Q: If I can get more people to open an email, will more of them click as well?

Click rate is an interesting stat. Independent of open rate, it measures how many people who saw your content actually ended up clicking somewhere in it. But when you pull open rate back into the picture, how do the two correlate? As more people open do more people click? Or does email copy perform with no relation to open rates at all? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
For this analysis, we pulled email stats from over 30 resorts for the last 3 seasons, only including emails that were sent to at least 10,000 recipients. Grouped by open rate, we took average click rates along the way to see what happens to click rates as open rates increase.

The graph below shows open rate on the horizontal axis and corresponding click rate on the vertical.

Right off the bat, it’s easy to see the trend that higher open rates lead to higher click rates. But there is also a peak as open rates reach the 25-30% range. At this point, the click rate slowly starts to decline again and higher open rates may not lead to higher click rates.

What This Means
Higher open rates are a good thing alone, but knowing that they actually lead to a higher percentage of clicks as well gives extra reason to optimize your subject lines and get as many people to click and open.

The better your subject line performs, the better the actual email performs. It’s as simple as that.

Tip of the Iceberg
We’ll release another simple insight next week just like this one. Don’t want to miss out? Stick your name and email below and it will be waiting in your inbox on Tuesday morning.