Email Click to Open Rate

The click to open rate (CTOR) is an email marketing metric that measures more than just the email click-through rate (CTR). It tells a more comprehensive story about the content of the email itself. The CTOR is an essential benchmark to measure if you want to improve your conversion rate, and we will dive into what it is, how it works, and how to improve your numbers.

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What is a click-to-open rate?

Click to open rate doesn’t measure the number of people who opened the emails, or the rate of opens per overall email list. Instead, it only looks at the behavior of people who did open the email, and it measures how many of those readers clicked through one of your call-to-action (CTA). Understanding this metric within your email marketing campaigns allows you to see how the format, design, messaging, and email content, itself, resonated with readers.

Often, the simple click-through rate is focused on, but that is a metric that says more about your subject line, unique opens, and email open rate, than it does about the content of the email itself. It is essential that beyond getting recipients to open the email, your content is driving them to engage, read, or buy from your eCommerce site.

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How to calculate click to open rate

Calculating the click to open rate is straightforward, and can be completed by checking the email performance or campaign monitor section of your email marketing strategy platform.

Email click to open rate formula

Click to open rate =(Number of unique clicks through the link/number of unique opens)*100

For example, if 5 people clicked through your CTA button, and 20 people opened your email overall, you would have a 25% CTOR.

What is a good click-to-open rate?

This value can vary depending on the industry, but a strong overall performance of high open rates would fall somewhere between 6%-17%. This good CTOR range indicates that your content holds relevance for your subscribers and readers and that your digital marketing, email campaign, and user experience is working well.

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What is a bad click-to-open rate?

If you are seeing your CTOR lower than 6%, it may mean that your email marketing benchmarks need some more optimization. Perhaps the total number of emails opened is high, but the engagement with the emails themselves is quite low. This could indicate a number of issues including a poorly formatted template, a misleading email subject line, weak action buttons, and more.

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Email click to open rate KPI examples & templates

Your email click to open rate can be added to our email report template :

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Email report template

Our email marketing report template has everything you need to get started quickly: it’s pre-built with the standard KPIs you need, and it’s fully customizable so that you can visualize the data you want, the way you want. Track metrics like open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-through rate, and deliverability rate.

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Click to open rate best practices

To improve your CTOR, consider implementing the following tools and strategies:

A/B testing

Test out different options for subject lines, formats, and headings to see if some content performs better with users than others, and use that information going forward to better optimize the structure of your email campaign.

Optimize call to actions

Make sure that the CTA buttons and links throughout your email are clear so that the average click rate will increase, driving readers to your social media, website, or eCommerce store.

Make your email easy to read

The content of each email should be easy to scan with headers, small sections, images, and engaging text so that readers can get what they need from your content. Make sure that your formatting and overall content approach is user friendly.

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