Click to open rate (CTOR) is a metric that measures the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign by determining how many people opened an email after receiving it. It generally expresses the ratio of opened emails to total emails sent and is usually represented as a percentage. The higher the ratio, the more successful the campaign.
CTOR is often compared to the Open Rate (OR), which tracks how many people opened an email immediately upon receiving it. While OR only takes into account when emails were opened, CTOR also considers if someone received an email, but didn’t open it until hours or even days later. This metric provides a more accurate understanding of overall engagement with your campaigns and allows you to determine which techniques are most effective in engaging your audience.
The success of an email marketing campaign can be evaluated by analyzing both CTOR and OR metrics together, as they provide complementary information about engagement rates from different angles. If your OR rate is high but your CTOR rate is low, this might indicate that some subscribers are opening their emails right away but failing to engage with them for any length of time afterward. On the other hand, if your OR rate is low but your CTOR rate is high, this could suggest that subscribers are taking longer to open their emails than usual or that they are engaging with them after opening them at a later time. Both scenarios can give important insight into what’s driving customer engagement and help marketers identify areas of improvement within their campaigns so they can better target and reach their audiences in order to drive successful results.