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Open rates - boring. Click-through rates - yawn. Is it time for some better, or at least different, metrics for email marketing? The answer, I believe, is yes. In this article we'll look at the "click-to-open rate”, a metric that no one talks about, let alone uses, yet it may be one of the more meaningful process metrics available to email marketers.
Open and click-through rates, the most commonly used and benchmarked email marketing metrics, provide marketers with a quick and reasonably accurate snapshot of how an email message performed. By combining these two metrics into the click-to-open rate, however, marketers have an additional and perhaps better tool to analyze and benchmark email performance.
Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is simply the ratio of unique clicks as a percentage of unique opens. The CTOR measures how effective your email message was in motivating recipients who opened it, to then click a link. In other words, the click-to-open rate expresses the measure of click-through rates as a percentage of messages opened, instead of messages delivered.
This difference is meaningful and important for a couple of reasons:
- If a recipient doesn’t “open” your message, they also can’t and don’t click a link. So why do we care about the notion of click throughs on unopened messages? (This argument doesn’t hold up for text messages since they can’t technically be tracked for opens.)
- By removing unopened messages from the picture, the CTOR then becomes a better measure of the value and effectiveness of the actual email message content, messaging and layout. Specifically, the CTOR measures:
- Relevance of the message content
- Effectiveness of offers
- Effectiveness of the copy
- Effectiveness of the message design and layout
- Timeliness and immediacy of the content or offer
- Effectiveness of the number and location of text and image links
- And to some extent, the level of trust recipients place in your brand and value proposition (the open rate is the better measure of trust since if trust is lacking, the recipient will not even open the email).
CTOR as Diagnostic Tool
The CTOR’s greatest value may be as a diagnostic tool for email messages. For example, if you compare the CTOR across ISPs, key domains or customer segments you might uncover potential issues or trends that need to be addressed.
For example, a segment that had a significantly higher or lower CTOR than the rest of your segments could be attributed to:
- A high number of text versions opened (opens are not trackable but links clicked are)
- A high use of a preview pane function
- Delivery issues with an ISP/domain (spam filtering, black lists, junk folder)
- Significant demographic or behavioral differences for that segment
As an example, looking at the chart below, the Ecommerce Email CTOR for the AOL domain is clearly out of line with the rest of the domains. The click-through rate of 8.2% is not far below the average for the message, but the open rate is well below the average. This would strongly suggest that the actual open rate for the AOL segment is much higher. In this case, the low reported open rate is probably due to a combination of text emails and blocked images.
Levels the Playing Field
Next let’s look at the CTOR in action using a sample result from a B2B newsletter. As you can see in the chart above, the CTOR varied very little, 25%-27% (excluding Earthlink), while open and click-through rates varied widely. In this case, regardless of ISP (again excluding Earthlink), about one-fourth of recipients who opened the newsletter also clicked on a link. So despite wide variances in open and click-through rates, this message actually motivated most all recipient segments to click at the same rate. Additionally, the overall CTOR for this message was 25 percent as compared to an historical average for this newsletter of 26 percent.
Getting Started With CTOR
So if you are intrigued by the concept of the click-to-open rate metric, what next? Here are some tips to get going with CTOR:
- Run reports on some recent messages by key ISP/domain and/or segmentation of your list.
- Analyze the click-to-open rate and determine if there are any positive or negative issues or trends for a particular segment or domain.
- Then analyze those messages with your highest CTRs and CTORs. See if you can hypothesize what drove a higher percentage of recipients to click a link in those messages.
- Establish your current average benchmark CTOR and set a target goal to reach. As example, for the B2B newsletter mentioned above the current benchmark might be set at 25 percent, with a near-term goal of achieving a 30 percent CTOR.
- Then using your hypotheses, modify, optimize and test future messages to reach your target CTOR.
What do you think of the click-to-open rate metric? Send me an email with your thoughts and feedback.
Note: I’d like to give special thanks to Niti Chhabra who first mentioned to me in 2001 the concept of the click-to-open rate.
Metric Definitions and Comments
Open Rate:- Definition: Open rate measures the number of unique opens as a percentage of the number of emails delivered.
- Equation: Open Rate = Unique Opens/Emails Delivered (Sent – Bounced)
- What it Measures: Trust, strength of relationship, effectiveness of from and subject line, timing and frequency, etc.
- Strengths: It is a simple and reasonable metric that provides marketers with a general sense of how effective an email was in motivating recipients to open it. A meaningful decrease in open rates compared to a message’s historical average suggests delivery issues, bad timing or poor subject lines. Increases may mean you found the “e spot” with your readers or solved a delivery issue, among other things.
- Weaknesses: The open rate metric can be very inaccurate in that it can under or over report actual opens due to:
- Text Versions: Text versions do not report when they are opened (except those that are clicked on and your reporting technology tracks a click as an open)
- Preview Panes: Many people scan emails via their preview panes and if images are blocked this view will not be reported as an open. If images are not blocked then the message would be counted as “opened.” Some messages should truly be considered opened as the recipient scanned and scrolled through the message in their preview window. Other times, however, the message is counted as an “open” even though the recipient was merely scrolling through their overloaded inbox. Perhaps it evens out in the end.
- Blocked Images: With many ISPs and email clients blocking images (see our ClickZ column on this issue), recipients may scan or read a message without being counted as an open (open tracking image does not load).
- Delivery Issues: Undelivered, junk folder, spam filtered and other “missing” messages that don’t generate a bounce message from the receiving server, will be reported as delivered.
Click-Through Rate:- Definition: The CTR measures the number of unique clicks as a percentage of the number of emails delivered.
- Equation: Click-Through Rate = Unique Clicks/Emails Delivered (Sent – Bounced)
- What it Measures: Relevance and effectiveness of message content, layout, offer, links, etc.
- Strengths: Long-time standard, simple.
- Weaknesses: CTR is based on messages delivered instead of opened.
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