Intervention with motivational emails can have a positive effect on course retention in e-learning (Kurtz et al., 2022). It is, however, not yet clear whether sending one’s own and peers’ performance and progress affect course retention. We used an online course with around 200 students. Students were randomly divided into six groups: 1. individual status (i.e., You have finished x% units) vs. 2. individual progress (i.e., You have finished x% units last week) vs. 3. social status (i.e., Your status is higher than x% of all course participants) vs. 4. social progress (i.e., Your progress last week is higher than x% of all course participants) vs. 5. peer leaderboard (i.e., Here are the top 5 students) vs. 6. no email. Emails were sent weekly for 3 months. In Exp. 1 a high number of participants (11%) who did not complete anything in social status group signed off the course. It indicated that it is not optimal to remind students that they did not complete anything and they are better than 0% of all students. Exp. 2 did not mention that students completed no unit and a high number of students (13%) made progress in social status group. In Exp. 3, no email was sent and no one had completed or made any progress. Across three experiments, the completion rate was extremely low (below 3%). Only students in individual progress and social status groups have completed the course, suggesting these two groups can motivate course retention.