What’s a Good CTR for Emails?
Is your email marketing campaign succeeding or failing? Everything’s relative and the same goes for your newsletters. Having some numbers to compare determines whether you’re reaching your potential.
Click-through rate (CTR) is one of the defining metrics of email marketing, and with 81% of businesses using CTR as a core marketing strategy, this is something you must focus on. Today, we’ll explore CTR, what a good number is, and how to improve it.
What is click-through rate (CTR) on email?
Your CTR measures how many people click on something within an email. It could be a hyperlink, contact form, image, or a CTA. Some emails may even have more than one thing to click.
The precise calculation is done by dividing the number of clicks within an email by the number of people you sent that email to in the first place. You can also find your Click-to-Open-Rate (CTOR) when you divide the number of opens by the number of clicks.
What is the average click-through rate for email?
The average CTR depends on your industry, with significant variations between each. According to MailerLite, the average email click rate across every email campaign was 2%, but they also found that average rates ranged from 0.77% to 4.36%.
Don’t forget that most stated figures are often linked to specific platforms or industries, potentially giving a distorted view of the average.
What’s a good email click-through rate?
Defining what’s good requires choosing your industry and comparing your numbers to your competitors and the overall industry average. According to ActiveCampaign, they consider a good CTR to fall between 1% and 5%, with anything above 3% considered to be a good return.
Is CTR an important metric to track in email marketing?
CTR is not just important, but one of the most important metrics to track. Strong CTRs indicate that you’re sending relevant and engaging emails to your audience. Businesses with high CTR percentages are more effective at using email to drive traffic to their websites, products, and other destinations.
On the other hand, a low CTR shows that there’s something wrong with your messaging, target audience, or design. Keeping track of this metric tells you whether there’s room for improvement.
Essentially, CTR is important because it tells you whether your emails are doing their job. If people are opening your emails and clicking away, you’re not holding their attention.
Factors that impact the click-through-rate on emails
Not achieving the CTRs you expect? It could indicate any number of problems with your emails. Remember, you’ve already got someone to open your email, so you’re trying to answer why people aren’t following through on what you want them to do.
Examples of factors impacting your CTR include:
- Target Audience – Are you providing content that your target audience actually wants?
- Subject Line – Does the content of your email follow through on the promise made in your subject line?
- Call to Action – Many businesses don’t provide a direct call to action and may only have a couple of hyperlinks. Readers will only click away if you don’t have a call to action – or it’s a weak one.
- Content – Is your email content engaging enough to encourage people to keep reading and take action after they finish?
- Design – Emails don’t just have to be walls of text. To make your communications stand out, you can incorporate extra design elements, including pictures, videos, fonts and colours. Is your design leading people toward taking action?
If only CTR were as simple as these five elements. Many businesses don’t go any deeper, but there’s evidence that minor elements like:
- Device optimisation
- Sending time
- More intricate audience segmentation
- Link position
- and link evidence;
…can also have an enormous impact.
Ways of improving email CTR
Email marketing isn’t effective if you can’t get your audience to engage. CTR is just one of several metrics indicating that your audience is interested in what you say. Let’s run through how to get more of your mailing list to click through on your emails.
Refine your audience
It doesn’t matter how interesting your content is if it isn’t relevant to your audience. Assuming you’ve already got a curated list, it’s time to segment them. List segmentation lets you split your audience into different categories by issues like:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Previous purchases
- Past interactions
One-size-fits-all email won’t have the same impact as sending newsletters to specific audience segments.
Create a scannable structure
Most people don’t read but scan. Think about how quickly you read an email or a webpage. It takes grabbing the audience to get them to stop and read.
Design your emails to be easily scannable, highlighting your CTA and anywhere else you want them to click. Here’s a crash course on the principles of highly scannable emails:
- Put the most important information at the top.
- Rely on subheadings.
- Shorten your paragraphs and use lists.
- Supplement with images.
Above all, don’t risk confusing your readers by adding multiple CTAs. Make each email relevant to one subject. Guide your readers toward one specific destination.
Use images
Imagery doesn’t have to feature in every email, but visual elements make a difference. It’s no secret that images and videos are more engaging than plain text.
Incorporate some high-quality imagery (not fillers) to break up the walls of text and keep your audience’s eyes where you want them.
Personalise your emails
The 2020s is the decade of personalisation. Generic experiences are out, and bespoke ones are in. According to one study, personalised content improves email CTRs by a whopping 39%. After all, people want to be names, not numbers.
The key is dynamic content. The art of dynamic content is automatically swapping images and text based on the data you already hold on the recipient. In other words, it’s a form of automated segmentation.
Thankfully, most popular email marketing platforms already have features and functionality for hyper-personalised email marketing campaigns.
Test, change and repeat
It all comes down to testing. Split testing still has an essential role in allowing you to incorporate new elements and eliminate what isn’t working. No business can achieve the perfect mix every time without constant testing. Test more, and your email performance will improve over time.
The problem is that testing takes time, and the chances are you don’t know where to start. Let the experts take control rather than crawling around in the dark, hoping to find what works.
At Tao Digital Marketing, we’re specialists in helping you find and connect with your target audience. To learn more about how we’re supporting UK businesses to succeed in a highly competitive market, contact us today.