Platform · Metrics · Email CTR
Email CTR: Email click-through rate
The share of delivered emails that earn a click. The useful email metric after privacy made open rate a weak proxy.
What it is
Email click-through rate is clicks divided by delivered mail. Open rate is easy to inflate and hard to trust after mail-privacy changes. CTR, plus unsubscribe and conversion from the click, tells you if the subject, preview, and body earned a real action.
Why it is worth tracking
Lifecycle is where paid CAC gets paid back. If welcome and replenishment mail does not get clicked, you paid for customers you never talked to again. Operators draft subjects and bodies against CTR and downstream conversion, not against who opened an Apple Mail proxy.
How to read it
A single number is not a brief. These splits are what change the work.
CTR low, conversion from click is fine
The page works. The email is not earning the click. Rewrite subject, preview, and the first screen of the body.
CTR high, conversion from click is weak
The email over-promised or sent people to the wrong URL. Align the body with the landing page.
CTR fine, unsubscribes rising
You are clicking a tired list too often, or the offer is off. Cadence and relevance, not more exclamation marks.
What the Operator does
Diagnose, act, then draft. The stats pick the job. Brand voice stays locked.
Diagnose
The Operator prefers unique CTR and click-to-conversion over open rate. It splits by journey stage (welcome, promo, win-back) so a blast does not hide a broken onboarding flow.
Act
Stop blasting segments that do not click. Put draft effort into the journeys that already convert. Flag when promo cadence is burning the list.
Draft
Draft subject lines, preview text, and bodies in brand voice, including bilingual subjects and festival sends that do not read like a US template. Iterate the weak step in the sequence without regenerating the whole flow unless you ask.
Example brief
“Welcome flow unique CTR in Hong Kong is 1.1% on email 1 and 4.2% on email 3. Rewrite email 1 subject + body for new signups who have not linked a bank account. Tone: reassuring, premium. Softer CTA during Lunar New Year week.”
Paste a brief like this into a Basis Operator. Connected account context and brand rules apply automatically.
Related metrics
Read it with these, or you will optimize the wrong surface.