Are click-to-open rates still accurate and valid?

Chart of the Day: Email benchmarking report 2016.

The DMA’s Email benchmarking report, sponsored by dotmailer, covering email performance data from 2015, has been recently released. They cover emails delivered, open, click through and click-to-open rates. But the dramatic statistic is the click-to-open rate (CTOR), which has declined to 20% in 2015 from the high of 32% in 2013. So, why the extreme decline?

Let's look at what a CTOR is first: a CTOR, used to report on the effectiveness of your email content. It is calculated by taking your unique clicks and dividing by your unique opens and multiply by 100 to get the percentage (eg: (232 unique clicks ÷ 1200 unique opens) x 100 = 19%). Now to calculate an accurate CTOR, we need accurate clicks and opens. Unfortunately, open rates aren't always an accurate reflection of email interaction anymore. The reasons an open could be inaccurate is:

• your ESP can't insert their tracking pixel into text emails
• some spam checkers can trigger multiple email opens when they scan an inbox
• if your client downloads images by mistake and if they use the preview pane to scroll through their inbox, even if they briefly view the email
• if an email client blocks all images, then the ESPs tracking image won't be downloaded.

So is CTOR still an effective way to monitor your emails? With all the above reasons and also the fact that email clients are changing the way they interact with marketing emails, perhaps no. But it is still good to have it as a reference and until ESPs can find a better way to track opens.

A better solution to measure success would be tracking your unique clicks and what your clients are actually clicking on.

• Source: DMA Insight: Email benchmarking report 2016
• Sample Size: Data comes from a large number of Email Service Providers based on the performance of more than 57 billion emails sent in the UK
• Recommended Resource: Email Marketing Toolkit