What is click-through rate (CTR)?
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Open rate tells you how many people noticed your email. Click-through rate tells you how many did something because of it.
Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of delivered emails that resulted in at least one link click. The formula: clicks divided by delivered emails, multiplied by 100.
A typical CTR sits between 1% and 5%, depending on your audience, industry, and what you're asking people to do. Newsletters linking out to articles tend to cluster lower. Promotional emails with a single, clear call to action tend to do better.
What makes CTR valuable is that it's harder to fake than open rate. Since Apple Mail Privacy Protection started pre-fetching tracking pixels, open rate data has become unreliable for many senders. Clicks require a human to actually choose to tap something, which makes CTR a cleaner signal of real engagement.
If you're trying to understand whether your content is working, CTR is the metric to watch. If you want to understand whether your emails are even reaching people, look at inbox placement rate alongside it.
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