Click to Open Rate

(CTOR), aka: Confirmed Opens, Click Throughs, Click-Through Rate (CTR). CTOR and other variants are terms used to determine how effective any given email marketing campaign was and what if anything needs to be changed in order to increase conversion rates and profit.

Both open rates and click through rates are a factor in determining future actions and modifications to any email marketing venture.  CTOR, however, wasn’t talked about much until recently and is now becoming a more effective and meaningful metric.

Open and click-through rates (the most commonly used and benchmarked email marketing metrics) provide marketers with a quick and fairly accurate view of how an email message performed. By combining these two metrics into the click-to-open rate, there is an additional and perhaps better tool to analyze and benchmark email performance.

Simply defined, a click-to-open rate is the ratio of unique (one per subscriber) as a percentage of unique opens and illustrates how effective an email message was in getting anyone who opened it to then click a link. The CTOR is the percentage of messages opened instead of just delivered. This is probably the greatest element of value the CTOR can provide which if you compare it across ISPs, key domains, and customer segments it is very likely to help correct potential problems, trends, or composition.

A CTR, although less detailed than a CTOR, does give a clear picture of how many subscribers are clicking on links provided in an email call to action URL. This is the base percentage of the unique clicks, divided by the number that were opened. These are also known as Clicks Per Delivered and Clicks per Open.