Automations run in the background, which is their strength and their risk. Nobody checks a welcome email that has been running for a year unless the numbers prompt them. Mailpro records statistics for every automated email so you can spot the step that has stopped working, the send time that doesn’t suit your readers, or the offer that has gone stale.
What Mailpro measures
- Opens per day and per hour: when your subscribers engage.
- Response rate: the share of recipients who opened and then clicked.
- Clicks per day and per hour: when action happens, which is not always when opens happen.
- Unique openers: how many different people opened, rather than total opens.
- Who clicked what: which subscribers clicked which link, useful for follow-up automations.
- Opening dates relative to sending: how long after delivery people tend to open.
See the full list on the automated email statistics feature page.
Reading the numbers for a UK audience
Hour-by-hour data. If most opens of a date-triggered email arrive at 7am, your subscribers probably check email on the commute. Move the send hour to just before that. Look again after the clocks change between GMT and BST, since hour-based patterns can shift.
Open rates are inflated. Apple Mail Privacy Protection preloads images and can register an open that never happened. Treat opens as a rough indicator and put more weight on clicks and conversions.
Geography. Geo-tracking shows where opens come from. A UK retailer might find its welcome email performs noticeably differently in Scotland, which could mean an offer or delivery message that doesn’t fit there.
Four questions to ask every quarter
- Where do people drop out? In a five-step sequence, compare clicks at each step. A sharp fall at one step points to the content of that email.
- Is the timing right? Compare the delay between trigger and send with when people act.
- Are unsubscribes rising? A welcome series that loses many subscribers in the first week may be sending too much, too soon.
- Is it still accurate? Expired codes, old prices and last year’s dates undermine trust quickly.
A worked example: the welcome series
Imagine a Manchester fitness studio with a three-email welcome series: a greeting with a class timetable, a “meet the instructors” email two days later, and a first-month offer on day five. The statistics show healthy opens on all three, but clicks on email two are far lower than on the other two. The unique-opener count is fine, so people are reading it; they just have nothing to do. The fix is simple: add a “book a free taster class” button to email two. A month later, clicks on that step have caught up and more people reach the offer on day five already booked in.
The same approach works for any sequence. Look for the step where behaviour changes, then ask what that email asks the reader to do.
Why we don’t publish benchmark rates
You will find plenty of “average open rate” figures online. They mix industries, countries and measurement methods, and many predate Apple’s privacy changes. Your own history is a better benchmark: compare each automation with its own previous months and with your regular campaigns to the same audience.
Share the results
If your automation supports sales or fundraising colleagues, send them the numbers that matter to them. You can export statistics for a monthly report, or compare automations with one-off sends.
From insight to action
Use what you learn to adjust the workflow: move a send hour, shorten a sequence, split an automation by segment. Clicks on a specific link can even start a new automation. To compare automations with your regular campaigns, use the campaign statistics.
Privacy and tracking
Open and click tracking relies on pixels and tracked links. Under PECR, the ICO treats these as storage and access technologies, and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 brought some changes to the consent rules for them. Explain tracking in your privacy notice and follow the current ICO guidance. Mailpro keeps statistics on private Swiss infrastructure, outside US jurisdiction. New to automation? Start with how to send automated emails.