Click-through rate
The percentage of email recipients who clicked at least one link in the email.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients who clicked at least one link in your email, calculated as (unique clicks / sends) × 100. Different from click-to-open rate (CTOR), which uses opens as the denominator. CTR is the conversion-flavored metric; CTOR isolates engagement among people who already opened.
Healthy CTRs vary wildly by industry and email type. Broad newsletter sends typically see 1.5–3% CTR. Targeted lifecycle emails (cart recovery, post-purchase) see 8–15%. Cold outreach to small, well-researched lists can see 25%+. Comparing CTRs across these contexts is meaningless.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection has dramatically inflated open rates since 2021 (Apple opens emails preemptively to load images), making click-through rate the more honest engagement metric for modern email programs. If you're still optimizing for open rate, you're optimizing for a number that's increasingly disconnected from real engagement.