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In 2014, when I started in digital marketing, I only saw numbers ahead and this indicator for a while gave me a lot to think about what I was doing wrong.
Most of the time you even had good opening rates in emails but there were practically no clicks…
After a lot of repetition and a good dose of failures, I began to accept that if my intention was to improve the click-through rate, I would have to research this topic a little deeper…
How to correctly calculate the click-through rate of an email
The click rate calculation formula can be carried out by counting unique clicks or total clicks. Counting unique clicks gives us a different view than counting total clicks. In the next section, we will interpret each of these indicators.
To be clear, unique clicks are the number of contacts who clicked on a link and do not include the count of the number of times that individual clicked on a given link. Total clicks refer to the total number of clicks made, if the same contact clicks on the same link 10 times, the increase will be counted in the total clicks.
A equação genérica para o cálculo da taxa de cliques é a seguinte:
$$\text{CR} = { \text{c} \over \text{ms} – \text{rm} } \times 100$$
To understand the equation in its entirety, let’s look at the meanings of the abbreviations.
$$\text{CR} = { \text{Click Rate} }$$
$$\text{c} = { \text{Number of Clicks} }$$
$$\text{ms} = { \text{Number of Messages Sent} }$$
$$\text{rm} = { \text{Number of Returned Messages} }$$
However… as discussed initially, it is not correct to make a generic calculation for this rate. There is a unique click rate and a total click rate.
And therefore…
$$\require{cancel} \xcancel{ \text{CR} = { \text{c} \over \text{ms} – \text{rm} } \times 100 }$$
$$\require{cancel} \xcancel{ \text{CR} = { \text{Click Rate} } }$$
$$\require{cancel} \xcancel{ \text{c} = { \text{Number of Clicks} } }$$
$$\text{ms} = { \text{Number of Messages Sent} }$$
$$\text{rm} = { \text{Number of Returned Messages} }$$
The correct approach would be representation using two different equations so that the distinction is clear.
Unique click rate calculation
The unique click rate calculation equation.
$$\text{UCR} = { \text{uc} \over \text{ms} – \text{rm} } \times 100$$
Let’s look at the meanings of the abbreviations.
$$\text{UCR} = { \text{Unique Click Rate} }$$
$$\text{uc} = { \text{Number of Unique Clicks} }$$
$$\text{ms} = { \text{Number of Messages Sent} }$$
$$\text{rm} = { \text{Number of Returned Messages} }$$
A practical example. Let’s imagine that our email marketing campaign was sent to a set of lists that had a total of 755 contacts. There were 12 returned emails and after observing the clicks during the five days following sending the email communication, we totaled 56 unique clicks.
$$\text{UCR} = { 56 \over 755 – 12 } \times 100$$
$$\text{UCR} = { 56 \over 743 } \times 100$$
$$\text{UCR} = 7,54\%$$
When interpreting the click rate, we will discuss the result obtained of 7.537% for a unique click rate and what clues this indicator can provide us.
Total click rate calculation
The total click rate equation.
$$\text{TCR} = { \text{tc} \over \text{ms} – \text{rm} } \times 100$$
Let’s look at the meanings of the abbreviations for this equation.
$$\text{TCR} = { \text{Total Click Rate} }$$
$$\text{tc} = { \text{Number of Total Clicks} }$$
$$\text{ms} = { \text{Number of Messages Sent} }$$
$$\text{rm} = { \text{Number of Returned Messages} }$$
Let’s look at the practical example for total clicks. In exactly the same campaign as the previous point, 135 total clicks were recorded. The remaining variables remain unchanged.
$$\text{TCT} = { 135 \over 755 – 12 } \times 100$$
$$\text{TCT} = { 135 \over 743 } \times 100$$
$$\text{TCT} = 18,17\%$$
In the following point, we will discuss and interpret what clues this 18.17% total click rate can give us.
How to know if an email’s click rate is acceptable or not
Click-through rate varies greatly from industry to industry. However, a unique click rate between 2% and 5% is acceptable. Anything above these values for the unique click rate is considered very good.
Unique click rate and total click rate give us different insights into audience interaction with our brand.
The unique click rate gives us an indication of the percentage of the number of contacts that are interacting with our email marketing message.
Analyzing the total click rate gives us an insight into the overall interaction of the campaign.
I now leave just a few observations and precautions to be taken, especially with optimization for the rate of unique clicks, because the essence of this issue lies more in this type of empirical observation than in a pure and hard analysis of numbers.
So, we must take special care when optimizing for the unique click rate, because normally when we optimize for this indicator it is quite common to make improvements to the call to action (CTA – call-to-action) and also removal from the list of contacts who have not opened emails for more than X amount of time.
By making this improvement in the CTA and removing non-performing contacts we will in fact be able to improve the unique click rate, however, the removal of non-performing contacts must be accompanied by a campaign to reintegrate contacts or a new campaign to acquire new customers /subscribers.
If this reintegration or new customer acquisition campaign is not carried out, in the short term we can actually increase the rate of unique clicks but ultimately in the medium term this will result in a decrease in traffic on the website and a decrease in the number of conversions.
Factors that influence the click-through rate of an email
The factors that will have the most influence on the click-through rate will be, above all, successful segmentation and the attractiveness of the message itself and in particular how the recipient was called to action, CTA (call-to-action).
When it comes to technical factors, it is very important that messages are also optimized for viewing on a mobile phone since a large proportion of recipients will consume communication via this route.
The use of buttons with a link to call recipients to action (CTA) should be the standard, however it is worth bearing in mind that the use of images with links to videos typically improves the click-through rate by 200% to 300%.
A/B testing to improve an email’s click-through rate
A/B tests should mainly focus on discovering the variations in a given segment that work best in terms of:
- Content: Imagine you are the author of a food blog and you want to find out whether, during the summer months, readers are more open to hot foods or cold foods. In the A/B test, the blog author made two versions of the newsletter for July. In version A “Oven-roasted duck” and version B “Sauteed tuna salad”. Measuring clicks will provide clues as to what type of content the author should focus on during the summer months.
- Call to Action: The choice of messages to motivate user action (click) is perhaps the most important point and therefore this is where you should spend the most time to optimize the click rate. The main factors to pay attention to are the choice of words used, to understand whether the segment responds better to a certain type of word, phrase, or sentence. Regarding the length of the message to action, bear in mind that many recipients will view the message on a mobile phone, and the organization and arrangement of the parts, sometimes it is better to have an image before the call to action, other times it will be better to just use text, for example. Spend some time testing the message for action.
- Use or Not of Images: Some campaigns work better when images are used, others not at all. If you come to the conclusion that the campaign works better with images, test the order and positioning of the images, the content of the images, compare different images for the same purpose, and even the colors used in the images as well as their size. And test to arrive at the best combination.
Conclusion
We learned that there are two variants of click rate, a single click rate that counts the unique clicks of each user on a given link and a total click rate that counts all clicks.
An acceptable unique click rate in an email marketing campaign is around 2% to 5%. However, optimization for this indicator may have undesirable consequences in the medium term, such as a decrease in visits and conversions, requiring careful interpretation of possible improvements in relation to this.
This indicator is very sensitive to the attractiveness of calls to action (CTA) and the quality of segmentation.
When it comes to A/B tests, they play a very important role in discovering the combinations (subject lines, messages for action, etc…) that work best for optimizing this indicator.