Click Rate
Whether the message gave anyone a reason to walk into the shop.
What it means
Click Rate is the share of delivered messages where someone clicked a link at least once. Each recipient counts once however many links they click, and the denominator is DeliveredDeliveredHigher usually means a larger reachable audience. rather than opens — so a weak subject line pulls it down even when the email itself is strong. 9,600 delivered and 288 clickers reads 3%.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Click Rate = unique clickers ÷ DeliveredDeliveredHigher usually means a larger reachable audience..
Unique clickers counts each recipient once, whether they clicked one link or six.
Worked example. A campaign is delivered to 9,600 profiles. 3,360 open it and 288 click something. Click Rate = 288 ÷ 9,600 = 3.0%. Those 288 visits produced €2,400, so each click was worth about €8.
Divide by openers instead of deliveries and you get 288 ÷ 3,360 = 8.6%. That's a different question — how good the email was once seen — and it's not the number on this page.
It answers the question
Did the message move anyone towards the shop? A click is a decision a person had to make, which makes it the first honest number in the chain.
Why it matters
An open is somebody glancing at the window; a click is somebody coming through the door. Opens are the easier of the two to overstate — image pre-loading inflates them, while a click takes a deliberate action.
It's also the cleanest test of the offer. Subject lines move opens; what moves this is the products, the images and the call to action, so when you want to know whether the thing you're selling appeals, read here.
What good looks like
There's no universal standard, because a one-product restock alert and a weekly newsletter aren't doing the same job. Compare each send with your own last five of the same type to the same segment, and watch the direction across a quarter rather than the level in one week. A rate that halves on a send you've run before is worth an hour; a rate lower than a number you read somewhere is not.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Cut the send to one offer | Strip the email to a single call to action, repeated near the top and again at the end | 0.5–1.5 points | 2 weeks | Everything you cut loses its only exposure that week. Slow-moving stock stops getting seen at all. |
| Fast Move the button above the fold | Put the primary link in the first screen, before the story and the hero image | Clicks up quickly, mostly on mobile | 1–2 sends | Shoppers who click before reading arrive colder, so Placed Order Rate often stays flat even as this rises. |
| Slow Segment by what they browsed or bought | Split each campaign by category so the images match the interest | 1–3 points | 4–6 weeks | Three versions of every send is three times the production work, and smaller audiences make each send's numbers noisier to judge. |
| Slow Send less, better | Cut from five campaigns a week to three, dropping the weakest performers | Rate up per send within a month | 6–8 weeks | Fewer sends means fewer total clicks. The percentage improves while the euros can fall for a quarter. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Clicks say the email worked. Orders say the shop did. The gap between them is where the money leaks.
The email and the page agree
People clicked and bought. The promise, the landing page and the price all lined up — worth writing down exactly what you did.
Great email, wrong page
The message did its job and something after the click didn't. Usually a sold-out size, a price that reads higher on the page, or a homepage where a product page belonged.
Few clicks, right clicks
A small audience with real intent. The offer converts; not enough people are being shown it.
The send didn't land
Both down together across several sends points at delivery or list quality rather than copy. Look at bounces and where recent signups came from.
The pair separates the envelope from the letter. Clicks flat while opens climb means the subject line is doing all the work and the message inside isn't holding it up; clicks holding while opens fall means the email is fine and fewer people are seeing it. Two different fixes that look identical if you read either number alone.
One counts people leaving the email, the other counts them leaving the site. Strong clicks landing on a high Bounce Rate means the email promised something the page didn't repeat, and you're paying for traffic that turns around at the door. Neither number can show that mismatch on its own.
Common misreads
This is measured against deliveries. A send that landed in spam for part of the list, or a list that just grew with cold names, drops the number with the same email. Check what changed in the audience first.
Usually the reverse. Ten links split the decision and most shoppers make none, so sends with a single repeated call to action beat catalogue emails on this number almost every time.
CTR (Link)CTR (Link)How enticing your ad is to the people who see it.1.5% or more is healthy is measured against impressions you bought at auction, from people who never asked to hear from you. This is measured against a list that opted in, so the denominators have nothing in common and lining the two up tells you nothing.
Also called
Unique click rate · clicks ÷ delivered · email click-through rate
See yoursYour Click Rate for every campaign and flow in the period, next to the opens and orders from the same send.
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