It’s the ultimate measure of an email’s success.
It goes beyond opens and clicks to show you the true level of your subscriber engagement.
It’s the metric that’s fast becoming the email marketer’s favorite.
Click-to-open rate, or CTOR, is becoming the benchmark for how email marketers view their email campaigns. It’s a simple metric with powerful implications. CTOR tells you what percentage of subscribers who opened your email also clicked on it, and so presents you with an overview of how effective your campaigns are.
CTOR is a good indication of how well your subject line matches the content within your email.
Testing to Increase CTOR
Since CTOR is one of the most powerful tools an email marketer has access to today, testing layout and design is intrinsic to pushing the limits of this metric.
This is exactly what Virginia Tech Division of Student Affairs did to see a lift of 6 percent in its overall CTOR over just three months.
At the start of this test, Virginia Tech Division of Student Affairs was new to measuring CTOR. The team had studied its reporting and knew it needed to start improving metrics. Seeing better subscriber engagement was top of mind for everyone.
The Virginia Tech Division of Student Affairs team focused first on increasing CTOR for its monthly newsletter, which provides an abundant amount of vital information for students and parents.
The first two email sends displayed all the information in the body of the newsletter. Although this made the body of the email long, the team used anchor tags at the top to link people to content further down. The only weakness was the imagery included wasn’t as good as the team wanted it to be.
The Virginia Tech Division of Student Affairs team decided to change the most recent newsletter and provide more imagery with teaser texts and links directed to the stories.
The Result
The result of this change from a longer email campaign to a shorter one resulted in an improved CTOR. The metric started at 11 percent with the mostly-text email, and jumped to a 17-percent CTOR on the most recent send. This test proved that for Virginia Tech Division of Student Affairs emails, the monthly newsletter with more images, teaser text, and CTAs driving readers to the site was what subscribers liked to read.
See what a little testing can do?
Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts
Twitter: @ugigirl
[cta1]