Avari Blog

In a recent blog post, I talked about how to assess your email marketing performance and mentioned click-to-open-rate (CTOR) as an important indicator for how successful your content is at engaging your audience.

Now let’s take that a step further by evaluating individual pieces of your email campaign. Which parts perform?

Seeing your results in one overview helps you recognize the good and the bad, separate the wheat from the chaff, identify your rockstars and your duds... you get the point. Combine that with your personal understanding of your products and customers, and you will be able to pinpoint interesting trends about your business. Knowing what your customers are reacting to (or not) in one overall view can drive your creative thinking, your product strategy, your inbound strategy, and your advertising programs.

Assessing your CTOR by comparing dynamic content blocks will also give you perspective on topics such as:

• relevance of the message content
• effectiveness of your offers
• copy, message design, and layout

You can even analyze the efficacy of the number and location of text and image links. For example, is the content on the top of your campaign getting a higher CTOR? Then it might be wise to think about rearranging your content by placing the most important parts (such as special products or promotions) higher up in your email.

The success of your email marketing can, on a campaign level, be broken down into the aforementioned pieces of content. However, in addition to functioning on their own, they need to perform together as well. If your special offer isn’t attractive, if your copy is poorly written, or if the design is hindering the reader’s ability to understand your message, you will not get the most out of your email marketing. This will result in a lower CTOR overall.

So back to the bottom line? Not exactly.

Think of it like a long string of old Christmas lights. When you take it out of the box, one of the lights might be broken, leaving you with a useless (or at least less effective) Christmas decoration. You can throw away the whole thing, or use your wits to find and replace the broken part so that it works again.

The benefit of measuring CTOR is that you have a grip on assessing ROI per content piece. Change it around, keep testing, and see if you can do better. Understanding the results of those harder-to-measure marketing activities now comes within reach.

You can also see the impact of changes in people, for example, a new product manager or creative director. Higher conversion means someone is doing a good job creating engaging content. Even a fresh design or enhanced focus on call-to-action buttons could increase your performance. In these ways, CTOR is valuable for your holistic business thinking, as well as for each individual campaign and its contents.