Glossary
Completion rate
Last reviewed 18 September 2026
What is a good completion rate for an email course?
A completion rate is the share of confirmed subscribers who reach the end of a course, and for a five-day course measured by a click on the last day it commonly runs between one in ten and one in four, with longer courses lower.
It is worth measuring because it says whether the thing you wrote is being used, and because it is the one funnel figure that cannot be improved by putting more strangers on a list. A course with a high sign-up rate and a low completion rate is a promise that was better than the material behind it.
Measure it with a click rather than an open, and give every day one link a reader who did the work has a reason to press. Published benchmarks disagree by wide margins here, because completion moves more with who the reader is and what was promised than with anything you can edit in the copy.
See also
- Click-asserted progress
Click-asserted progress is measuring how far a reader got through a course by acts that required a decision from a person, such as a click on a link in the last lesson, rather than by an open, which is an image load a machine can perform.
- Open rate
An open rate is the share of delivered messages in which a tiny remote image loaded, used as a proxy for a human having looked, and it is unreliable because that image is fetched by proxies and caches that are not readers and never fetched by clients that block images.
- Email course
An email course is a finite sequence of lessons delivered one email at a time, in order, on a clock that starts when each reader joins, and it ends on a day both of you knew about in advance.
Read next
This term is covered properly in Email course conversion and completion rates: what to expect, which is a longer piece on the subject.
Every other term is on the glossary index , the longer writing is in the guides, and what this site itself does is on the home page.
Thinking of writing one of these?
5dayemail hosts a five-to-ten day email course: you write it once, and everyone who joins your list gets one email a day, in order, starting from the day they confirm.
Accounts are opened a few at a time rather than by signing up. Leave your address and you will be written to when the next ones open.
One message, when there is room. No course emails, no newsletter, and the address is not passed on. Ask and it is deleted; what is kept, and for how long, is in the privacy policy.