[FAQ]

Hello,

I’m a junior email marketer here in New York, and I’m going through our campaign reports. I understand the usual metrics like Open Rate and Click-Through Rate (CTR).

However, I also see a metric in our analytics called “CTOR” (or sometimes Click-to-Open Rate), and I’m not sure what it is. How is it different from the normal CTR? I’m trying to understand what this number tells me about our campaign performance.

[Jeff Bullas]

An excellent question. CTOR is a much sharper metric for measuring content effectiveness than the standard click-through rate.

Short Answer: CTOR stands for Click-to-Open Rate. It measures the percentage of people who opened your email and then also clicked a link. It is calculated by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens, not by the total number of emails sent.

Think of it this way: your Open Rate measures the success of your subject line, but your CTOR measures the success of the actual content inside your email.

The standard Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a measure of clicks against all the emails you delivered. This means it is influenced by your open rate; if nobody opens the email, nobody can click. CTOR is a more precise metric because it isolates the audience that actually saw your content. It answers the question: “Of the people who opened this email, what percentage found the content compelling enough to take the next step?”.

This is an incredibly valuable diagnostic tool. For example, if you have a campaign with a very high open rate but a very low CTOR, it tells you that you wrote a brilliant, attention-grabbing subject line, but the text, images, or offer inside the email failed to deliver on that promise. Conversely, a low open rate with a high CTOR suggests that your subject line was weak, but the content of the email was actually very persuasive to the few people who saw it.

To improve your CTOR, you need to focus on the body of your email. This means writing clearer and more persuasive text, using more compelling images, having a single and obvious call-to-action, and ensuring your design guides the reader toward the click. It is worth noting that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can artificially inflate your open numbers, which in turn can artificially deflate your CTOR. However, it remains a very useful metric for comparing the relative performance of your email content from one campaign to the next.

Cheers,
Jeff

[Author]

Posts