How to Calculate and Improve Your Email Marketing Click-Through Rates

Introduction

A successful email campaign can reinforce your brand, attract current and future customers, and nudge them through the sales funnel.

At a minimum, your emails can keep you at the forefront of your readers' memory. As email marketing is among the most personal ways to establish a relationship with customers, your potential is greater for creating purposeful and effective emails.

Email marketing has remained popular throughout the years due to its simplicity, low cost, and success. One study has shown that 80% of marketers would prefer to relinquish their social media marketing than their email campaigns.

Measuring Email Marketing Success

An essential parameter used by email marketers for determining their campaign performance is the click-through rate, also known as the CTR. The CTR is the percentage of readers who interacted with at least one link from your email. For pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, a CTR is the number of clicks given an ad in relation to impressions.

Preferably, your readers won't be clicking on random links but be led to interact intentionally with your email content. Whatever your business or organization, whether you want them to make a purchase, give a donation, take a profile survey, or sign up for a program or offer, your email should include a call-to-action link that will direct to a website to execute that action.

This process of an email link directing its user elsewhere is what adds to your CTR. This also covers PPC marketing, in which you pay for every click-through from your ad.

Calculating CTR

Now that you've read what a CTR is about and its importance to your marketing strategies, here's how you can really measure it.

To determine the CTR for email campaigns, divide the number of recipients who clicked the link by the number of successfully delivered emails in this campaign. Multiply that sum by 100 to find your CTR percentage.

For instance, if you sent emails to 110 people, with 100 of these successfully delivered, and 35 of the 100 responded to your CTA and clicked through to a new webpage. With this information, your CTR would be calculated this way:
CTR = 35/100 x 100 = 35%

To determine the CTR for PPC campaigns, divide the number of viewers who clicked through by the number of ad impressions. Multiply that sum by 100 to find your PPC CTR percentage.

For instance, if out of 200 viewers, 20 clicked through on your ad, your CTR would be calculated this way:
CTR = 20/200 x 100 = 10%

A Favorable CTR

A favorable click-through rate for your brand depends on your type of business, budgeting, marketing plan, and size of audience.

Reports by MailChimp state the average industry-wide click-through rate for emails is 2.91%. The industries with the top click-through rates include Hobbies (5.01%), Media and Publishing (4.62%), Government (3.99%), and Home and Garden (3.03%).

Across all industries, the average PPC click-through rate is approximately 2%.

Improving Your CTR

After calculating your click-through rate and comparing the results to industry standards, you might find your campaign needs improvement to be more successful. The way to find what needs improvement will come through testing.

Your first step will be examining your previous email campaigns. Divide them into two categories: those with well-performing, high CTR and those with poor-performing, low CTR. Carefully study these and recognize any significant variations or patterns.

Here is what you need to examine:

• Ad Copy. Does it need to be shorter? More amiable? Easier to follow? Strive for vocabulary that your audience identifies with, which may depart from that used by the mainstream industry.
• Design. Are your current emails visually attractive and alluring? Does it clearly indicate which steps the reader should take next?
• Call-To-Action. How clear-cut is your CTA? Test with arrangement and text to find what works best with your readers. Additionally, take into consideration using no more than one or two CTAs and links per email. With too many choices, your audience could feel overwhelmed or disoriented. View your content through your reader's eyes. What might seem to you as a dazzling email or ad might not seem so attractive to the readers you're trying to captivate.

Conclusion

With a good email service provider, you can take advantage of its A/B testing capabilities. With A/B testing, you can send out one version to one segment of your email audience and another version to the second segment, then compare to discover which has a better CTR.

No matter if your email strategy involves paying per click or paying a small amount for a monthly subscription through an email service provider, you're still consuming time and effort to attract your readers and turn them into buyers. For a successful ROI, your campaign strategy needs to be effective. With your email and ad campaigns composed and arranged effectively, directed to the proper audience, you can attain your ideal CTR.