In beauty and personal care, only 0.95% of newsletter recipients click a link on average, while in healthcare the same metric sits at 2.25% (MailerLite, 2025). An aesthetic clinic lives right between those two worlds, yet most clinics email like a cosmetics shop: promotion, discount, "new in our menu". This guide sets out which numbers are a realistic reference point, why open rate stopped telling you anything, and which messages should move from manual campaigns to automation.
What does normal look like? 2024-2025 benchmarks
The freshest large dataset is MailerLite's: more than 3.6 million campaigns from 181,000 accounts, sent between December 2024 and November 2025, reported as medians. The second set, from GetResponse, covers more than 4.4 billion messages sent in 2023 and includes a separate row for Poland.
| Source and segment | Open rate | Click rate | Click-to-open | Unsubscribes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MailerLite 2025, all industries | 43.46% | 2.09% | 6.81% | 0.22% |
| MailerLite 2025, beauty and personal care | 38.4% | 0.95% | 3.91% | 0.23% |
| MailerLite 2025, medical, dental and healthcare | 43.75% | 2.25% | 7.31% | 0.20% |
| GetResponse 2024, health and beauty | 38.16% | 2.14% | 5.62% | 0.12% |
| GetResponse 2024, Poland (all industries) | 38.07% | 5.38% | 14.12% | n/a |
Two takeaways for a clinic:
- Positioning your content matters. Emails with a clinical tone (information, aftercare, reminders) earn more than twice the click rate of typical beauty emails. A clinic can choose to play in the medical league.
- Polish audiences click readily. In the GetResponse data, click-to-open for Poland (14.12%) is well above the report's global average (8.62%). The market is rarely the problem. Content and timing usually are.
Why open rate is no longer your metric
According to Litmus data from July 2026, Apple accounts for 62.26% of all email opens, and 55-60% of opens are affected by Mail Privacy Protection (Litmus, 2026). Apple prefetches message content, so your email platform often records an "open" even though nobody read the email.
The benchmarks show it. Beauty posts a 38.4% open rate but only a 0.95% click rate. Opens look respectable while action barely happens.
What to track instead:
- Click rate (clicks over all delivered emails) as your primary engagement metric.
- Bookings from email, meaning appointments made from a link in the message. Your email tool alone cannot measure this; you need a link to your calendar or CRM.
- Unsubscribes per campaign. If one send produces noticeably more unsubscribes than your average, the topic or the frequency missed.
Automation versus newsletters: what the data says
GetResponse breaks results down by message type. Behaviour-triggered emails reach a 5.02% click rate against 3.84% for regular newsletters. Autoresponders, the sequences sent after sign-up, reach 5.59% (GetResponse, 2024).
The gap is even clearer in revenue. In Omnisend's report, based on more than 27 billion emails sent in 2025, automated emails made up just 2% of sends but generated 30% of email-attributed revenue and earned 16 times more per send than scheduled campaigns (Omnisend, 2026). That is ecommerce data, not clinic data, but the mechanism is the same: a message sent at the moment a client needs it beats a message sent because it is Tuesday.
6 emails every clinic should automate
The map below is our framework for aesthetic clinics. Each message has one trigger from the appointment calendar or CRM, one goal and one metric.
| # | Message | Trigger | Goal | Metric |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New client welcome | first booking | prepare for the visit, fewer no-shows | no-show rate on first visits |
| 2 | Aftercare instructions | completed visit, same day | safety and trust | clicks on aftercare, questions to reception |
| 3 | Review request | 2-4 days after the visit | Google reviews | new reviews per month |
| 4 | Next-stage reminder | date from the treatment plan set by the practitioner | continue the series or follow-up | bookings from email |
| 5 | Post-consultation, no booking | 3 days after a consultation without treatment | help the decision | consultation-to-treatment rate |
| 6 | Lapsed client reactivation | no visit for e.g. 120 days | bring the client back | returns within 60 days of sending |
Rules that keep the system honest:
- Messages 1-4 are service communication, not marketing. Keep them about the client's visit, with no discounts or "while you are here" offers.
- Messages 5-6 are marketing, so they require marketing consent under GDPR and local electronic communications law. No consent, no send.
- The practitioner sets the dates in message 4, not the marketing team. The email only reminds the client of what is already in the plan.
- One message, one button. Ideally "Book a time", linking straight to your calendar.
How many clicks does one newsletter buy you? A quick calculation
Take the number of active contacts with marketing consent and multiply by click rate. With a list of 2,000:
- at a typical beauty result (0.95%), that is 19 clicks from the whole send,
- at a typical medical result (2.25%), that is 45 clicks.
Now multiply clicks by your own click-to-booking rate (pull it from your CRM, do not guess) and by your average visit value. If the result does not cover the time your reception or marketing team spends producing the campaign, you have your answer on why automation should come before the next newsletter. You build an automation once, and it runs on every visit.
30-day rollout checklist
- Export your list and remove contacts without marketing consent from campaign lists.
- Make click rate and bookings from email your primary metrics, not open rate.
- Launch messages 1 and 2 (welcome, aftercare) in week one.
- Add the review request (3) in week two.
- Connect reminders (4) to the treatment plan stored in the client record.
- Switch on the post-consultation follow-up (5) and reactivation (6) for consented contacts.
- After 30 days, compare bookings from email with your last manual newsletter.
FAQ
What is a good open rate for an aesthetic clinic?
The median is 38.4% for beauty and 43.75% for healthcare (MailerLite 2025). Treat open rate with caution, though, because 55-60% of opens are distorted by Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Click rate is a better reference point: 0.95% in beauty and 2.25% in healthcare.
How often should a clinic send a newsletter?
There is no single number. Watch unsubscribes after each campaign: the beauty median is 0.23%. If you regularly exceed it, you are sending too often or the content does not fit your list. Visit-triggered automations do not wear out a list the same way, because they only reach the people they concern.
Does an aftercare email need marketing consent?
A message that relates only to a service already delivered and contains no promotional content is part of client service. The moment you add an offer or a discount, it becomes marketing and needs consent. If in doubt, run the copy past your data protection officer.
Email or SMS?
The two channels play different roles. SMS works for short appointment reminders; email works for content that needs reading: aftercare, treatment preparation, a treatment plan. Ideally both are triggered from the same calendar.
The bottom line
An aesthetic clinic does not need to send more email for email to start paying. It needs to send at different moments: after booking, after the visit, before the next stage of treatment. In Palyri these triggers come straight from the calendar and the client record, so automations run without manual list exports. Whatever tool you use, start by measuring clicks and bookings, not opens.
Sources
Want to implement this in your clinic?
Book a free Palyri demo. We'll show how it works on your clinic's data.
Book demo via WhatsAppPaulina Zielińska
Konsultant w branży beauty
Ponad 4 lata doświadczenia w branży beauty: najpierw od środka jako manager kliniki, teraz jako niezależny konsultant. Wdrożyła systemy automatyzacji sprzedaży i CRM w kilkudziesięciu klinikach estetycznych w Polsce.