Your weekly newsletters are being sent. And your open rates aren’t bad either. However, are you tracking the right metrics to measure the performance of your campaigns?

Email marketing has evolved since 2021. With Apple’s introduction of its Mail Privacy Protection, open rates no longer provide an accurate representation of your campaign performance. Are you still evaluating your campaigns based solely on open rates? If so, then there may be a bigger picture that you’re missing.

In this post, we will go through the metrics that truly matter for measuring email marketing performance. We will also discuss what represents good performance and how you can use those metrics to measure your Return On Investment (ROI).

Click Through Rate (CTR) vs. Click To Open Rate (CTOR)

While click-through rate (CTR) and click-to-open rate (CTOR) seem similar, they represent entirely different aspects of your campaign performance.

Click Through Rate (CTR): A metric that represents the number of clicks divided by the total number of emails sent. If you sent 1000 emails and received 20 clicks, then your CTR is 2%.

Click To Open Rate (CTOR): A metric that represents the number of clicks divided by the total number of opens. If 400 people opened the same email that resulted in 20 clicks, then your CTOR would be 5%. In essence, CTOR provides insight into the effectiveness of your content.

Why Do These Metrics Matter?

It is possible that your CTR may be very low and your CTOR may be very high. This is an indication that your content was effective, but the subject line for that email may require improvement. Conversely, if your CTR is very high and your CTOR is very low, this suggests that you were able to capture their attention via your subject line; however, you failed to convert them to take action.

Average Industry CTR & CTOR Rates:

For most industries, the average CTR ranges between 2% – 2.6%. While the average CTOR ranges between 6.8% – 10.5%. However, the average CTR and CTOR rates can vary greatly depending on the type of business or industry. For example, legal firms tend to average CTRs ranging from 3% – 5%, while restaurant-related businesses tend to average CTRs ranging from 0.5% – 1%.

Average Industry Open Rate:

Now, here’s the interesting thing regarding average industry open rates in 2026. According to available data, average open rates across all industries have been reported at approximately 43.46%. There is an issue with this data point. With Apple’s recent implementation of privacy protection features for emails, many emails are being automatically marked as “opened” regardless of whether the recipient has viewed the email or not.

Therefore, while the average open rate may appear to be 43.46%, the true open rate is likely much lower. Many emails may be listed as “opens,” but are actually just being stored in an individual’s inbox unopened.

Open Rate Variations By Industry:

While some industries, such as non-profit organizations and religious organizations, report average open rates of greater than 50%, e-commerce and travel-related businesses typically report average open rates between 30% and 40%. However, the average open rate range can vary widely depending on the industry. Average open rates can range anywhere from 30% to 56%.

Instead of focusing solely on open rates, smart marketers are now focusing on CTR and CTOR. Both of these metrics demonstrate engagement with the content and are less affected by the behavior of the email client.

What are ways to determine an ROI for an Email Campaign?

You can calculate your Email ROI by using this simple formula:
(Revenue – Costs) / Costs

But as easy as it sounds, there are many different elements in determining what exactly your “costs” will be and how to assign a dollar value to your conversion rates.

First of all, you need to establish a method for tracking conversions based on each email campaign you send out. Next, assign a dollar amount to each type of action you want to track such as when someone makes a purchase, books a room, signs-up for something etc… Finally, you have to subtract your email marketing costs (the cost of sending out the emails via your email service provider, the time you spent designing and building the email, the cost of maintaining your contact lists).

Generic email blasts that don’t take into account behavior usually perform much worse than emails that take into account a person’s behavior. For example, automated welcome email series, reminder emails for people who have abandoned their shopping carts, and emails sent to inactive subscribers can produce as much as 30 times more revenue than one-time promotional emails.

Ultimately, the most important thing is to connect the actions you’re getting from your email to the actual revenue those actions are producing. You can use UTM parameters to track which specific email produces the most web traffic to your site and set up conversion tracking to determine which specific campaigns produce the most sales. Additionally, you should also look at the customer lifetime value of each customer and not just immediately after they make a purchase.

Adaptive Media has been helping greater Boston businesses create effective email marketing campaigns for years. We focus on the numbers that really matter to our clients so they get the best possible results from their email marketing efforts. If you’d like to improve your email marketing performance, call us today at (781) 473-3377.