Click Rate
Email MarketingAlso: Email Click Rate · Click Through Rate
Quick definition
Click rate is the percentage of delivered emails that received at least one click on any link. Calculated as total clicks divided by total emails delivered, expressed as a percentage. It is not the same as click-to-open rate, which divides clicks by opens instead of by total sends.
Compare against your own historical baseline first. Industry benchmarks use different definitions of delivered and clicks. Your trend matters more than the average.
How it varies across Australia
Click rates vary sharply by list quality, send frequency and offer type. Transactional emails and tightly segmented promotional sends sit well above broad newsletter blasts. Across the Australian market, click rates on batch-and-blast campaigns sit well below what targeted automation sequences produce.
See email performance patterns across Australian industries →What it actually means
Click rate answers a simple question: of every person who received this email, how many cared enough to click something?
It sits one step below open rate in the engagement funnel and one step above conversion. It is the metric most likely to tell you whether your email is doing its job, because opens can be inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and other pre-fetch behaviour. A click is a deliberate human action.
The catch is that click rate conflates two very different problems. A low click rate might mean your subject line failed to attract openers who would have clicked. It might mean your openers read the email and found nothing worth clicking. It might mean your list has decayed and large portions of it are disengaged. Each problem has a different fix. Treating them all as 'the email underperformed' is how email programs stagnate.
Click-to-open rate isolates the second problem. It answers: of the people who actually opened, how many clicked? That number strips out list health noise and measures the email content itself.
Click rate is a list health signal as much as it is a content signal. A falling rate usually means the wrong people are still on the list.
How to calculate it
Click Rate = Total clicks ÷ Total emails delivered × 100
Worked example. You send a campaign to 8,500 subscribers. After bounces, 8,200 are delivered. 246 clicks are recorded. Click Rate = 246 ÷ 8,200 × 100 = 3.0%.
The Australian context
Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which prefetches email content and inflates open rates, has made click rate more important as a primary engagement signal for Australian marketers. Australian subscribers also tend toward longer consideration cycles in B2B categories, which means click rates on first-touch nurture emails sit lower than equivalent US benchmarks without that necessarily being a problem.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
What is the difference between click rate and click-to-open rate?
Click rate divides clicks by total emails delivered. Click-to-open rate divides clicks by total opens. Click rate reflects list-wide engagement. Click-to-open rate isolates how well the email content performs for people who actually opened it. Use both to separate list health problems from content problems.
Why is my click rate falling even though open rate is stable?
Open rate may be inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection prefetching. If real human opens are flat or falling, click rate follows. Alternatively, the content or offer has weakened relative to subscriber expectations. Segment by engagement tier to see which group is responsible.
Should I use unique clicks or total clicks?
Report on unique clicks for engagement benchmarking. Total clicks is useful when you care about total traffic driven or when testing placement of multiple links in one email. Label clearly which you are reporting so comparisons hold across campaigns.
How do I improve my email click rate?
Start with list hygiene: suppress subscribers who have not engaged in 90 days. Then test a single, clear call to action rather than multiple links competing for attention. Finally check that the offer in the email matches what the subscriber signed up expecting. Relevance moves click rate faster than design.
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About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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