What Are Good Email Click Through Rates

What Are Good Email Click Through Rates Recently, we shared what we learned through A/B testing our email subject lines over the course of several months. We showed what worked and what didnt, and what kinds of subject lines were the most likely to get opened. A reader then suggested that we provide similar data, but not just on subject lines. What were our readers doing once they opened the email? Were they clicking to articles? We thought this was a great question, and decided to look at the same set of data, but this time focus on what readers did once they opened the email. What Our Email Looks Like Our weekly Content Marketing Update email has no complete posts in it, meaning that if a reader wants to read what weve shared in the the email, they must click on something. We share the post title, a small graphic, and a summary of the post. We have a update or featured item with a gray background, and then below that, links to at least three interesting blog posts for the week. This is what our email looks like. We send it out every week, on Tuesday. Our Email Click-Through Rates Though we didnt A/B test our emails based on the click activity that happens once an email is opened, there are still a few things we can learn about what people do once they open an email. In the table below, we use the same emails from our earlier post. You can see the date of the email, and the subject line of the email. We are only showing the subject line that won the A/B test. Open Rate: The percentage of total recipients that opened the email. Click Rate: The percentage of those who opened and then clicked at least once. Click / Person: How many clicks each person made, on average. Subj. Post: Whether the most-clicked link matched the A/B winning subject line of the post. So, what did we learn?Date Subject Open Rate Click Rate Click / Person Subj. Match JUNE 3 17 Apps To Help You Make Ebooks 21 27 1.87 Y 10 A No-Fail Method For Writing Blog Posts 22 29 1.98 Y 17 The Total Guide To Sharing Content On Social Media 20 22 2.07 N 24 Using Game Theory As A Content Marketing Tactic 19 25 2.19 N JULY 1 The Case For (And Against) Using Link Shorteners 21 25 1.78 Y 8 3 Tricks To Get People To Remember Your Content 20 28 1.94 Y 15 The 1 Big Reason You Should Self-Host Your Blog 20 22 1.88 Y 22 5 Plugins That Get You More Leads 21 31 1.68 Y 29 Why Your Project May Be Doomed Before Its Launched 19 21 1.78 N AUGUST 5 Why Content Marketing Tips Should Not Be Trusted 19 21 1.69 N 12 Know Your Audience? Google Just Made It Even Easier 20 25 2.03 Y 19 90s Nostalgia Can Rock Your Content Marketing 19 23 2.03 NWhat is considered to be a good click rate? Lets look at some standard benchmarks to get a better idea at what email click rates are, based on the industry. MailChimp has compiled the data from their users, breaking it up by industry. According to MailChimp, for marketing and advertising: 18.81% of emails get opened. 2.44% of emails get clicked. According to MailChimp, for software and web app emails: 21.86% of emails get opened. 3.26% of emails get clicked. MailerMailer did a similar study of their own data, and found that marketing and PR emails generally had about a 15% click-to-open rate. Constant Contacts numbers hover around the same level, too. And, according to the 2012 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, email open rates in general average about 20%, while click rates, once that email is open, drop to 5.4%. Our open rates average at 20%, which is in line with these averages, but what about our click rates? Even though the average click rate is at 5.4%, we set the bar a bit higher and consider a 20% click rate of those who open an email to be a good, typical rate. Our average rate, across these three months, was a 25% click rate. Thats pretty good! Ideally, youd love to see more than one click per reader, meaning that they are more engaged with your email content. Our average, across these three months, was  1.9 clicks per person. Was the most highly clicked link the same as the post referenced in the winning subject line? Youd think that, since we A/B tested our email subject lines and proved which was the most powerful, the link  referenced in the subject line would also be the link people clicked on once they opened the email. Not always. As you can see from the chart above, 58% of the time the subject line was the link that received the most activity. Sometimes, though, it was quite close. Once readers opened up the email, they found something else theyd like to read more than what the email subject line advertised the email was about.