Click-To-Open Rate: How to Improve It?

What is Click-to-Open Rate?

Being a marketer, you might think that the email that you are sending out is relevant, desirable, and intriguing. However, emails should be a win-win for both businesses and customers. As brands send out more emails to the customers, they get to see more offers in relevance to the action they have taken.

But how can you measure the performance of the email campaigns? You can do it using the Click-to-Open Rate. It is an easy metric that will help you get an insight if you are sending out a relevant email or not.

The click-to-open rate, popularly known as CTOR, is a comparison metric. It compares the total number of people who have open the email you have sent to the number of people who have opened the provided link.

CTOR is a metric that measures your content’s quality. A good click-to-open rate means your offer or email copy is convincing enough for the subscribers to click the links present in the email. Unlike CTR, CTOR is the total number of unique clicks divided by total unique opens. It gives you an insight into how the message and the design resonate with the audience. This is because the metric takes into consideration the people who have opened it.

To calculate the CTOR, you will have to follow the formula given below.

CTOR: (unique clicks/unique open) x 100

So, if the email gets 100 clicks and 150 are opened, the CTOR will be 66%. If you keep a close eye on the CTR, it helps you to decide if the content is resonating with the email recipients.

How Business Analytics Bring Success in Your Business

Click-Through-Rate vs Click-to-Open Rate

The click-through-rate measures the number of emails that made the recipient click on the call-to-action. However, the open rate for email measures the total number of recipients who have opened the email and have clicked on it. In this case, marketers don’t care about the number of people who have received your email. Rather, they just want to know how many people have actually opened it and then have proceeded to click the call to action.

If you have high CTOR, it implies you are connecting the active members on the list. Often people tend to confuse CTOR with open rate. The latter is the percentage of recipients who are opening the email, out of the total. So, if 50,000 of the recipients out of 100,000 are opening the email, the open rate is 50%.

The difference between CTR and CTOR is subtle. However, successful email marketers need to pay attention to both.

An email might have a poor click-through-rate and have a good click-to-open rate. If you track both of these, you will get to understand what the two represents. It contributes to the company’s bottom line.

What is the Average CTOR?

Tips to Improve Your Email Marketing Metric

A good CTOR usually ranges between 20% and 30%. Nevertheless, like any other metric, it is necessary to know how you are going to compare to the industry averages.

If you want to improve the click-to-open rate of your emails, here are a few things that you should do.

1. Make the Email Consistent with the Website or Brand

Inconsistency with the brand can increase the number of clicks you get, but that is for subscribing. Since you are not pursuing it, make the emails appear consistent with the website.

The first element of the email is to add the logo. There should always be consistency between the website and the emails.

2. Include the Right Images with Alt Text

The emails even without the images make total sense but if you are adding one, you have to make sure that it adds meaning to the story. At times, the images are turned off by clients, by default. So, you need to use relevant texts. The text is going to show up even if the image isn’t. Almost all email marketing services let you fill the files of the images.

If you want, you can add some links to the images as these links are easier to open if the email is accessed from the mobile phone.

3. Make the Design Mobile-Friendly

These days people use their mobile devices to check their emails. You must format the email to make it appealing to the customers who are viewing the content on the mobile device.

This includes bigger call-to-action, small images, and smaller fonts for the copy that won’t overwhelm the mobile screen. When you are checking the CTOR, check the different parts of the email that are lacking. If you want, you can make the required changes. When you know what exactly is not working within the email, you can find out what will.

4. Use Button Call-to-Action

Human beings are attracted to clicking on the buttons. Clicking on a call-to-action button comes as naturally to the viewers are twisting the doorknob. Hence, you should always add buttons for the primary call-to-action. These prompt the readers to click on it.

Writing boring content that provides no value to the viewer or not satisfying the reading-eyes will do nothing other than welcoming a higher bounce rate. It’s enough to take your website image down in the eyes of search engines. In the end, your website will start losing traffic. That's why try to write immersive content that sorts out your customer's needs. Don't stay promotional, write smartly, and engage people through your content. Provide real value to your customers by actually solving their problems instead of trying to only promote your product.

5. Use HTML to Create Buttons

In the end, Search Engine Optimization remains the most valuable principle to follow. But it hasn't stayed that difficult thing to do with the introduction of helpful SEO tools. SEO can boost traffic on your website by 50%. If you're working in a low competitive niche, try to reach the first page in Google search results. Subsequently, with further SEO implementation, you can boost traffic even further.

Click-to-Open and Click-Through rates have always been used to measure an email campaign’s success. The click-to-open metric isn’t something that should go unnoticed. To get a clear picture of how your email campaign is performing, you have to consider the people who have checked your email.