An owned marketing program is a bit like racecar driving…
You have to make sure every part is working well, because one faulty part can slow you down—or, worse, cause a crash.
Click rate is one of those parts of the whole—sometimes overlooked, but crucial.
Remember not to confuse click rate with click through rate. Click through rate refers to people who clicked on a link within your email. Click rate is the percentage of people who clicked on your email out of the total number of emails delivered.
That’s why we consider it one of the most important metrics for evaluating email performance, second only to revenue.
“Click rate is king,” says Erin Aguilar, senior customer success manager at Klaviyo. “While open rates are often inflated by Apple’s Mail Privacy Policy (MPP), click rates have remained untouched, making it one of the truer indicators of customer engagement.”
Katie Martello Sardo, email and SMS manager at Tata Harper Skincare, agrees. “Click rates are key when we’re measuring the impact of our copy, design, and overall campaign themes, especially when comparing similar campaigns year over year,” says Sardo.
Click rate—CR for short—is a 3-in-1 metric. Deliverability, opens, and clicks all impact email click rate, making it an efficient metric to gauge your overall email marketing performance.
What does all of this add up to? The most effective means for improving click rates in your email program depend on where your weak points currently lie. For example:
- If your sender reputation is strong, try tweaking the content or design of your emails.
- If deliverability is hindering you, focus your energy there.
- If you can strategically optimise this metric, you can quickly increase your earned revenue through email marketing. And who doesn’t want that?
Here are 8 tactics to get your click rate where it needs to go: up.
1. Practise healthy email list habits by segmenting
Strong email deliverability hinges on healthy lists. Regularly cleaning your list—removing unengaged subscribers before they mark your emails as spam—helps you make it into your recipients’ inboxes more reliably.
“Ignoring your click rate can get you in a bad spot with sender reputation, and then you have to crawl out of deliverability hell,” says Caleb Simpson, senior customer success manager at Klaviyo.
Long story short, cleaning your lists and segmenting according to engagement can improve click rates because the relationship between click rate and deliverability is bi-directional: The more people click your emails, the better your deliverability rates. This leads inbox providers to give your emails better placement.
“Companies fear that by tightening their engagement segments, they’ll exclude potential buyers. But that doesn’t usually happen,” says Simpson, who’s seen brands move from the promotions tab to recipients’ primary inbox after excluding unengaged profiles from a send.
In Klaviyo, you can segment based on factors far beyond engagement, including whether a subscriber is on a certain list, their proximity to a location, and behaviours from web browsing to purchase habits.
The results play out: Tata Harper Skincare saw improvements in open and click rates by leveraging their engagement data and targeting strategic segments with this GWP campaign email. Segments created in Klaviyo included: 30-day engaged customers, active contacts (engaged in the last 90 days or signed up in the last 15 days), Loyalty members, and VIP customers.
Image source: Tata Harper