Using Click-Through Data in Your Email Marketing Campaign

One of the more practical and valuable features of using e-mail to market your business is using e-mail tracking reports to find out what your audience is doing with your e-mails after you send them. Every time someone clicks a link in your marketing e-mail, you have the opportunity to track the click back to the individual, use the information to accomplish more meaningful objectives, and increase the value of your e-mail list.

Click through data is a way of measuring the success of your email campaign using the number of unique individuals clicks (only one click per person is counted) who clicked on one or more links in an email expressed as a percentage of total tracked opens.

CALCULATED AS:

Total number of unique individuals who click a link in the email

-DIVIDED BY- the total number of tracked opens

OR CLICKS / OPENS = CLICK THROUGH RATE

So if there were 3 unique clicks and 30 opened emails:

3 clicks/30 opens = .1 clicks per open (multiplied by 100 to get CTR ) = 10% CTR

Average click-through rates vary widely by industry. Below are some ranges for average email click through rates for permission-based house lists.

• B2B (business to business) email newsletters typically range from 5% to 15%. If your CTRs are consistently below that level then among other things, you are probably providing content of little value to your email subscribers. Or you may have most of the content within your email, not giving subscribers a reason or means to click-through to your Web site.


• B2C (business to consumer) promotional email marketing campaign often range from about 2% to 12%. Email campaigns with less than a 2% CTR may be a result of over mailing and questionable email opt-in processes.


• Highly segmented and personalized email lists (B2B and B2C) are often in the 10% to 20% CTR range. Also, email messages with very strong content but sent to unsegmented lists, like many news or trend-type e-newsletters, are often in the 10%-15% range.


• Trigger or behavior-based email campaigns (emails that are sent to recipients based on some behavior they showed, such as clicking on a product link, visiting a specific Web page, etc.) are often in the 15% to 50% range.

Author: Rebecca Allas
Editor: Yasifur Rahman