Someone signs up to your newsletter. At that moment their attention is higher than it will ever be again: they have just done something deliberate, your name is in front of them, and they are expecting something from you. Four weeks later they remember none of it. The welcome series is the sequence that either uses that moment or wastes it. On most small lists it consists of a single message that says „thanks for signing up" and nothing else. This piece covers what the benchmarks actually show about those first emails, what German and Austrian law require in email one, and which three jobs the first three emails take on.
Why is the welcome email both your most opened and your most unsubscribed message?
The largest publicly available dataset on this comes from GetResponse, an email sending provider. For its Email Marketing Benchmarks the company says it analysed „more than 4.4 billion messages sent by GetResponse customers in 2023", limited to „active senders with at least 500 contacts". This is vendor data from its own customer base, not an independent study. It is useful for comparing message types against each other, not as a target figure for your list.
The comparison runs like this: welcome emails reach an 83.63 per cent open rate and a 16.60 per cent click-through rate. Newsletters, meaning the regular round-up, sit at 40.08 per cent opens and 3.84 per cent clicks. Between them are autoresponders at 51.05 per cent and triggered messages at 45.38 per cent. On those three numbers alone, the welcome email is by some distance the strongest message on the whole list.
Now the fourth number, which is rarely quoted alongside them. The unsubscribe rate of the welcome email is 0.94 per cent; for the newsletter it is 0.12 per cent. Autoresponders and triggered messages sit at 0.37 and 0.38 per cent. So the message with the highest attention is also the one after which roughly eight times as many people leave as after an ordinary round-up. That is not a flaw in the data, it is the logic of the situation: someone who has just signed up is checking whether the decision was right. Email one is that check.
What does that mean in absolute terms on a small list? Our own calculation, based on 480 sign-ups a year, meaning 40 a month: 0.94 per cent is roughly four and a half unsubscribes a year, 0.12 per cent would be half of one. The difference is four people. Optimising a welcome series against that gap means optimising against noise. The same base is far more interesting from the other side: a 16.60 per cent click-through rate on 480 sign-ups is around 80 clicks a year on the one link you place in email one. Those 80 clicks are what the work is actually about.
What belongs in email one, before you offer anything at all?
Before the editorial question comes the legal one. In Germany, section 7(2)(2) of the UWG governs email advertising: it prohibits advertising „unter Verwendung einer automatischen Anrufmaschine, eines Faxgerätes oder elektronischer Post, ohne dass eine vorherige ausdrückliche Einwilligung des Adressaten vorliegt", that is, without the recipient's prior express consent. Austria says the same in section 174(3) of the TKG 2021: sending electronic mail, including SMS, without the recipient's prior consent is unlawful where it is done for direct marketing purposes. Both jurisdictions have a narrow existing-customer exception where the address was collected during a sale, the advertising concerns the sender's own similar goods, the customer has not objected, and the right to object is pointed out on every use (section 7(3) UWG, section 174(4) TKG 2021). That exception does not cover an ordinary newsletter.
On top of that sits the burden of proof. Article 7(1) GDPR: „Where processing is based on consent, the controller shall be able to demonstrate that the data subject has consented to processing of his or her personal data." That is exactly what double opt-in delivers: confirmation email, click, timestamp. Internationally it is the exception. Across all industries in the GetResponse dataset, 89.01 per cent of senders use single opt-in and only 10.99 per cent use a confirmation click; agencies sit at 6.21 per cent, publishers highest at 34.75 per cent. For the German-speaking market that means the benchmark figures above come mostly from lists that would not have been collected cleanly by local standards.
Two things therefore belong in email one before any offer appears. First, the unsubscribe, and visibly so. Article 7(3) GDPR requires that „it shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent". Google, in its email sender guidelines, additionally requires that senders of more than 5,000 messages a day „must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body" - technically via the headers defined in RFC 2369 and RFC 8058. Second, the promise, delivered. Whatever someone signed up for has to be in this message and not in the next one: the guide, the checklist, the discount code. Anything else is an announcement, and announcements do not get opened.
Why is „tomorrow morning" too late for the first email?
Because attention has a very short half-life. The same dataset measures when opens and clicks actually happen: „The first hour is when most recipients open and interact with your email, capturing 21.20% of opens and 44.14% of clicks." Over 24 hours, the report puts it at roughly 70 per cent of opens and 85 per cent of clicks. Almost half of all clicks therefore happen within the first sixty minutes.
For the welcome email this finding bites harder than for any other message, because the trigger and the attention coincide: the person is still sitting in front of the form. A welcome email that rides along in the nightly batch, or waits for the next editorial slot, reaches a different person than the one who signed up. Technically this is not effort, it is a setting: the sequence is started by the event, not by the calendar. That starting point is exactly what separates a pure drip campaign from a triggered sequence.
What jobs do emails two and three have?
The three emails have three different jobs, and the most common mistake is giving all three the same one. Email one delivers. It redeems the promise someone signed up for, it names the sender and the way out, and it carries exactly one link. Not three.
Email two sets expectations. It answers the question that arrives after the download: who is writing here, what is this about, and what turns up how often. It is the least spectacular part of the sequence and the part that decides the next few months, because it is where the expectation is set. Say nothing here and the unsubscribe arrives later, at the third round-up nobody has a frame for.
Email three offers the first small step, and one that is smaller than a purchase. A reply to a real question, a second piece on the same subject, an appointment. What this message should not be is the first sales attempt, because at this point all you know about the contact is that they filled in a form. The sequence is therefore the shortest possible form of a nurture sequence: a defined trigger, a defined goal, a defined exit.
How do you tell whether the sequence is working?
Not from the open rate. An open is a loaded image, not a decision, and on a freshly collected list it is predictably high without anything following from it. Two numbers do carry a steering decision.
The first is the click-through rate of email one. It measures whether the person did the thing they signed up to do. If it sits well below what you see on your other messages, the problem is almost always the link itself: it points at an overview page instead of the promised thing, or there are several links and none of them is the main route.
The second is the unsubscribe rate across the whole sequence, not of a single message. If it rises across the three emails instead of falling, that says something about the expectation you set: people are getting something other than what they ordered. A high unsubscribe rate straight after email one, by contrast, is not an alarm but a filter doing its work. What does matter: complaints instead of unsubscribes. Google wants to see a spam complaint rate „below 0.10%" and warns against „ever reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher". Hide the unsubscribe and you convert unsubscribes into complaints, damaging the deliverability of every future message. How serious that gets is in our piece on deliverability before reach.
The frame behind all of it stays the same: your list is the part of your reach that belongs to you. Why that outweighs any platform reach is in the piece on owning your audience. The welcome series is the moment an address turns into a contact.
Three levers for this week
One: check what is actually being sent right now. Sign up with a fresh address and time how long email one takes. If all that arrives is a confirmation without the promised content, that is the most expensive open item in your entire email programme.
Two: cut email one down to one link. One goal, one route, a visible unsubscribe. Every extra link divides the 16.60 per cent click-through rate from the benchmark rather than raising it.
Three: write email two before you think about email three. Who is writing, what turns up, how often. Three paragraphs will do. This message prevents unsubscribes that would otherwise arrive in four weeks, when nobody remembers why that address is on your list.
If you want to know what your sequence sends today and where people drop out: we will walk through it with you, using your numbers. ✉️