How to Calculate Email Click Rate and Compare It With Bookings

To calculate an email’s click rate, divide the number of recipients who clicked a tracked link by the number of delivered emails, then multiply by 100. If 48 people click in an email delivered to 1,200 people, the click rate is 4%. Whether that email did its job depends on what you asked readers to do.

Which email filled more pottery classes?

Imagine a pottery studio sends two newsletters a week apart. Each has one tracked link to the same booking page. The first email shows what students make in the class. The second lists available dates and the price. For each send, the studio counts confirmed bookings from that email’s tagged link within seven days. The figures below are fictional.

The class preview attracted 48 people to the booking page. Some clicked more than once, bringing the total to 66 clicks. Dividing 66 by 1,200 would give 5.5%, but it would count repeat visits by the same reader. The second email’s click rate is 30 ÷ 1,200 × 100 = 2.5%.

How many bookings did each email bring in per 1,000 deliveries?

Divide confirmed bookings from the email by delivered emails, then multiply by 1,000. For the class preview, 3 ÷ 1,200 × 1,000 gives 2.50 bookings per 1,000 deliveries. For the available-dates email, 7 ÷ 1,200 × 1,000 gives 5.83. The second email reached the same number of inboxes and produced four more bookings, even though fewer readers clicked.

To examine what happened after the click, change the denominator. Three bookings from 48 clicking recipients works out to 6.25 bookings per 100 clickers. Seven from 30 gives 23.33. Count each confirmed booking ID once. A reader who books two classes can contribute two bookings, so this figure answers a different question from “What percentage of readers booked?”

Download the free email clicks and bookings calculator (Excel). Replace the four counts for each send with figures from your email and booking reports. In this example, each email has one tracked booking link. If you use several links, enter only the clicks on the booking link for this comparison.

What would you change for the next send?

If the goal was to fill seats, the available-dates email brought in four more bookings. The class preview still tells the studio something useful: people were interested enough to click. Did they have to search for the date or price once they arrived? Open the first email on a phone and follow its link as a customer would.

For the next class preview, keep the photo and put the date and price next to the booking link. Record clicks and bookings over the same seven-day window. These first two sends went out on different dates, so the figures alone can’t tell the studio which part of the message made the difference.

A row to copy into your campaign report

Email and send date ___
Action the reader was invited to take ___
Delivered ___   Recipients who clicked ___   Click rate ___
Completed action and measurement window ___
One thing to check before the next send ___

Look for the equivalent of “recipients who clicked” in your email platform. Mailchimp’s metric definitions distinguish the number of recipients who clicked from the total number of clicks. If your email also contains links to other pages, use the booking link’s own report when investigating visits to that page.

For more practice with a set of campaign figures, the After the Send Bundle includes an email measurement workbook and a separate guide to the metrics.

If you are deciding what belongs in a recurring report, What the Number Measures includes a dashboard guide and a business metrics workbook. To trace a specific piece of content through to a business result, Past the Pageview includes a KPI checklist and a written mini-course.