Good Email Click-Through Rate in 2024: How to Maximize CTR for Your Campaigns

Email is still king. With so much new other options nowadays, email remains as the best marketing approach. And one powerful metric is email click-through rate.

With a good handle of average email click-through rate email, marketers gain a way to optimize their marketing CTRs. If their email marketing software supports click-through performance analysis, then they just need to make the most of it too.

Do you know the best, average, and decent CTRs in your business sector? Read on and discover some key email click-through rate and related marketing metrics that you should know for 2025.

Whoever said email is dead? The truth is email continues to see great results in the online marketing world. This is because these trusty online correspondences directly reach customers.

Email is the only communication channel that provides the outcomes inside 72 hours after being sent. What’s more, you can gauge its efficiency using similarly effective metrics that are now easier to use.

Marketers track and measure their marketing campaign effectiveness mainly to strengthen lead generation. So what’s the most crucial metric to monitor and measure? How do you know if your campaigns are doing great?

An email click-through rate is a very important email marketing metric. A simple click-through rate definition is that it’s the number of people who had clicked on at least one link in your email campaign.

A high CTR is typically a positive sign that your email marketing initiatives are good. This means your campaigns are relevant and your audiences are acting on them. A low CTR, on the other hand, means things should be improved.

It’s no wonder up to 70% of marketers monitor CTRs as a way to measure the success of their email marketing campaigns.

Email CTRs change every year and vary per industry and location. One industry’s high can be another’s average or low.

How does email personalization affect click-through rates?

Personalization has become a critical factor in email marketing, directly impacting click-through rates (CTR) by creating more relevant and engaging experiences for recipients. Personalized emails, tailored to the preferences, behaviors, and demographics of subscribers, are more likely to catch attention and encourage engagement. Here’s how personalization can enhance CTR:

• Dynamic Content
  Including dynamic content that adjusts based on the subscriber’s preferences, such as recommended products or location-based offers, helps capture interest. For instance, if a subscriber has previously shown interest in a product category, including similar items can drive more clicks.
• Personalized Subject Lines
  Subject lines with the recipient’s name or specific interests increase open rates, which positively influences CTR. Emails that feel relevant from the subject line onward are more likely to prompt action.
• Behavioral Triggers
  Trigger-based emails that respond to customer actions, such as cart abandonment, product views, or recent purchases, create timely and relevant touchpoints. Behavioral triggers remind subscribers of their interests and prompt them to return, often resulting in higher CTRs.
• Segmentation Based on Preferences
  Segmenting email lists based on customer preferences, purchase history, or demographics allows marketers to tailor messages to specific groups. This strategy increases relevancy and boosts CTR by ensuring the content matches subscribers’ interests.
• Interactive Elements and Personal Messages
  Adding interactive elements like quizzes, polls, or countdown timers, along with a personalized message, encourages engagement and drives more clicks. These elements make emails more engaging and can result in higher click-throughs.
• Customized Send Times
  Optimizing email send times based on user behavior, such as peak engagement times, can increase CTR. Personalized timing makes it more likely that emails land in subscribers’ inboxes when they are most receptive.

There are also good and bad days to send emails. Marketers do need to consider, track, and measure a myriad of things. To ensure your marketing efforts succeed, let’s focus on this very important metric.

Good Email Click-Through Rate in 2025

How to improve email click-through rates

Nowadays, any market should already know how to calculate email click-through rate. This is done using email click-through rate formula, i.e., the number of clicks divided by the total emails sent (minus bounces).

To maximize a CTR’s efficiency, a marketer should measure a single click in two methods. First is by measuring clicks by an individual person. Second is by measuring individual clicks.

For 2025, the average email CTRs is 2.69% across all industries.

Achieving strong CTRs

To achieve strong CTRs in PPC, a market must do several things.

First, you need to have cost-efficient clicks. Second, you must use targeted keywords to bid on. Third, a marketer must be capable of effectively grouping keyword segments fast. This is to enable closer targetting.

To facilitate these important things, a marketer must have the tools and strategies to closely integrate relevant keywords with landing pages and ad content.

Don’t forget that your (Google) Quality Scores–an important PPC success predictor–depend largely on your CTR. So if your CTRs are high, you’ll have better Quality Scores. Remember also to optimize your email campaigns using the best email marketing applications.

How to increase CTR on PPC campaigns

The PPC game is always shifting, but it’s constantly highly competitive. So it’s important to ensure that your marketing campaigns have high CTR and conversion rates. Aside from good targeting, the second key to success is marketing creativity.

You must ensure that your ads reach your target audience. It’s a no-brainer that when emails are shown to the wrong people, they’ll likely won’t click on the ads. This happens when:

• Your targeting method is not right
• You’re selecting the wrong keywords
• You’re using the wrong targeting criteria
• You need to use segmented marketing campaigns.
• You need to use more specific marketing programs.

Then, it boils down to the level of creativity. You must:

• have an irresistible offer to generate clicks
• deliver content specifically tailored to your particular audience
• use keywords that they’re searching for.
• Always ensure that your visuals (videos or images) are captivating and engaging.

Support Strategies

Your efforts should not stop there. On top of doing all those things, an efficient marketer should then begin undertaking support techniques to boost CTR.

Some of these support methods include the need to:

• offer flash sales
• integrating urgency in your content
• offer limited-time-only discounts
• clearly mention when a sale will be ending.

Marketers should also take full advantage of every element of the entire ad platform.

For instance, it’s good practice to use multiple ad extensions for your Google AdWords. Don’t forget to put your location map, seller ratings, and your contact details. These ad extensions can provide you that added edge against others.

Likewise, you should test the various ad formats and CTA buttons in your Facebook ads.

You can actually use marketing apps like HubSpot to enhance your AdWords campaigns. By integrating your campaign data with Hubspot, for instance, you can automatically monitor ad conversions and keyword efficiency.

You can use all the features for free for a period of time to see if the software matches your needs. Simply sign up for HubSpot free trial here.

To be an effective marketer, you must always create irresistible offers. Giving a discount or something for free help a lot in closing a sale.

And to further ensure you’re able to reach your target audience, you need to get the most out of the AdWords that you use.

What are the effects of low CTR?

Having a low CTR doesn’t only mean that you have fewer than expected potential visitors or customers. It means so much more.

A low CTR can also mean low “Quality Scores” in Google AdWords, Facebook ads, and other PPCs that use CTRs to measure ads quality.

Because of low CTR, you can only improve your search results by paying more per click. That means reaching the top of the pay entails higher cost on your part.

Marketers can enhance the performance of low CTR ads by improving the ad copy. Another is coming up with content that’s more suitable for their target users.

Poor CTR is costly

Ad engagement–or CTR–primarily determines the quality score.

Google and other web portals think that keywords with higher quality scores indicate higher usefulness and relevance to the user. This is why they prioritize keywords with high-quality scores in searches.

So the key to this is relevance. By giving priority to ads that are relevant to their users, Google and Facebook are rating every ad in their sites with a quality score. If users kept on receiving irrelevant results, a website’s user base will likely decrease.

Along with quality scores, Google and Facebook also use bidding systems to identify which ads make it to the top.

Basically, a high-quality score jacks up a bid. So if you have a sufficiently good quality score, one can even dominate others without the need to outbid them.

To consistently achieve good quality scores, you should take advantage of the benefits of content marketing platforms. This way, you focus on other more important things like expanding your market reach.

Are CTRs useful for boosting SEO and display ads?

CTR can also be crucial for SEO as the search result’s click-through rate is considered by many as a key ranking factor in Google. Display ads and ads on other platforms like Facebook use the same rule.

Display Benchmarks Tool says that 0.06% is the average CTR of display ads across all formats and ad placements.

As such, your email strategy will ultimately depend on your ad display objectives. These may include:

• Offering a lead magnet to generate leads
• Using the buying process to nurture leads
• Developing brand and top-of-mind awareness
• Using retargeting to attract abandoned customers.

Techwyse says that display ads are highly efficient if they’re applied in three particular marketing objectives. These are for building or maintaining brand awareness, and for fostering customer loyalty. You can easily apply these three when you use a trusty campaign management platform.

Google Ads Industry Benchmarks: Average Click-Through Rates.

When is high CTR bad for business?

There are situations when having a high CTR doesn’t bring good results.

A high CTR is bad for business when the keyword used to generate the CTR is not relevant to your business. It’s also not good if the keyword will not generate leads, sales, etc.

The reasons for these are simple:

• A business pays for each click.
• Numerous clicks mean higher ad spending.
• There are times when clicks that came from expensive keywords may even result in losses.
• Irrelevant clicks and keywords can just be a waste of money since they can’t generate new business.

In most campaigns, a high CTR is a good success indicator. However, there are still other instances when it’s really not good to have a high click-through rate.

For instance, let’s say one of your email campaigns had generated either an average or a high CTR. However, it’s conversion rate is very poor.

This means that there’s likely a problem somewhere. It could be with your landing page. Or perhaps the actual offers you’ve made. It’s not normal to receive numerous clicks but without any actual results.

What should be done?

Now you know, merely having a high CTR should not always be the objective. It should be to have high CTRs on keywords that are affordable and relevant.

As such, your CTR should come from keywords that your target audience can afford. Likewise, it should be relevant, meaning it should have a related offering, landing page, and ad content.

Simply put, a good CTR first involves targeting the correct keywords and then attracting as many users as possible to click on the ads. It should also follow good email design practices to achieve better outcomes.

Using an efficient content marketing solution like HubSpot will help a lot in you target the right keywords in your campaigns.

Are CTRs and Conversion Rates the same?

Conversion rate is the percentage of people who took the designed action. On the other hand, CTR is related to the situation that results in the conversion.

Their relationship is complementary. The higher your CTRs are, the higher your conversion rates will be.

Imagine you and five of your friends are visiting a mall. Upon entering the establishment, 3 went to check out some shoes, 2 entered a clothes shop, and one went to the supermarket.

If we’ll use click-through rate for each type of store, the shoe store will have a 50% CTR, the clothes shop 33%, and the supermarket 16%. CTR is a good measure of people’s interests, interaction, and behavior. It is a good way to determine the efficiency of a campaign.

However, lets’ say that only two among your group actually bought something, one in the shoe store, and another in the supermarket. So, the shoe store’s conversion rate is 33%, as 1 of 3 made an actual purchase.

The clothes shop had a 0% conversion rate, whereas the supermarket had 100% (1 of 1).

Experts suggest that the better way to generate profits is by first optimizing your conversion rate, and then work on your web traffic. Prioritizing traffic first and then the conversion rate offers a lesser impact on your business success.

To ensure your conversion rate is optimized, it’s crucial to leverage technology to your advantage. In this regard, don’t forget to deploy an efficient conversion rate optimization software solution.

Clicks vs clicks to open: what’s the difference?

Many tend to think that open rates are the most important email marketing measure. It basically involves a potential customer opening an email you’ve sent means your offer will be considered.

What’s more important, however, is your click-to-open rate (CTOR). The CTOR is a measure of how many click-throughs an opened email receives. A good CTOR may differ from 20% to 30%.

So an open rate involves the number of opened emails, while CTOR concerns the number of click-throughs in the opened emails.

Going further, CTRs are based on clicks per subscribers. CTOR monitors the number of clicks per each open (or read).

CTOR provides the overall efficiency of your email content. The moment people opens your email, the question is how many acts (or clicks) on your offers?

Thus, every marketer should spend time conducting keyword research to ensure that every ad spend you make is relevant to your target audience or ideal customer.

You should also use the best marketing automation solutions to help further your business cause.

Source: IBM/Watson Marketing’s 2018 Marketing Benchmark Report.

So how do you optimize CTR for your campaigns?

There you have it, some important email click-through rates considerations, including other relevant marketing metrics that you should know for 2025. Maximizing CTRs for your email marketing campaigns depend largely on the use of proper and relevant keywords. Likewise, your offers should be realistic ones, so that your target audience can readily act on them.

Your CTRs can tell you so much about the performance of your PPC campaigns. It can tell you if you’re running the right campaigns or not. You can also use CTRs if your campaigns are targetting the right audience or not.

Likewise, aside from knowing the number of people clicking on your ads, CTRs are indispensable in helping you identify areas of improvement. In case you’re still exploring which email marketing app to use, why not test drive a leading solution first? For example, you can easily sign up for HubSpot free trial here.

Lastly, this metric also helps a lot in making you a better marketer in this highly competitive digital marketplace. Of course, you need all the help you need from any of the leading email marketing software solutions.

Key Insights

• Importance of Email Click-Through Rate (CTR): Email CTR remains a vital metric for evaluating the success of email marketing campaigns. High CTR indicates relevance and engagement, while low CTR suggests areas for improvement.
• Industry Benchmarks: Average email CTR varies by industry, with agriculture leading at 3.66%, followed by real estate at 3.06%. Knowing your industry benchmark helps set realistic goals.
• Impact on PPC Campaigns: High CTR in PPC campaigns can improve Google Quality Scores, leading to lower costs per click and better ad placement.
• Factors Affecting CTR: Key factors include targeting the right audience, using relevant keywords, and creating compelling ad content.
• Email Design Trends: Personalization, dynamic content, and interactive elements are increasingly important in email design, contributing to higher CTRs.
• CTR vs. Conversion Rates: While CTR measures initial engagement, conversion rates indicate the ultimate success of converting clicks into desired actions. Both metrics are complementary and crucial for campaign evaluation.
• Optimization Strategies: To improve CTR, use segmented campaigns, enticing offers, and visually engaging content. Utilize tools like HubSpot for better campaign management and performance tracking.

FAQ

1. What is a good click-through rate for email? A good click-through rate for email can range from 1% to nearly 5%, depending on the industry. On average, a CTR of 2.5% is considered good, although aiming for around 4% is ideal if achievable.
2. How do you improve email click-through rates? To improve email CTR, focus on creating compelling content, using targeted keywords, segmenting your audience, and employing effective design strategies. Additionally, consider the timing and frequency of your emails to maximize engagement.
3. How can I increase CTR on PPC campaigns? Increasing CTR on PPC campaigns involves precise audience targeting, using relevant and high-performing keywords, creating compelling ad copy, and leveraging ad extensions. Regularly testing and optimizing ad formats and content is also crucial.
4. What are the effects of a low CTR? A low CTR indicates poor engagement and can result in lower Quality Scores in platforms like Google AdWords, leading to higher costs per click. It also suggests that the content or targeting strategy may need improvement to better resonate with the audience.
5. Are CTRs useful for boosting SEO and display ads? Yes, CTRs are useful for boosting SEO as they are considered a key ranking factor by search engines like Google. For display ads, a higher CTR indicates better ad performance and relevance to the target audience.
6. When is a high CTR bad for business? A high CTR can be detrimental if the clicks are not relevant to your business or do not lead to conversions. This can result in wasted ad spend and poor return on investment. It’s important to ensure that the keywords and content driving the high CTR are aligned with your business goals.
7. Are CTRs and conversion rates the same? No, CTRs and conversion rates are not the same. CTR measures the percentage of people who click on a link in your email or ad, while conversion rates measure the percentage of people who take a desired action after clicking. Both metrics are important for evaluating campaign effectiveness.
8. What is the difference between clicks and clicks to open? Clicks refer to the number of times a link is clicked within an email, while clicks to open (CTOR) measure the number of clicks relative to the number of opened emails. CTOR provides a more accurate measure of the email content’s effectiveness in driving engagement.

By Jessica Stewart

Jessica Stewart is the resident marketing analyst at FinancesOnline and a pioneering member of our research team. She believes that data is at the center of business and marketing technology is its enabler, a point not lost in her articles published in major outlets such as BusinessInsider, USA Today and Entrepreneur. Beyond assessing the standard tools for workflow automation, campaigns, messaging, and real-time alerts, Jessica focuses on the software’s bottom-line ROI— how it helps marketers perfect their data-driven method to collect and process customer data, measure the KPIs, and, ultimately, realize profits.