Email KPIs: Open Rate vs Click-Rate vs Click-Through Rate

When it comes to email marketing, how do you measure success? Today, Senior Marketing Marketing Strategist Svetla Mihaylova discusses several email marketing KPIs and the differences between them.

What email KPIs should you measure?

Open Rate

The first KPI you should measure is the open rate. Open rate is the percentage of people who opened your email out of the total number of people to whom you sent your email. For example, if 15 people opened your email out of the 100 you sent it to, that makes a 15% open rate. Simple, right?

But why is it important? Open rate shows how successful your subject line was. If your open rate is low, it means that you may have to do some A/B testing on your subject lines to see which is actually the best one for your business.

Click Rate

The second KPI you should measure is the click rate. This is the percentage of people who clicked on a link or image in your email. So if five people clicked a link or image in your email out of the 100 you sent it to, that’s a 5% click rate.

If you have a high click rate, then it means you’re doing a good job with showing off your links and choosing the right images for your email. But if your click rate is low, you might consider adding a button here and there. But don’t overdo it. Using too many buttons in an email is not the best practice.

Click-Through Rate

The third KPI to measure is actually a combination of the two we already discussed. It’s called click-through rate (CTR) or click-to-open rate (CTOR). And yes, you guessed it: it’s the percentage of people out of the people who opened your email that clicked on a link or an image.

For example, if 15 out of 100 people opened your email and five of those 15 actually clicked on a link or image, that makes a 30% click-through rate. To optimize your click-through rate, you must first optimize your open rate and click rate.

Bonus: Conversion Rate

The final KPI to measure in your email marketing is the conversion rate. It’s very important in every aspect of marketing, not just email. Conversion rate is the percentage of people that completed a purchase or bought some of your services or products on your website.

In email context, that’s the percentage of people who actually completed a purchase on your website out of the people to whom you sent your email. So, if you have one person who completed a purchase out of 100, that’s a 1% conversion rate.

Optimizing your email performance might seem tricky sometimes but once you start, results will happen. Hopefully, this video sheds some light on the KPIs to measure when it comes to email. While we focused on email marketing for this video, these metrics are also applicable to other facets of digital marketing.