The Year the
Welcome Sequence
Died
Most email benchmarks are lying to you. Not with malice — with aggregation. Industry averages flatten the signal. Dispatch reads the cohort data your ESP buries in footnotes.
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4,200+ email marketers already reading
Deliverability Index
Inbox placement fell 11 pts in Q4.
Across 847 monitored domains
Avg. Open Rate — B2C SaaS
18.4%
12-month rolling · 847 domains
¹ Data sourced from 12,400 campaigns
² Cohort: B2C SaaS, list size 2k–50k
³ Period: Jan 2025 – Feb 2026
Industry averages versus
real cohort data.
We tracked 847 sending domains across 12,400 campaigns. The gap between what ESPs report as "good" and what actually moves revenue is not a rounding error — it's a category mistake.
The cohort excludes e-commerce promotional blasts and counts only transactional + editorial sequences. Apples to apples.
The finding
63%
of senders using industry benchmarks as KPI targets are optimizing for the median of a broken population.
The fix
Build your own benchmark.
Issue #139 walks through the exact cohort methodology. It's free in the archive. Read it →
All figures from Dispatch internal cohort. Methodology published in Vol. 131. Reproducible with standard ESP export + Python.
"The welcome sequence is not a funnel. It's a first impression written in code, sent at three in the morning to someone who typed their email into a box because they actually believed you."
147
Issues published
4,200+
Active subscribers
61%
Avg. open rate
0
Sponsored issues
A failing automation,
annotated.
This is a real welcome sequence from a $2M/yr SaaS company. Five mistakes. Each one was fixable in under an hour. None were caught before the sequence went live to 40,000 subscribers.
Result of these 5 errors
−38%
click-to-open rate versus their own 90-day baseline. Recovered after Issue #144's checklist.
Subject line repeated in preview text — zero incremental lift.
Sent at 9:02 AM EST. 73% of list is on PST. They woke up to this.
CTA #1 of 6. Reader fatigue starts at CTA #2.
Personalization token broke. "Hi {first_name}" shipped to 12k inboxes.
Unsubscribe link below the fold on mobile. GDPR flag.
Composite of real sequences reviewed in Vol. 144. Company names redacted.
Don't miss the next one
Vol. 148 drops next Tuesday.
Recent issues.
Free to read.
Jan 28, 2026
The Klaviyo Cohort Report
We ran the same A/B test across 200 Klaviyo accounts. The winning subject line wasn't the one you'd guess.
Dec 10, 2025
Build Your Own Benchmark
Step-by-step methodology for extracting cohort-accurate open rate baselines from any ESP export in under 20 minutes.
Oct 22, 2025
The Anatomy of a Dead Sequence
Why welcome sequences crater after 90 days — and the three data signals that predict it six weeks in advance.
You've already missed
146 issues.
Don't miss #148. Every Tuesday. Never sponsored. Always data-first.
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