What Is Email Click-Through Rate and Why Does It Matter?
An effective email marketing campaign can build your brand and drive conversions. While content is of utmost importance, your email metrics establish important benchmarks for it. The open rate shows how many recipients opened your emails, while the click-through rate measures engagement.
Ultimately, engagement is critical for business campaigns, strategies, and overall performance. Let's delve into the importance of the click-through rate and learn how to calculate it.
What is the click-through rate?
An email click-through rate is the percentage of clicks that recipients make on one or more links in your email. It is different from pay-per-click marketing, which is the number of clicks an ad receives to make an impression.
What is a good CTR?
MailChimp reports that the average email click-through rate across industries stands at 2.91%. Notably, some sectors recorded higher rates, such as government (3.99%), media and publishing (4.62%), and hobbies (5.01%).
So, if you find your CTR in a single digit, don’t get anxious. We suggest that you always check the average CTR for your industry.
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Why does the email click-through rate matter?
Email CTR is an important metric, as it’s an event created by you and executed by the recipient. After all, no recipient would click any link in your email accidentally.
Usually, it’s a call-to-action (CTA) or some URL attached to some text. The purpose of making recipients click on these links can be anything, such as buying a product, booking a service, or donating to a cause (if you’re a non-profit).
So, when the recipients click on the email, they are redirected somewhere. This event is used to calculate the CTR.
Email click-through rate (CTR) is a crucial metric for several reasons:
Engagement Measurement
CTR indicates how engaging your email content is with your audience. If more people click on the links in your emails, it means they find your content engaging.
This engagement is crucial for building strong connections with your subscribers and keeping them interested in what you have to offer.
Effectiveness of Content
CTR helps you assess the effectiveness of your email content and design. It tells you whether your subject lines are compelling enough to entice recipients to open the email and whether the content inside the email is relevant and interesting enough to encourage clicks.
Conversion Rate
Click-throughs often lead to conversions, whether it's completing a purchase, signing up for a service, downloading content, or any other desired action.
A higher CTR generally correlates with a higher conversion rate, which directly impacts the success of your email marketing campaigns.
Segmentation and Personalisation
Analysing CTR can help you understand user preferences and behaviours.
By optimising these insights, you can identify the content type and offer that resonates best with your audience. Further, you can tailor your email notifications to meet their needs, leading to higher engagement and CTR.
Email Deliverability
A good CTR improves your email deliverability, which helps you maintain a positive sender reputation. Using this factor, the internet service provider decides whether to deliver email to the inbox or spam folder.
A high CTR signals to ISPs that your emails are wanted and relevant, which can help improve deliverability.
Benchmarking and Comparison
Comparing your email click-through rate (CTR) with industry standards or your past performance helps you see how well your emails are doing compared to others in your field or how they've performed in the past. This comparison guides you in making improvements and adjusting your strategies for better results in the future.
How do you calculate CTR?
Calculating the click-through rate (CTR) for email campaigns is straightforward. Here's the formula:
CTR = (Number of Clicks / Number of Delivered Emails) * 100
To break it down:
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Number of Clicks: This is the total number of times recipients clicked on any links within your email.
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Number of Delivered Emails: This refers to the total number of emails successfully delivered to recipients' inboxes. It excludes bounced emails or those that were not successfully delivered for other reasons.
For example, if you sent out 1000 emails, and, out of those, 50 recipients clicked on a link within the email, the calculation would be:
CTR = (50 clicks / 1000 delivered emails) * 100 = 5%
So, the click-through rate for that email campaign would be 5%.
Key takeaways
From this blog, it's evident that the average click-through rate varies across different industries. Therefore, it's crucial to check the average rate for your specific industry.
Additionally, CTR has significance in terms of conversions, email deliveries, and user experience. Finally, you can use a formula to calculate your CTR; however, it's recommended to use a communication platform like Notifly.
Notifly offers accurate CTR data along with other vital metrics such as open rate, bounce rate, and more. These metrics enable you to optimise your email notification performance and make informed, data-driven decisions.
