What Is An Email CTR? How to Calculate and Improve It

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An effective email marketing campaign has the ability to strengthen your brand, engage existing and potential customers, and move them to action.

At the very least, emails will keep you front and center in your audience’s mind. Since email is one of the more personal touchpoints you can use to build rapport with your customers, you have a greater opportunity to make your emails meaningful and successful.

Email marketing has sustained its popularity due to its ease, low expense, and effectiveness. According to Litmus, four out of five marketers would rather give up social media than email marketing. But how do you measure success for email marketing campaigns?

One key metric email marketers can use to determine how well their email campaigns are performing is the click-through rate (CTR).

Ideally, your email subscribers aren’t haphazardly clicking on links. No, you want them to take intentional action from your emails.

Maybe you want them to buy your product. Or (if you’re a nonprofit) to donate to your cause. Perhaps you want them to sign up for your latest program, or even just take a survey so you can learn more about their needs. The point is that just about every email you send out will have some sort of call-to-action that often requires recipients to click on a link and head to a website to carry out that desired action.

That action of clicking on a link in your email and heading somewhere else is what contributes to your CTR. The same applies to pay-per-click (PPC) marketing where you pay each time your link is clicked from an ad impression.

CTR Formula

Now that you understand what a click-through rate is and why it’s so important to your marketing efforts, how do you actually calculate it?

How to Calculate Email CTR

For email, the CTR formula is as follows:

CTR = Number of People Who Clicked A Link / Number of Emails Delivered Successfully x 100

Let’s say you sent an email to a list of 110 people and 100 were delivered successfully to their recipients. Of those 100 recipients, 35 of them clicked on your CTA and were sent to a new page. Using this data, here’s how you would calculate your CTR:

CTR = 35 People Clicked A Link / 100 Delivered Emails x 100 = 35%