By now, you might have noticed that click rates have been slipping for quite some time. Click rates have dropped by almost 30% since the beginning of 2019, from 2.03% in Q1 2019 to 1.43% in Q4 2022. This isn’t an Omeda-specific issue, either: Since 2016, we’ve seen yearly decreases in click rates across multiple industries. 

And because an email’s click rate isn’t impacted by the number of opens it gets, MPP can’t explain this phenomenon. 

So what’s happening?  

1. People are sending more emails: Since the onset of COVID, organizations have sent way more emails. Our clients sent 39.3% more deployments in 2022 than 2020. That crowds inboxes, increases competition and could overwhelm recipients, all of which could result in less clicks.

2. Routines have become more individualized, making it harder for email marketers to optimize send days and times. At the same time, many professionals changed their routines as a result of shifting to remote work.

In 2019, your standard office worker had 20-30 minutes to check their email while on the morning train to the office — and email marketers took that into account when scheduling send times. (That’s why Tuesday at 10 am was considered the “best” time to send an email for such a long time.)  

But post March 2020, people’s routines haven’t been as tied to the standard 9-to-5 schedule: Jane might spend her former morning commute at the gym, then check email between afternoon meetings, whereas John might check his inbox at 5 am before tackling childcare duties.  

As a result, it’s harder to reach a critical mass of people at the same time as easily as before. Marketers are sending more emails than ever at a time that they can’t predict when people will actually check their messages. As they experiment with different send times and frequencies, you’d expect to see click rates go down. 

3. There’s been a mass increase in promotional emails. Also, the increase in sending volume hasn’t been even across all deployment types — and that has important implications for click rates.

In the last two years, we’ve seen the biggest spike in promotional emails, with clients sending 61% more promotional emails than they did in 2020. This one category made up 28.55% of all deployments sent through Omeda in 2022, compared to 24.55% in 2020.

That means promotional emails have gained 16% more share among all emails in the last two years.

At the same time, clients sent 34.5% more newsletters in 2022 than in 2020. While that’s a big jump on its own, the newsletter category still lost share to promotions in the last two years.

In the context of click rates, this is important, because promotional emails tend to have lower click rates than newsletters: In the last five quarters, the average click rate of promotional emails has ranged from 0.77% to 1.03%, compared to 1.96% for 2.20% for newsletters.

Combined, these three factors can have a major impact on click rates, as shown in the chart below: 

So far, we’ve attributed global email engagement declines to a lot of factors: an increase in sending volume and promotional emails, as well as the shift to remote work.  

But there’s an extra reason why email engagement may have slipped this month: The holidays.   

Fewer people are at their desks between Thanksgiving and the New Year, and when they are, they’re more likely to be heads down on year-end campaigns than reading newsletters or whitepapers.  

At the same time, companies sent more promotional emails: Our clients sent 8.2% more promotional emails in Q4 than Q3 of 2022. That crowds inboxes and can draw attention from less time-sensitive emails like newsletters.  

So we asked ourselves: Have there also been temporary drop offs between the final two quarters in previous years? Do email engagement metrics rebound in the New Year? We looked back at the last few years to learn more.   

In Q4 2021, our clients sent 5.89% more promotional emails than they did the previous quarter. Unique click rates dropped by 10.3% in Q4, only to rise by 10.6% in Q1 2022. (Note: Unique CTR also dropped by a dramatic 35% in Q4 2021, but we discounted this from our analysis given the outsized impact of MPP on click-through rates that quarter.) 

Going back to 2020, our clients sent 11.9% more promotional emails in Q4 than they did in Q3. Unique click rates dropped by 5.39% in Q4 2020, then increased by 3.6% in Q1 2021. Unique CTR also fell by 3.69% in Q4 2020, then rose by 0.83% the following quarter.  

Overall, deployments sent by Omeda clients decreased by 3.06% in Q4. However, this was not uniform across email types.   

Our clients sent much more surveys and promotional emails this quarter, as these deployment types went up 12.45% and 7.94% respectively. This was offset by noticeable decreases in event-related emails (-15.03%), newsletters (-6.43%) and other communications (-3.47%).  

Engagement in every deployment type decreased in Q4. However, we saw the biggest declines in click and click-through rates in surveys and promotions, the only deployment types that increased in sending volume in Q4.   

For surveys, clicks and click-through rates dropped by 10.29% and 13.82%, respectively. For promotions, those metrics decreased by 9.09% and 12.2%.  

Meanwhile, newsletters saw a 6.45% drop in click rates and a 5.7% drop in CTR. Events saw a 4.17% and 9.85% drop in those metrics, and misc. comms saw a 2.25% and 9.8% drop.  

The increase in bot traffic in recent months has made it more difficult to trust the accuracy of click-related metrics.   

As shown by the chart below, the share of bot clicks as part of the total first spiked in August 2021. 

The actual percentage has fluctuated in the 15 months since, but it remains a significant portion of total click traffic: In July 2022, 65% of all clicks were marked as fake and removed. (Note: All of the “bot clicks” shown in the chart below were automatically removed from Omeda’s client click counts.)  

This trend continued in Q4 2022: Between October and December 2022, an average of 61.6% of all clicks were marked as bots and removed from our client reports.  

With click rate set to become the new North Star metric for email, it’s more than important to recognize which clicks were real and which are false. This way, you can rest assured that your reports always reflect what’s actually happening within your audience.  

At Omeda, we look for the following indicators of bot activity, then automatically negate them in client reports. (PS: We also produce separate reports on click bot activity, so you can see how many clicks have been removed from your email numbers.) 

Since there’s no single source of click fraud, there’s no surefire way to stop them from accessing your emails. (And that’s OK — some bot activity comes from legitimate corporate security products and other benign sources.) But by adding layers of security to your subscription forms and website, you can make your email list more secure and accurate. We recommend following some of these best practices:  

• Add a hidden field or stealth link to your email subscription forms: Hidden fields are essentially a hidden registration field that is only visible to bots. So when you review your new email subscription reports, you can easily identify which new entries entered a value for that hidden field, identify them as bots, and remove them from your list. Implement this by using HTML to add the extra field to your form, then style it out of the regular audience’s view with CSS. Stealth links work similarly, except that offending bots will click a link within a specific email that’s not visible to human users. 
• Clean your lists regularly: Email addresses signed up during a bot attack will not open or click your message. This lowers the percentage of engaged users in your subscriber list, which can hurt your deliverability long term. So if a recipient hasn’t engaged with your emails in the past six months, add them to a re-engagement campaign and remove them from your list if they don’t respond. (Good hygiene is the key to any healthy list.)  
• Know your audience: If you own a local news site, it’d be unusual to have a sudden influx of email subscribers originating from foreign IP addresses. So if that occurs, chances are that they’re bots — and you can delete them from your list. To mitigate click fraud, compare new subscribers against the demographics of your known audience and watch for any irregularities. (Note: Omeda’s Audience Search function compiles demographic and behavioral data from every known IP address that has interacted with your website, email or ads into one database, allowing you to easily identify and isolate members of key demographics within your audience set.)  

We’re sending more emails than ever in search of clicks, but the inverse is taking place. So what can we take away from these findings? How can you keep generating leads, attracting advertisers and running your business when clicks aren’t getting the returns that they used to?  

Here’s our advice:  

• There’s no one magic metric anymore — and that’s OK: Open, click and click-through rates used to be incredibly predictive measures of email marketing success. But due to MPP and other external factors, it’s unlikely that any one metric will be as reliable going forward. So instead of optimizing for particular metrics, consider how email contributes to the rest of your marketing funnel. If your click rates are lower than expected, evaluate the leads that do come from those clicks. Are they marketing-qualified? Do they generate a consistent amount of revenue? Does your email content generate good word of mouth or sponsorship revenue? Click rates don’t account for these nuances, but these questions are what ultimately determine whether or not your business will succeed. Also consider: do you really need to maximize your click rate? Or does it make more sense to create a self-contained email newsletter consisting solely of news — and no CTAs?
• Diversify your advertising and marketing mix. Traditionally, advertisers have depended on clicks to optimize their ad spend. But in the face of falling click rates, over-relying on click-based advertising could hurt your long-term prospects. We recommend shifting some resources to strategies that don’t use clicks as a success metric, like website metering and pop ups, or developing new lead generation tactics. Also encourage your advertisers to consider clicks as just one measure of overall marketing success. Ask them how they measure growth and push them to respond back with their specific metrics. Compare your advertisers’ engagement to your list’s behaviors and demographics, then look for more holistic ways to measure progress that include, but aren’t limited to, clicks and opens.
• Target your communications in order to attract more engagement. The takeaway isn’t to abandon email entirely, but to make the most of each message you do send. Instead of sending yet another mass email, look to make each message more targeted. Consider creating more specific audience segments, implementing personalization in your messages, and/or adding dynamic content to your emails.  

Finally, be sure to review your previous email reports to identify the days, times, and seasons when your audience is most likely to respond. (Keep in mind that our reports are based on averages — and what resonates with the “average” audience may not work for yours!)  

And as always, we’re here to help. Check out our blog for advice on email marketing strategy and best practices or sign up for our biweekly newsletter for the latest resources from our team.  

For more information about how Omeda’s award-winning platform can help you navigate your email marketing automation strategy, reach out to your Client Success Manager or sales@omeda.com.