What Is CTOR (Click-to-Open Rate) and Why Should You Monitor it?

Angie oversees Cazoomi's operations. She enjoys traveling, loves dogs, is a 1% Pledge supporter, and a start-up entrepreneur with investments in several APAC startups. 9 minute read

What is CTOR Click to Open rate and Why Should You Monitor it

It’s now over 40 years since the very first email campaign was sent. It targeted over 400 recipients and resulted in over $13 million in sales. 400 hundred people might seem like such a small number by today’s standards but the results pretty much speak for themselves, especially since it was a new marketing concept.

And just like that email marketing was born!

Email marketing has evolved over time and has firmly entrenched itself as a marketing tactic marketers and brands cannot afford to ignore.

And although there have been numerous ground-breaking digital marketing innovations such as social media that have repeatedly threatened to render email marketing obsolete, this old-timer is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Actually, 91 percent of marketers rate email as their top priority when it comes to preferred marketing channels compared to 83 percent who prefer social media.

Part of the reason why email marketing is still widely used by marketers is that it remains one of the most trusted channels of communication. It is also still considered as one of the most effective marketing tactics that money can buy.

But what exactly drives email marketing? Why is it still so popular today despite the existence of other trendier marketing technologies?

Email marketing is still king because:

1. Personalization: Consumer purchase habits, needs, and preferences are constantly evolving. Trends also keep changing every single day.

This makes a one-size-fits-all approach ineffective. Sending all your 15,000 email subscribers the same marketing message is simply catastrophic. Armed with data from your email service provider, you can segment your subscribers based on their recent purchases, browsing patterns and interests.

This way, you can confidently personalize your campaign emails to target each segment with the right messages and product. According to Instapage, personalized emails have a 6x bigger transactional rate than non-personalized ones. They also account for over 58 percent of all email marketing revenue and an average return on investment of 122 percent.

2. Everyone still uses email: Email penetration is still growing at a phenomenal rate. By 2025, the number of email users globally is expected to reach 4.6 billion up from four billion in 2020.

According to Statista, the number of sent and received emails globally is set to also increase to 376.4 billion by 2025. This trend alone firmly positions email marketing as the go-to tactic for digital campaigns.

number of sent and received emails globally

Image Source: Statista

3. It’s affordable: You will be forgiven to think email marketing is the preserve of big, deep-pocketed corporations. Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the cost of email marketing is way negligible compared to other marketing tactics. Small businesses can spend between $9 to $1,000 per month on email marketing if they do it internally or even $300 to $500 if they engage an agency. Email marketing ROI is also remarkable. By 2016, businesses would get $44 for every dollar spent on email marketing compared to $38 the previous year.

But while all these factors, and many others, make a strong case for email marketing and also explain why most digital campaigns have succeeded, unfortunately, some marketers are sadly still struggling to find the winning formula.

The main reason why some marketers today might still be finding it difficult to get the best out of their email marketing campaigns is simply that they keep relying on metrics that don’t pack a punch.

Metrics such as email list growth rate, share and forward rate, device open rate, click-through rate are okay but not critical in the larger scheme of things. You can still monitor them but don’t invest a whole lot in them.

Having said that, one of the most important email marketing metrics that you simply can’t ignore is the Click-to-Open Rate or CTOR. This is arguably what can make or break your email marketing strategy. CTOR is what will determine how successful (or not) your campaigns are.

What Is CTOR?

CTOR is a metric that helps to closely monitor how many email recipients have actually opened your email and then gone ahead to click a link within the email.

While many marketers will be forgiven to think that just opening the email itself is good enough to declare victory, opening and reading the email without clicking the link, which most of the time should lead them to your website or eCommerce store, is only half the battle won.

Your CTOR rate also measures how effective your email content and design was and most importantly if it drove the email recipients to act the way you wanted them to.

The ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your website or online store and your marketing emails are the gateway. This makes clicking the link extremely vital as far as lead generation and subsequent conversion are concerned.

Now, CTOR should not be confused with Open Rate (OR), which is also a common metric that’s used for measuring engagement within an email campaign. OR measures the percentage of email subscribers that open a specific email out of the total number of subscribers.

Now that we have the CTOR definition out of the way, how do you calculate CTOR?

CTOR is measured by the number of clicks/number of opens multiplied by 100 for a percent. So, let’s say you sent out an email to 1,000 subscribers, only 20 open the email, and you get 15 clicks in the process. Your CTOR will be calculated as follows: (20 x 15) divide by 100 (for a percent) = 75 percent, which is an impressive CTOR by today’s standards.

But why does CTOR matter? It matters because it allows you to know how your email recipients responded to your email content. This is a key indicator of just how effective your email marketing campaigns should be. Ultimately, you should aim to achieve a higher CTOR in order to give you a better chance of increasing your sales and meeting your targets.

What Is a Good CTOR?

There’s actually no right or wrong answer to this question per se. The thing is, a good CTOR depends on several factors, which include your industry, content, target audience, and the topic or niche.

Other equally important factors include getting to know your audience, their online habits, and how they interact with your content across all touchpoints. Even the time of day or season plays an important role in achieving a decent CTOR.

The trick is, however, to tick all the boxes and achieve acceptable results, which is somewhat of a challenge for many marketers.

Achieving a good CTOR is not that easy. It takes a lot of work, creativity, and consistency. But challenges notwithstanding, the average global benchmark for a good CTOR currently stands at 11 percent. However, different industries have their own benchmarks.

If you are just getting started with CTOR, you should probably self-benchmark first. This way you will grow your CTOR at your own rate from campaign to campaign without necessarily putting too much pressure on yourself.

5 Ways to Improve Your CTOR

Use Call-To-Action Buttons (CTA)

Apart from engaging copy, high quality and enticing images, a great email must have a CTA. Tip: Instead of using text as your CTA, use a button to attract the reader’s attention. Just make sure you keep them short – one to three words max, use action-based verbs (discover, learn), and most importantly, place your CTA button after you’ve made the offer NOT before.

Finally, just use one CTA. Don’t give them too many unnecessary options.

Focus on The Customer

Your customers have different needs and preferences. They are also at different stages of the buying cycle. To be able to understand each customer’s needs accurately, you need to segment them accordingly. This will allow you to target each one of them with the relevant email content.

Make it Scannable

Your customers are super busy. Also, reading emails is not exactly a fun activity, unless it’s from a loved one.

So, to improve the chances of your marketing emails being read and acted upon, make it scannable. The reader should instantly be able to identify the key messages. Break up your key points into easy-to-read chunks. Use bullet points if you have to and prioritize your messages. Don’t forget to include enticing images.

Use Dynamic Content

Ensure that your email content is personalized based on demographics, interests and email preferences. Your email should only display what your customer is interested in at that moment.

Of course, this changes over time, which is why it’s important t0 always make sure you are on top of things. Also, make your email conversational and friendly. This will enhance their chances of clicking through.

Integration

For better segmentation, integration is your ace in the sleeve. Integration helps you seamlessly sync all your customer data from your CRM and ERP solutions and present it in a way that can make it easy to identify and segment your customers accordingly for better CTOR.

For example, SyncApps integrations like Mailchimp for Salesforce and Constant Contact for Salesforce help to bring back only records with opens or clicks activity to allow lead nurturing in CRM as well as what they clicked on in your drip marketing campaigns.

They also automatically sync opt-outs so that you don’t have to waste valuable time sending emails to people who are not even interested. In turn, this makes your CTOR more realistic!

Conclusion

If you really want your sales and business to grow, then CTOR is something you should seriously consider monitoring from today on. As the migration from offline to online gathers momentum, email marketing is also steadily positioning itself as one of the most effective sales tactics.

Lead generation and conversion are key beneficiaries of CTOR. The more email subscribers click links within your emails, the better chance of converting them to buyers you have. But while CTOR is important, other metrics that you can throw in the mix include: open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, email list growth rate, and mobile open/click rate, among others.