Email Campaign, Newsletter and Banner Ad Click-Through Rates (CTR)

When planning online advertising and email promotion budgets, it's critical to calculate the likely ROI upfront whenever possible, as well as to establish campaign benchmarks. The first step is understanding the average and likely range of CTRs for various programs. The growth in online advertising, the proliferation of enewsletters, the emergence of new forms of information delivery such as RSS and the emergence of social media sites have all affected CTR, so planning based on current data is crucial.

It can be challenging to find current statistics, but based on several studies, these are typical CTR ranges for email newsletter ads, email campaigns (blasts or internally-produced enewsletters), and banner ads.

Email newsletter advertisements

• Open rates range from 28-40%, with an average of about 33%—meaning that roughly one-third of the subscriber base is likely to see your ad. The Advertising Is Good For You blog tracks these statistics from DoubleClick.


• The average CTR for industry trade newsletter ads is 7-8% of "openers," or 2-3% of all recipients. CTR can be as high as 20% of openers (7% of total recipients) for exceptionally well-performing ads.

Email marketing campaigns

• The average open rate is slightly lower than that for enewsletters from business publishers, at about 27%.


• Average CTR is 2.5%, with various sources reporting a range of 1.5% to 7%.


• The average conversion rate (percentage of clickers who buy an item or provide lead contact information) is 4-5%.


• There are several sources of reasonably good and current data on email campaigns (most of which ultimately point back to DoubleClick). Marketing Today has summarized recent results Pro Publishing Services provides a breakdown based on sending frequency; and U.K. marketing agency eMarket2 has published a highly informative white paper with statistics from both the U.S. and EMEA markets, for B2C and B2B campaigns.

Banner ads

• The average CTR for banner ads is roughly 0.25%, with a reported range of 0.17% to 0.40%, although rich media ads can produce significantly higher CTR.

These statistics give you some idea of the results you can expect from newsletter ad, email campaign and banner ad campaigns, as well as benchmarks to help measure (and hopefully improve) your results.

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