PA Internet Marketing Blog:

Evaluating Your Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures recipients of your email who click a link in the email and enter your website. Obviously this is important information, because when people click through to your website, you can sell to them. CTR depends on:

  • whether you send to a business or consumer audience
  • the kind of email you send
  • whether the content is relevant to your audience
  • how often you send the email
  • your opt-in process
  • whether you personalize your email
  • whether you segment your email list
  • how many links you have in your email
  • your use of snippets that require the reader to click through to a website to read the rest of the article.

In addition, CTR depends on whether total or unique clicks are tracked. Sometimes a recipient will click on many links, driving "total" clicks much higher than "unique" clicks.

The following average CTRs are for permission-based house lists, based on unique clicks (only one click per recipient is counted):

  • Newsletter CTRs should range from 5% to 15%. Reasons for lower rates are: poor or irrelevant content, or putting too much in the email, and not giving the recipient a reason to click-through to your site.
  • Promotional emails should range from about 2% to 12%. Reasons for lower rates are: over mailing and using a list where recipients have not opted-in.
  • CTRs for Highly segmented and personalized lists should range much higher, in the 10% to 20% range.
  • The highest CTRs result from Trigger or behavior-based emails (email sent as a result of clicking on a product link, visiting a specific Web page) range between 15% to 50%.

Other reasons for low CTRs include:

  • Your opt-in process does not make it clear what kind of email will be received. For instance, you should not automatically add someone to your newsletter list if they actually gave you their email only to buy a product.
  • Your email subject line is not compelling.
  • Your email is not delivered because it is blocked or filtered.
  • Poor email design and layout.
You need more links, both text and graphic, to entice readers to click.