New users really open 28.8% of welcome emails. By day 2, it is 13.5%.
Real, bot-filtered benchmarks for the three onboarding emails every SaaS sends: the welcome email, the day-2 nudge and the win-back. Apple Mail Privacy Protection and security-scanner opens are removed, so these are people, not proxies.
- Published 22 October 2026
- 16,827 onboarding and win-back emails
- 3 March to 14 October 2026
- Raw open rate
- Human open rate
At a glance
The benchmarks
Key findings
What the onboarding data says
- 1The welcome email wins
28.8% of new users open it and 6.0% click. No later email comes close on either number.
- 2Half the readers are gone in 48 hours
Human opens fall from 28.8% on the welcome email to 13.5% on the second email, a 53% drop.
- 3Raw opens hide the drop
Raw opens only fall from 42.4% to 32.2%. Apple proxy opens grow from 8.9 to 14.1 points of the open rate as real readers leave.
- 4The day-2 nudge is the weak spot
It has the lowest human open rate in the sequence (13.5% vs 15.8% for later emails) and the highest unsubscribe rate (1.88%).
- 5Win-back: 12.5% open, 2.3% click
Emails to stalled or lapsed users reach about one person in eight, with the lowest click rate of any email type we measured.
- 6Complaints stay tiny
Fewer than 1 in 1,000 onboarding or win-back emails drew a spam complaint, at every stage.
Clicks
Click rate by onboarding stage
- Raw click rate
- Human click rate
Full table
Every onboarding benchmark in one place
| Delivered | Raw open | Human open | Human click | Unsubscribe | Complaint | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome email | 2,588 | 42.4% | 28.8% | 5.99% | 1.28% | 0.04% |
| Day-2 nudge | 3,677 | 32.2% | 13.5% | 3.78% | 1.88% | 0.03% |
| Later onboarding emails | 5,715 | 36.7% | 15.8% | 4.13% | 1.73% | 0.05% |
| Win-back | 4,847 | 30.6% | 12.5% | 2.31% | 1.34% | 0.06% |
All onboarding emails together: 36.5% raw open, 17.9% human open, 4.42% human click across 11,980 delivered emails.
List health
Unsubscribes, bounces and complaints
These are opt-in lists of people who signed up for a product, which is why complaints are close to zero. Unsubscribes peak at the second onboarding email (1.88%, against 1.28% for the welcome email): that is where new users decide whether they want to keep hearing from you.
What to do with this
How to use these benchmarks
Put the one action in the welcome email
It is the email most people will ever read from you. With 6.0% clicking, the welcome email should carry the single step that makes a new user stick.
Rewrite the day-2 nudge first
It has the lowest reach and the most unsubscribes. Make it shorter, tie it to what the user did or did not do, and give one reason to come back.
Judge win-back on clicks
At 12.5% human opens, a win-back that looks like a 30% open rate in a raw dashboard is mostly Apple's proxy. Count clicks and reactivations.
For the full breakdown of where fake opens come from, read the True Open Rate Report. Planning a sequence from scratch? The onboarding email sequence guide walks through each email.
Methodology
How we measured it
Data. Anonymized send and event logs from software products that send their onboarding email through Meisa, 3 March to 14 October 2026. Only delivered emails sent with open tracking switched on are included.
Stages. For each new user we ordered their onboarding emails by send time. The welcome email is the first email of an onboarding sequence or a dedicated welcome email. The day-2 nudge is the second onboarding email, sent between half a day and three and a half days after the first. Later onboarding emails are the third email onwards. Win-back covers reactivation campaigns, abandoned-checkout emails and emails to users who never used their account.
Bot filtering. Opens from security-scanner signatures and from Apple Mail Privacy Protection were removed, as were other opens within 10 seconds of delivery. Welcome emails are exempt from the 10-second rule because new users often open them the moment they arrive. The same rules apply to clicks. Full details are in the True Open Rate Report methodology.
Unsubscribes and complaints. An unsubscribe counts against an email when the recipient used the one-click link or preference page within seven days of receiving it. Automatic suppressions, such as hard bounces, are not counted as unsubscribes.
Anonymization. Aggregates only. Every group shown has at least 300 delivered emails, and no sender can be identified. No recipient addresses, recipient domains, sender names or per-sender figures are used.
Onboarding email human open rates
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Meisa (2026). Onboarding email benchmarks 2026. Meisa Research. https://meisa.io/research/onboarding-email-benchmarks
<a href="https://meisa.io/research/onboarding-email-benchmarks">Onboarding email benchmarks 2026</a> (Meisa Research, 2026)
In bot-filtered data from software products sending through Meisa (Meisa Research, 2026), 28.8% of new users opened the welcome email and 6.0% clicked. The day-2 nudge reached 13.5% human opens and win-back emails 12.5%.
Free to quote, chart and republish with a link back to this page (CC BY 4.0).
Know which new users are really reading
Meisa runs your onboarding sequences and shows opens from people separately from proxy and scanner opens, so you can fix the email that is losing them.
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