Latest / The Email Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Newsletters, Open Rates, and Subscriber Growth / Why Click-to-Open Rate Matters More Than Open Rate
Transcript
- Lucas: Okay, let me start with a confession. For years I judged my email marketing success almost entirely on open rate. If it was above 25 percent, I felt like a genius. Luna: I think most people do that. It's the first number you see in every email dashboard. Lucas: Right. But here's the thing — open rate is actually a pretty noisy metric. It can be inflated by a clever subject line, by Apple's Mail Privacy Protection opening pixels automatically, or just by sending at the right time. None of those tell you if the email itself was any good. Luna: So what should we look at instead? Lucas: click to open rate. CTOR. It's the ratio of unique clicks to unique opens. So if 100 people open your email and 30 click something, your CTOR is 30 percent. It strips out the inbox placement noise and tells you how engaging your actual content is. Luna: I love that. It's like measuring the quality of the meal, not just whether people walked into the restaurant. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a great real-world example. A fashion retailer I worked with changed their subject line from 'Your weekly style edit' to 'Your 20% off code inside.' Their open rate jumped from 22 percent to 31 percent. But their click to open rate dropped from 28 percent to 14 percent. Luna: Ouch. So more people opened, but half as many found the content worth clicking. Lucas: Exactly. The discount subject line got opens from people who just wanted the deal — they clicked the discount link and left. The old subject line attracted a smaller but more engaged audience that actually browsed the editorial content. If you only tracked open rate, you'd think the new version was a win. Luna: So CTOR saved them from a bad decision. How do you calculate it exactly? Lucas: Most email platforms show it, but you can also do it manually. Take unique clicks divided by unique opens, multiply by 100. So if you had 500 unique opens and 125 unique clicks, that's 25 percent. Just make sure you use unique clicks, not total clicks — one person clicking five times shouldn't inflate the number. Luna: And what's a good CTOR? I've heard different numbers. Lucas: It varies by industry. For e-commerce, a healthy CTOR is typically 20 to 30 percent. For B2B SaaS, it's lower — more like 10 to 15 percent — because emails often drive to long-form content. Newsletters tend to fall in between, around 15 to 25 percent. The key is to benchmark against your own past performance and your industry, not random internet averages. Luna: So what should someone do if their open rate is fine but their CTOR is low? Lucas: Then the problem is the email itself. The subject line is working — people are curious enough to open — but the content doesn't deliver. Maybe the call to action is weak, the copy is too long, or the offer isn't compelling. I'd A/B test one element at a time: hero image, headline, button copy, or the number of links. Luna: And if CTOR is high but open rate is low? Lucas: That's actually a good problem to have. It means the people who do open love your content. You just need to work on your subject lines to get more opens. Maybe test more curiosity gaps, personalization, or urgency. But don't ruin what's working inside. Luna: One trap I've seen: people look at CTOR on very small sends, like a test segment of 50 people. One click can swing the whole percentage. Lucas: Great point. CTOR is unreliable under about 100 opens. Below that, the numbers are too jittery. I'd also caution against comparing CTOR across different types of emails. A transactional email — like 'Your order has shipped' — will have a much higher CTOR than a newsletter, because the reader has a clear next step. Compare apples to apples. Luna: Right. And don't forget that CTOR doesn't measure what happens after the click. You still need to track conversion rate to know if the click turned into a sale or a sign-up. Lucas: Absolutely. CTOR is a content quality metric, not a revenue metric. It tells you if people found the email engaging enough to click. But if they click and then bounce off the landing page, that's a different problem. So use CTOR alongside open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate for the full picture. Luna: I think the biggest takeaway is: stop starring at open rate like it's the only thing that matters. If your audience is smaller but more engaged, that's often more valuable than a huge list that ignores you. Lucas: That's exactly right. And honestly, if you're a podcaster thinking about your own newsletter, this is really the kind of metric that helps you make better decisions. So if today was actually useful to you, the way these shows stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a small way to keep the conversation going. Luna: Yeah, it really helps us keep doing deep dives like this without selling out to sponsors. Lucas: Exactly. And the coffee metaphor is appropriate for this episode — it's a small daily habit that adds up. Luna: Alright, so let's wrap with a practical challenge. Next time you send a campaign, look at CTOR before you look at open rate. See if it changes how you think about the email's success. Lucas: I'm going to do that myself. And if your CTOR surprises you, reach out — we'd love to hear about it. For now, I'm Lucas. Luna: And I'm Luna. See you next time.