What Is a Good Click-Through-Rate (CTR) For Email Marketing?

Starting an email marketing campaign is a huge step in creating a strong relationship with current and potential customers.

Whether a business uses their own strategies or ones laid out by tested and studied experts, there can be many questions that pop up. Some include basic terminology, like click-through-rate (CTR), 0pen rates, and other email marketing terms.

Marketers and business owners often find themselves asking the question, “What Is a Good Click-Through-Rate?” early on in email marketing campaigns. But, the better question really should be, “What Is a Good Click-To-Open Rate?”

You can understand the answers better by knowing the definitions of these measurements:

• Open Rate: The percentage that measures unique opens compared to the total number of emails delivered to your list.
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who clicked on a link measured against the total number of emails sent (minus bounce).
• Click-to-Open-Rate (CTOR): The percentage of subscribers who clicked something in the email as related to the total number of recipients who opened it.

The big difference between these is that the percentage is either based upon the clicks vs total recipients or clicks vs total opens. Let’s take a look at an example.

Click-Through-Rate VS Click-To-Open-Rate Example

For example, lets say you send out Email A and Email B to 100 recipients each. We will pretend that there are no bounces of course.

Email A had 10 people open the email and 5 people clicked on something within the email.

Email B had 50 people open the email and 10 people clicked on something within the email.

According to this example, Email A would have a CTR of 5% and Email B would have a CTR of 10%.

However, Email A would have a 50% CTOR (5 clicks divided by 10 opens), while Email B would only have a 20% CTOR (10 clicks divided by 50 opens).

Which is Better? It depends on what you are looking for.

The CTR shows an email’s overall performance (which truly is a culmination of many different factors) while the CTOR only examines the success of the content within the email.

Good Open Rate and Click-Through-Rate

Of course, 100% open rate and 100% click through rate would be miracles within themselves with a high volume email campaign. We all can dream, right?

As with any marketing, these types of rates are hard to provide precise numbers or be specific to what constitutes the best open rates and click through rates. But, we can provide what is considered really good numbers to measure upon.

Remember that different industries, business types, product price points and services will all deem their own “GOOD, BETTER, BEST” numbers to base successful measurements on.

We do recommend that you test, test, and TEST your email campaigns to determine what GOOD numbers are to YOUR BUSINESS. This is very important because the difference in these percentages will vary greatly between different industries and products or services.

Across all industries, the average 2017 Open Rate, CTR and CTOR are as follows:

AVG Email Open Rates: 24.79% – 39% (Legal Services ranked highest)

AVG Email Click-Through-Rates (CTR): 4.19% – 7.9% (Publishing companies ranked highest)

AVG Email Click-To-Open-Rates (CTOR): 20%-30%  (promotional and/or triggered campaigns)

 

Added bonus info: AVG Search ad CTR is 1.91% and AVG Display ad CTR is 0.35%

Example Email Campaign – Open Rates and Click-Through-Rates

Let’s take a look at a few campaigns conducted over the holiday seasons for “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” in November, and “12 Days of Christmas” and “End of Year Clearance Sale” in December.

View the open rates and click rates below, including the number of orders placed that resulted in over $7,388.00 in sales!

November Email Campaigns:

December Email Campaigns:

Email Campaign Examples Results

Between these two month’s campaigns, the average open rate was an impressive 38.66% which is great for an open rate.

And the average click-through-rate (CTR) was 12.66% which was higher than the average.

The average click-to-open-rate (CTOR) was 21.36%.

Overall, we were very happy with the campaigns. The emails brought in over $7,300 dollars in a matter of the 5 days that each email was sent. Based on the average sale of each customer being around $55.00 and a typical day’s sales can run from $300 – $1100. On these days, the company’s daily sales put them above $2000, plus an increase in sales in consecutive days after the emails were sent due to ongoing promotions.

Email Marketing Companies

So, which email marketing system should you use?

Whether you already have an email marketing system in place or looking for a more streamlined or complex approach, there are many to choose from.

Here is a list of our “Top 10 Popular Online Email Marketing Companies”:

• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Aweber
• GetResponse
• ConvertKit
• InfusionSoft
• Vertical Response
• Campaigner
• Drip
• Klaviyo, Shopstorm, or Bronto (available for Shopify)

How To Improve Email Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

If your numbers appear to be less than ideal and below the average for your industry, then it’s time to start improving those emails altogether.

Here are ways that you can start making changes to your emails and campaigns to see near immediate results.

Email Setup

There are numerous ways to improve emails and email campaigns, starting with the following:

• Segmented Lists
• Email Subject Line
• Email Header, Catch Title
• Settings
• Above The Fold Visual
• Content Setup, Template
• Images
• Call-To-Action Buttons, Links
• End Links, End Link Content
• Email Message
• Grammar

All of these can have a huge overall impact on the performance of each email sent. From the subject line that intrigues the recipient to open the email in the first place to the look and feel of the email as to whether they can easily read and determine where they want to click on at all. Even the colors and text of an email can make a big difference, especially when it comes to creating a cohesive branding image for your company.

Try to play around with your email system’s templates and do some A/B testing. Start simple. Use one of their basic templates and keep your colors, text and buttons with your brand. Send it out to a small group and see what kind of response you get.

It really does come down to testing your emails and reading the data to start tweaking and learning what works best for your email campaigns and what creates that interest for your email recipients to open those emails and start clicking!

Segmented Lists

Improving the segmented lists can also increase CTR and CTOR drastically. Segmented campaigns will get 14.64% more opens and 59.99% more clicks , according to Kissmetrics. And, according to Optinmonster, personalized emails will deliver 6X higher transaction rates. 

Try creating segmented lists using these top 10 strategies:

1. New Subscribers
2. Preferences, Interests
3. Location
4. Previous Engagement (Open Rate, Click Rate, Enrollment, Optin-Frequency, etc)
5. Subscriber Activity (Inactive, No purchases in time frame, Purchase history, etc)
6. Source of Lead (where was the lead originated from?)
7. Abandonment (Forms, Shopping Carts, Surveys)
8. Type of Purchases
9. Satisfaction Level (Review Rate, Loyalty Scores, Referrals)
10. Targeted Demographics (age, gender, industry, etc)