The Click to Open Rate (CTOR) is extremely important for email marketing. When you plan and release new campaigns to your target audience, you have to know how the emails are being received by people.
We are talking about if people are opening and reading your message. By keeping track of the CTOR, you might understand how your email marketing campaigns are being received.
As marketers, we should worry about the relevance of the emails that we send. After all, we spend most of the days planning strategies and writing strong copies and creative Call to Action (CTAs) sentences.
To make our jobs more successful, we should ask ourselves: “Do people really want to receive these messages? What do they have to offer? Do people get the information they want and need? What do they think about our content?”.
The CTOR can answer these questions and many more. That’s why we decided to share this article, which brings valuable information about the Click to Open Rate, how to improve it, how to calculate CTOR, and how to interpret it.
- What is the Click to Open Rate (CTOR)?
- CTR vs. CTOR: what are the differences?
- Why should you track the CTOR in your email marketing campaigns?
- How to calculate CTOR (Click to Open Rate)?
- How to improve your CTOR?
- Click to Open Rate: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the Click to Open Rate (CTOR)?
The Click to Open Rate (CTOR) represents the number of clicks an email gets in relation to the number of people who have opened the email. In other words, it shows how inviting your email campaign is to promote message openings.
In other definitions, the CTOR can be interpreted as the percentage of people that judged your email as interesting enough to be checked out.
This way, the CTOR is an important marketing metric, which is able to measure the quality of your content, as well as the strength of subject lines and Call to Action sentences.
CTR vs CTOR: what are the differences
The difference between Click-through Rate (CTR) and the Click to Open Rate (CTOR) is subtle, even to many experienced marketers. But, both metrics are different from each other, and we should be aware of this when performances are being analyzed.
- Click-through Rate (CTR): this marketing rate shows the number of emails that generated clicks in relation to the number of emails that were successfully delivered.
- Click to Open Rate (CTOR): on the other hand, we have the CTOR, which is a marketing metric used to measure the number of clicks a message received (usually in a CTA sentence) in relation to the emails that were opened
Marketing metrics can show the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. That being said, the CTOR is a more realistic rate, when you are considering your engagement levels because it takes into account the people who have opened the message.
As the CTR takes email deliverability and quality of email lists into account, it might not be the best metric to be considered when you want to measure engagement. Thus, it can show if you need to check email address validity to clean your email lists.
The CTOR takes mostly the quality of your content into account. That’s why it is the perfect indicator to measure the strength of your marketing campaigns, as well as engagement from the overall public.
Why should you track the CTOR in your email marketing campaigns?
As with every marketing metric and KPI, the Click to Open Rate (CTOR) must be studied to make you understand how the general public is receiving your content.
If you see that your KPIs are falling behind the goals and expectations, something is wrong with your campaigns, such as technical issues (dirty email lists or server malfunction) and problems related to the content (wrong list segmentation, poor content, the body of emails containing spammy words, and other similar aspects).
That’s how marketers improve the quality of email marketing campaigns. In the case of the CTOR, by analyzing this metric, we can extract valuable insights from it, such as:
- verifying the quality of your content;
- analyzing the power of CTAs, and design organization;
- checking the effectiveness of copywriting elements, regarding the persuasive effect;
- checking if the email list segmentation is working;
- making sure your email marketing campaigns are targeting the correct audience;
- evaluating the engagement levels of your brand and target audience;
These are some of the benefits that tracking the CTOR can bring to your company. These aspects will surely make you plan more successful email marketing campaigns.
How to calculate CTOR (Click to Open Rate)?
The Click to Open Rate (CTOR) can be calculated with a simple mathematical formula. After getting your statistics, you can find out your CTOR through the following calculation:
| Click to Open Rate (CTOR) = Number of clicked emails X 100 / Number of opened emails |
The result varies according to the quality of your content. The better your emails are, the higher the CTOR will be.
For example, if you have 280 emails, and 80 of them were opened and accessed, your calculations will prove that your CTOR is around 28%.
Is it good or bad? Well, depends on the goals that were established for each campaign. To analyze the CTOR, you need to see the bigger picture, considering the reality of your company at the moment.
How to improve your CTOR
If you are unhappy or unsatisfied with your engagement levels, check out some interesting tips to make your CTOR grow.
Personalize your campaigns
Sometimes, when we read emails, it feels like it was designed to have conversations with robots, rather than human beings.
When you have this approach, people can’t relate to the messages you are currently sending them. They won’t be interested in your emails and accessing their content.
That’s why, when you are trying to improve your Click to Open Rates (CTOR), the first thing to be done is to personalize your campaigns.
Considering the data you have about your customers, make efforts to make your content relatable. Take a look at pages the user visited, the purchased products, the location, age, gender, customer behavior, and other data on your database, so you can organize more personalized email campaigns.
Test and improve your CTAs
An enticing copy, outstanding images, and convincing Call to Action (CTA) sentences are all features of an efficient email.
The CTAs are strong attention-catchers. As such, they play an important role in the Click to Open Rate (CTOR).
You can use CTAs buttons to make them even more attractive to readers. Use A/B tests to improve the quality of these buttons, the texts, position on the email, and other aspects.
For example, you can use A/B tests to verify if:
- short prompts are more effective than longer ones, making you know exactly how many words can be used in a CTA button;
- the use of action-based verbs (such as “learn” or “start”, rather than “look” or “feel”) can result in more conversions;
- the CTAs with only one request perform better than multiple actions to be performed by the recipient;
- the CTA should be single and exclusive or if it is possible to include more than one CTA in one email.
- the placement of the button after an offer can result in more conversions.
A/B tests will show how you should proceed in the campaign, gradually improving your performance in relation to CTAs and other aspects.
Segment your email list
The email you send to one group of your audience can be uninteresting and unwanted to the other, which proves the fact that you must segment your email list to achieve an awesome Click to Open Rate (CTOR).
When you send the same email to every contact on your list, many people won’t be compelled to this message, ignoring it.
To illustrate this idea, your long-term clients shouldn’t receive the same messages as brand-new leads. They won’t get interested in your messages. After all, they already know you, and your products. The other way around is also true.
They are in different stages of the sales funnel, so they get motivated by different approaches.
If you keep sending the same email every time, over and over again, subscribers can get annoyed and unsubscribe from your channel.
You don’t want to get to this point. Effective email list management and segmentation will make you achieve good results, and also keep subscribers happy and satisfied with the messages they are receiving from you.
Use criteria that are relevant to your line of business to organize your lists, such as period on your platforms, customer behavior, location, age, purchased products, and so on.
Consider the user experience
People read your content very fast because online reading is very different from reading a book. Having this in mind, it is important to make your content scannable.
Your emails should be written in small chunks, with short sentences, and with routine language (according to your company’s tone of voice). This way, subscribers will identify the key points of your message, just by scanning it.
Thinking about the user experience is important, so you make sure people will learn something from your content, rather than be intimidated by it.
Track your results
All your work and effort are transformed into results. They are a valuable source of information about strategies that are working, and others that should be reviewed.
For example, the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an important metric that measures interactions. If you are seeing a low level of interaction with your messages, you should probably study ways to improve the quality of your content.
Your results can show how your target audience is responding to your messages. If they are below average, you can start searching for methods to make them grow.
For instance, reviewing your subject lines, the list segmentation, effectiveness of CTAs, and quality of content can lead you to an increase in the Click to Open Rate (CTOR).
Keeping track of your results, by studying and analyzing marketing metrics and KPIs is the only way to be in constant improvement. Now that you learn how to calculate CTOR CTA, read about email marketing metrics and KPIs to learn how to supervise your results.
Click to Open Rate: Frequently Questions (FAQs)
A good CTOR will fall between 20% to 30%. These numbers represent that a lot of people are getting interested in your content.
A CTOR is an excellent marketing metric to measure the quality of your content. It is based on single email openings, and it evaluates the overall quality of your message, considering aspects, such as:
● links;
● layout;
● informative text;
● copy.
The Click-through Rate (CTR) and the Click to Open Rate (CTOR) are marketing metrics that frequently are mixed up. They deal with different aspects of the sending email action. In the first place, the Click-through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who interacted with a link in the body of an email, considering all the emails that were sent.
On the other hand, the Click to Open Rate (CTOR) represents the percentage of people who have read the message, and clicked on links in the body of an email, considering only the emails that were opened.
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