Email Click-Through Rate
Email click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of recipients who clicked at least one link in your email, calculated by dividing total clicks (or unique clicks) by the number of emails delivered.
What Is Email Click-Through Rate?
Click-through rate is one of the most direct signals of whether your email actually did its job. An open tells you the subject line worked. A click tells you the content worked. It's the difference between someone reading your newsletter and someone acting on it, which is ultimately what separates a healthy email programme from one that just looks healthy on the surface. The formula is straightforward: divide the number of clicks by the number of delivered emails, then multiply by 100. Some platforms use unique clicks (each subscriber counted once regardless of how many links they clicked), while others use total clicks (every click recorded). Unique CTR is generally the more useful figure for understanding audience behaviour, since one person clicking three links in your email doesn't mean three people found your content compelling. Average CTRs vary significantly by industry and email type. Newsletters from individual creators tend to see higher engagement than bulk promotional email, often landing between 2% and 5% for unique CTR, though top-performing newsletters consistently hit double digits. The figure means very little in isolation. A 1% CTR on a list of 100,000 subscribers is 1,000 clicks. A 10% CTR on a list of 500 is 50. Context is everything.
Why It Matters for Newsletters
For newsletter creators, CTR is arguably a more honest metric than open rate. Open rates have been unreliable since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection rolled out, because Apple's servers pre-fetch emails and register opens that never really happened. Clicks are harder to fake at scale, which makes CTR a sturdier foundation for understanding how engaged your audience actually is. If you're monetising through sponsorships, CTR matters enormously. Sponsors increasingly want to know how many people clicked their link, not just how many theoretically opened the email. A strong, consistently documented CTR gives you a credible number to put in your media kit and defend in negotiations. It also tells you which content formats, topics, and calls to action resonate with your readers, giving you a feedback loop that makes every future issue a little sharper.
Best Practices
- Use unique CTR as your primary benchmark rather than total clicks, since it reflects genuine audience engagement rather than repeated clicking by the same person.
- Place your most important link high in the email. Many readers don't make it to the bottom, so don't bury your primary call to action.
- Limit the number of competing links in a single email. Too many options can paralyse readers and dilute clicks away from what actually matters.
- Write specific, descriptive link text rather than generic phrases like 'click here'. Readers need to know exactly what they're clicking and why it's worth it.
- Track CTR by segment and content type over time, not just in aggregate. Knowing that your 'tool recommendation' sections consistently outperform your 'industry roundup' sections is genuinely useful editorial intelligence.
How Aldus Handles This
Aldus tracks unique click-through rate at the campaign level and surfaces it alongside open rate and revenue data, so you're never reading CTR in isolation. Because Aldus is built for newsletter creators who care about both audience and revenue, CTR is connected directly to sponsorship performance tracking, helping you show sponsors exactly what their placement delivered and build a credible, data-backed case for your rates.