What Is Click To Open Rate In Email Marketing?

What is CTOR (click-to-open rate)?

The email marketing metric often referred to as the “secret metric” is CTOR. The easiest way to understand it is to think of those who opened the email, what percentage of users found the content inside interesting.

The CTOR can be calculated by dividing the unique clicks by unique opens and multiplying by 100. For example, if the campaign receives 90 unique clicks and 400 opens, the CTOR is around 22%. A good click-to-open rate is considered between 20% and 30%.

This metric is based on the number of unique opens and clicks. CTOR is a good indicator of how relevant the provided content is to subscribers. If the marketer presents engaging content, photos and links, users will want to learn more.

How to increase the Click-to-open rate

Calculating average click-to-open rate for every email campaign type. Some of the email campaigns are just not as interesting as others. It’s important to find the norm for every different email marketing campaign type, so the marketer knows what average rate they are trying to increase.

Incorporating more personalization. It doesn’t matter if the campaign is targeted at industry professionals or eCommerce shoppers. They want to receive emails that are relevant to them. Using previously collected user data, such as viewed products or pages, and using that information to build better emails will result in a higher CTOR.

Giving more attention to the details. Going the extra mile and putting up some finishing touches on the digital email campaign can provide benefits. Experimenting with different subject lines, adjusting the color scheme and design of the campaign can lead to an increased click-to-open rate.

CTA should be the star of the campaign. Including a call to action, which stands out in the email, leads the subscriber to learn more about the business’s product or service.

Running A/B tests and measuring the performance data can also help optimize, run better campaigns and drive CTOR higher than the average. A/B tests of similar campaigns can highlight the parts of the email marketing campaign that ask for improvement.

Making the campaign eye-scannable. Most subscribers are busy and don’t have much time to read all of the campaign’s content. By making the content more scannable and putting up the most important information first so that the users can get key points of the email can work wonders on the click-to-open rate.

CTR vs. CTOR

The difference in CTR and CTOR might seem slight, but it’s important.

• If you’re looking at CTR, Email A has a CTR of 5 percent, but Email B has a CTR of 10 percent. Does that mean that Email B was more successful? Not necessarily.
• If we look at the CTOR of each, we find that Email A’s CTOR is 50 percent (5 clicks divided by 10 opens), and Email B has a CTOR of only 20 percent (10 clicks divided by 50 opens).

Essentially, the CTR takes into account all of the in-box actions. By contrast, the CTOR only includes the actions of those who have opened the email. Thus it isn’t skewed by reactions to timing, subject lines, “from” fields, etc. In short, it only measures the performance of the content of the email.

In a world where content is king, that’s definitely a metric worth looking at.