivery states does Blue Reacher report?
Blue Reacher reports six states in real time: queued (waiting), sent (left line), delivered (on device), read (thread open), replied (live thread), undelivered (rejected). Delivered is your denominator for all rates.
- Every timestamp gap carries information. A message delivered 9:02am, read 9:03am, replied 9:11am gives a response profile. Ten thousand gaps tell you when to send.
Queued
- What it means
- Waiting for its slot in the campaign schedule
- What to do with it
- Nothing, unless a time-sensitive send is backing up
Sent
- What it means
- Left your dedicated line
- What to do with it
- Nothing, delivered follows within seconds
Delivered
- What it means
- Landed on the recipient's device
- What to do with it
- The denominator for every campaign rate
Read
- What it means
- Opened, with receipts turned on
- What to do with it
- Prioritize the contact, never use as a denominator
Replied
- What it means
- The thread is live
- What to do with it
- Route to a rep and stop the sequence
Undelivered
- What it means
- The address did not accept it
- What to do with it
- RCS then SMS fallback fires, flag for validation
Are read receipts a useful signal?
Useful for prioritizing conversations, misleading as a campaign metric. Receipts are off by default on iPhone, so read counts are a fraction of actual readership.
- The channel's actual rate is 98% open, 90% read in 3 minutes. Use reads to prioritize contacts, delivered as the denominator for all rates.
How does campaign reporting work?
Campaign reporting rolls per-message states into rates by campaign, step, list, and funnel stage. Every send carries the external_id of its CRM record, so the rollup stitches back with no manual matching.
- Step-level reporting shows where the money hides: most sequences have one step carrying the replies and two carrying nothing. Campaign averages miss this.
Which numbers actually predict revenue?
Which numbers actually predict revenue?
Reply rate and conversion rate predict revenue. Delivered rate and read rate describe the channel working as designed, and they barely move between a great campaign and a bad one, which makes them useless for diagnosis. The 98% open rate is a property of the medium, and under 3% of texts get flagged as spam against roughly 85% of email, so those numbers stay high whatever you write. A 98% open rate with no replies made you nothing.
- Reply rate is the first number that answers to your judgment: the offer, the segment, the first eleven words. Positive reply rate is better still, because it separates real interest from a polite no. Conversion rate decides budget, meaning the share of delivered contacts who did the thing you sell on, a purchase, a signed proposal, a completed application, or a booked call for teams that run a booking funnel.
- Unlimited iMessages at $249 per line per month, paced at up to 50 opted-in / 30 cold new conversations per line per day, change the arithmetic underneath all of it. With no per-message fees, cost per conversation drops as volume climbs: a line that delivers to 4,000 contacts at a 6% reply rate produces 240 live conversations for $249, about $1.04 each. Divide by the deals those conversations closed and you have the number that survives a budget review.
Delivered rate
- What it actually tells you
- How clean your contact list is
- Verdict
- Hygiene check, not a KPI
Read rate
- What it actually tells you
- Directional interest from the subset with receipts on
- Verdict
- Watch it, do not optimize it
Reply rate
- What it actually tells you
- Whether the message earned a response
- Verdict
- Primary leading indicator
Positive reply rate
- What it actually tells you
- Whether the response was interest or a brush-off
- Verdict
- Best early predictor of revenue
Conversion rate
- What it actually tells you
- Share of delivered contacts who took the action you sell on
- Verdict
- The number that decides budget
Those are our assumptions. The Blue Funnel Map runs the same arithmetic on the funnel you actually have, and you keep the map either way.
Run these numbers on your funnelHow do teams use delivery data across the funnel?
How do teams use delivery data across the funnel?
Teams use delivery states as branch conditions inside their automations, so a state change fires the next action without anyone watching a dashboard. iMessage carries the whole funnel, and a reactivation campaign against a dead list reports exactly like a cold outbound one, so you can see which pool of contacts is actually paying.
- Speed-to-lead follow-up. A new inbound lead gets a text inside 60 seconds. Delivered with no reply after ten minutes fires a call task, and read with no reply fires the same task at higher priority.
- Appointment confirmations and reminders. A reminder showing read on the morning of the call needs nothing else. One sitting at delivered two hours out triggers a second touch. An undelivered one routes to email and a phone call.
- No-show recovery and payment reminders. Reply rate on the recovery sequence is the number to watch, and step-level reporting tells you whether the save came from the 15-minute message or the next-day one.
- Review requests and referral activation after the sale. Read with no reply means the ask was seen and skipped, a copy problem. Undelivered means a data problem. Delivery states tell the two apart.
How do you set up delivery reporting?
How do you set up delivery reporting?
Setup takes one mapping decision and one endpoint. Pass your CRM record id as external_id on every send, and every state change, reply, and conversion stitches back to the right contact automatically.
- GoHighLevel teams get this natively: delivery states land on the contact record and campaign stats appear with no configuration. Other CRMs connect through the REST API and webhooks at https://api.bluereacher.com/v1/messages using an Authorization: Bearer brk_live_your_key header. Inbound messages post to your webhook as {from, content, channel, external_id}, so replies land in your system the second they arrive. Full reference lives at docs.bluereacher.com.
- Three configuration choices are worth making on day one. Define your conversion event, the single action that counts as success, before you launch anything. Set one attribution window, seven days from first delivered suits most teams, and apply it to every campaign. Tag campaigns by funnel stage so reporting shows whether your money comes from cold outbound or from traffic you already pay for. White-glove activation walks through all three with you, normally $449 and waived on annual billing.
Frequently asked questions
What does an undelivered state mean?
Undelivered means the recipient's address did not accept the message, almost always because the number is not a live mobile line. Fallback fires automatically, over RCS and then SMS where RCS is unavailable, so the contact still gets the message. The mobile-validated leads add-on checks numbers against a 700M+ database at $0.03 per contact, billed monthly with the line.
Can I see whether someone read my message?
Yes, when that recipient has read receipts turned on. Receipts are off by default on iPhone, so your visible read count always sits below actual readership. Use read to prioritize individual contacts and delivered as the denominator for campaign rates.
How is reply rate calculated?
Reply rate is unique contacts who replied divided by unique contacts who received a delivered message, measured across the campaign's attribution window. Counting on delivered rather than sent keeps the number honest, and counting unique contacts stops one chatty lead from inflating a campaign.
What reply rate should I expect from iMessage?
iMessage drives 2 to 3 times the reply rate of cold email, so the honest answer is 2 to 3 times whatever your email baseline is today. Cold email open rates have fallen to 27.7%, which means the baseline you measure against keeps dropping. Run your first campaign against a list you have already emailed and compare directly.
Does reporting separate iMessage from RCS and SMS fallback?
Yes. Every message carries a channel value of iMessage, RCS, or SMS, and every report filters or splits by it. Blue-bubble sends and fallback sends are counted separately, so you can read reply rate by channel and see what the iMessage lane produces on its own.
Can I push delivery events into my own CRM or data warehouse?
Yes. Webhooks post events to your endpoint as they happen, and the REST API returns the same data on demand at https://api.bluereacher.com/v1/messages. Inbound replies arrive as {from, content, channel, external_id}, so most teams write states to the CRM record and mirror raw events into a warehouse.
Is there a per-message fee for sends, replies, or delivery events?
No. Lines are $249 per month or $1,949 per year, about $162.50 a month, with unlimited iMessages, no per-message fees, and new conversations paced at up to 50 opted-in / 30 cold per line per day. Delivery states, read receipts, replies, and full reporting are included, so cost per conversation is a division problem against a fixed number.
Which metric should I fix first when a campaign underperforms?
Reply rate comes first, every time. Glance at delivered rate to rule out a list problem, work reply rate through the offer and the opening line, then move to conversion rate once conversations are flowing. Optimizing conversion rate while reply rate is flat means tuning a funnel almost nobody entered.
See these numbers on your own list
Blue Reacher is a B2B iMessage platform that sends blue-bubble texts from your CRM across the entire funnel, driving 2-3x the reply rate of cold email and higher conversion at every step, with no A2P registration required. Every state on this page exists to answer one question: how many of the leads you already paid for turned into closed deals. Book your Blue Funnel Map and we will map your external_id, define your conversion event, and measure your first campaign on reply rate and conversion rate. Ask us to open the call by text and you'll watch the delivery states change live. Lines are $249 a month, $449 white-glove activation waived on annual billing.