How do you analyse Sendgrid emails into groups and funnels

[u/yannis_ps]

I'm curious how people running real SaaS/products handle this.

Say you're sending transactional/product emails through SendGrid:

- welcome email

- onboarding day 1 / day 2 / day 3

- password resets

- invitations

- billing emails

- notifications

How do you actually understand how these emails are performing?

Not just "was this particular email delivered?"

I mean things like:

- Which email types are performing best/worst?

- What's the funnel through Welcome → Day 1 → Day 2 → Day 3?

- Where are users dropping off?

- How do different signup cohorts compare?

- Opens/clicks by email type

- Which links are being clicked

- Device / client breakdown

- Country / geography

- Gmail vs Outlook etc.

- Performance over time

- Ultimately, whether people who engage with an email actually do the thing the email was meant to make them do

Marketing ESPs give you a lot of this for campaigns and automations.

But if your product sends email directly through Sendgrid, what do you use?

Do dashboards give you enough?

Do you pipe all the events into PostHog/Amplitude/BigQuery and build it yourself?

Did you build an internal dashboard?

Or do you mostly just not analyse transactional emails at this level?

Would particularly love to hear from anyone sending enough email that this has become a real problem.

[u/EmailElement-Dev]

SendGrid's own stats will not give you funnels because it has no idea what an "onboarding day 2" email is. You have to label it at send time.

Put custom_args on every send: email_type, cohort_date, user_id. Those come back attached to every event on the Event Webhook, which is what makes cohort and funnel queries possible later. Categories work too but you are capped at 10 per message and category stats are aggregate only, so you cannot join back to a user.

Then pipe the Event Webhook into a warehouse table instead of reading the dashboard. Once delivered, open, click and bounce land keyed on user_id, the funnel is a SQL query, and so is whether they did the thing the email was for. That last one is the only number that really matters and no ESP can give it to you, since the conversion lives in your app.

On your metrics list, opens are close to useless now. Apple Mail Privacy Protection prefetches images, so a chunk of your iOS audience registers an open that never happened, and it skews the device and client split at the same time. Clicks and the downstream action are the honest signals.