Picture this. You finish a launch. The revenue number is sitting in front of you. Maybe it’s decent. Maybe it’s disappointing. Either way, you have no idea which part of the email system actually worked and which part quietly cost you 30% of your potential revenue.

That’s the situation I see in almost every course creator I start working with. They have an email list. They send emails during the launch. They look at revenue at the end. But they can’t tell you what their registration emails converted at. They can’t tell you what their show-up sequence open rate was. They can’t tell you how much revenue their cart-close sequence drove versus cart-open day. They’re flying completely blind.

I’ve worked on campaigns with Tony Robbins, Terry Real, Marisa Peer, Danny Morel, and dozens of others. At Mindvalley, I was part of the team managing an email list of over 2 million subscribers. The biggest launch I personally worked on came in at around $3 million. And across 114+ campaigns and what I estimate is $100M+ in funnel revenue generated, one thing stays constant: the operators who scale are the ones who treat each phase of the launch email system separately with its own benchmarks, its own KPIs, and its own optimization lever.

So this article isn’t going to give you a single number and call it a benchmark. That’s not useful. What I’m going to give you is the full picture: open rates, click rates, and revenue per lead broken down by phase so you know exactly where you stand, and exactly where to fix things when you don’t.

If you want to understand the full system behind how email drives a launch from registration through to close, start with Email Marketing for Online Courses: The Complete Launch System Guide. This article will make a lot more sense after that foundation.

Why Measuring Email as One Channel Is the Wrong Move

Most course creators look at their email performance at the campaign level. Total opens. Total clicks. Total revenue. One big number at the end.

The problem? A launch email system isn’t one thing. It’s five or six completely different conversations happening in sequence. And each one has a different job. A registration email is trying to get someone to take action on an event. A show-up email is trying to make a decision feel urgent. A sales email is trying to move someone from interested to committed. These are not the same conversation. And they will not perform the same way.

When you average them all together, you destroy the diagnostic signal. You can’t tell if your low revenue came from weak registration emails (meaning fewer people made it into the event), from a broken show-up sequence (meaning fewer people heard the pitch), or from a weak sales sequence (meaning the people who showed up didn’t convert). Each of those problems has a completely different fix. But you can’t see which problem you have if you’re only looking at the final number.

The shift I make with every client is simple: measure email by phase, not by campaign. Here’s what those benchmarks look like.

Course Launch Email Benchmarks by Phase

Phase 1: Pre-Launch Warm-Up Emails

These go out 2 to 4 weeks before the event. Their job is simple: get the audience thinking about the problem your product solves, so that when the registration invitation lands, it doesn’t feel cold.

Benchmark open rate: 25-35%
Benchmark click rate: 1.5-3%

These won’t be your best-performing emails of the campaign. That’s fine. Their value is cumulative, not individual. If your warm-up open rates are below 20%, that’s a signal your list has gone cold and you have a deliverability or re-engagement problem to solve before you try to launch anything.

Phase 2: Registration Phase Emails

This is where I like to send 7 to 14 emails over the 7 to 14 days before the event. Every single one has one CTA: register for the event. Not “watch this video,” not “download this PDF,” not “follow me on Instagram.” One direction. One destination.

Benchmark open rate: 30-42%
Benchmark click rate: 2.5-5%

What you’re looking for here is a click rate above 3%. If you’re below that, the issue is almost never deliverability. It’s almost always angle. Your emails aren’t giving people a new reason to register with each send. The announcement email, the personal story email, the paradigm shift email, the objection-destruction email each one should make a different case. If they all sound the same, click rates collapse.

The other number that matters in this phase: the ratio of people who clicked but didn’t register. That’s a segment worth following up with specifically. They showed intent. They went to the page and didn’t finish. A single follow-up email to this group, framed as “I noticed you were interested but didn’t finish,” consistently recovers 10-20% of those lost registrations.

Phase 3: Show-Up Sequence

Once someone registers, your job changes entirely. You’re no longer trying to convince them. You’re trying to keep them warm, build anticipation, and make sure they physically show up on the day.

Benchmark open rate: 40-55%
Benchmark click rate: 4-8%

Show-up sequence emails perform significantly better than registration emails and they should. These people already said yes. They’re engaged. They expect to hear from you. The question is whether you’re sending the right content.

For live webinars, I target a 25% show-up rate. For evergreen, the benchmark is 38%. If you’re below those numbers, the fix is almost always in the show-up sequence. You can learn more about what that sequence should actually contain in How to Increase Webinar Show-Up Rates: The Show-Up Sequence Explained.

One thing that consistently moves show-up rates: adding a personal story email 24 hours before the event. Not a reminder. A story. Something that makes the person remember exactly why they registered in the first place. That emotional reconnection converts to attendance in a way that “Don’t forget, it’s tomorrow” never will.

Phase 4: Cart Open / Sales Emails

The event is done. The offer is live. Now email has to close.

Benchmark open rate: 32-48%
Benchmark click rate: 3-6%

Most course creators send one email when cart opens and one email when cart closes. That’s not a sales sequence. That’s a notification. A real sales sequence addresses objections, shares testimonials, tells stories, and moves people through the decision step by step.

The webinar conversion rate benchmark is 3-10% of attendees, depending on price point. If you’re at 2% or below, the issue often isn’t the pitch it’s the post-webinar email sequence. People need to see the offer again, in a different context, with a different angle, before they commit.

Phase 5: Urgency / Cart Close Emails

The last 48-72 hours of cart open consistently drive a disproportionate percentage of total sales. Every serious launch I’ve worked on confirms this. The urgency is real, and the emails that carry it perform differently than anything else in the sequence.

Benchmark open rate: 48-65%
Benchmark click rate: 5-10%

These are the highest-performing emails in the entire campaign and they’re also the ones course creators most often get wrong. They either don’t send enough of them, or they send too many without escalating the actual reason to act now. Fake urgency (“Only 10 spots left!” when there are clearly more) destroys trust permanently. Real urgency a genuine deadline, a disappearing bonus, a price increase converts at exactly these rates.

Revenue Per Lead: What Good Actually Looks Like

Open rates and click rates are diagnostic tools. Revenue per lead is the number that actually tells you whether the system is healthy.

Here’s how it breaks down by price point:

$97 offer: $1-4 revenue per email lead
$497-997 offer: $4-12 revenue per email lead
$2,000-5,000 offer: $10-30 revenue per email lead
$10,000+ certification or high-ticket program: $25-75 revenue per email lead

These numbers assume a reasonably warm list with a proper email sequence. Cold list with no nurture? Cut those numbers significantly. Warm list that has been receiving consistent value content for months? You can push toward the top of those ranges.

The Mindvalley model is the best example I know of how to think about this. Ads were designed to break even not to profit. The profit came from the email list. 100 people sign up for a webinar. 5 buy. Those 5 pay back the cost of acquiring all 100. The other 95 go into the email list. Whatever revenue those 95 generate over the next months and years is essentially free profit. That’s why I say to every course creator who thinks ads are their growth engine: ads are the door. Email is the house.

For a deeper breakdown of what each subscriber on your list should actually be worth, Revenue Per Email Subscriber: Benchmarks Every Course Creator Should Know takes you through the full calculation with specific examples.

The One Benchmark That Ties Everything Together

Here’s the question I ask at the end of every launch review: at which phase did the funnel break?

Start from the top. If landing page conversion is below 40%, fix the copy before you touch anything else. If registration click rates are below 2.5%, you have an angle problem not a volume problem. If show-up rates are below 25%, the sequence between registration and event isn’t doing its job. If conversion rate is below 3%, the pitch or the post-event sequence needs work.

Growth is always the sum of many small things. No campaign was ever saved by one great subject line. But a campaign where every phase performs at benchmark? That’s how you build something that compounds. That’s how $25M becomes $75M. That’s how Tony Robbins campaigns go from ROAS 100% to 388%. Not through tricks. Through process, measurement, and relentless iteration on the right numbers.

First you nail it. Then you scale it. And the only way to know whether it’s nailed is to know your benchmarks by phase, not by campaign.

If you want to build the email system that produces these numbers from the ground up, start with Email Marketing for Online Courses: The Complete Launch System Guide. That’s where the full architecture lives. This article gives you the benchmarks to know when it’s working.