Learn & Understand

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action: The Marketing Funnel

The email click rate calculator distinguishes two ways of measuring clicks, and this distinction reflects a foundational concept in marketing: the funnel. Customers move through a series of stages on the way from first noticing a message to finally taking action, and each stage is narrower than the last, like a funnel. Understanding the funnel, and how different metrics measure different stages of it, explains why there is more than one kind of click rate and what each one really tells you.

A Journey in Stages

Marketing has long understood that people do not leap instantly from awareness to action. Instead they pass through stages: first their attention is caught, then their interest is engaged, then desire is built, and only then do they act. Each stage carries fewer people than the one before, because some drop away at every step. This narrowing sequence is the funnel, a model of how a broad audience is progressively filtered down to the smaller number who ultimately convert. It has guided marketing thinking for over a century.

Every Metric Measures a Stage

The funnel explains why marketing uses so many different metrics: each measures a different stage of the journey. In email, the message is delivered to a broad audience, a subset opens it, a smaller subset clicks, and a smaller subset still takes final action. Delivery, opens, clicks, and conversions are successive, narrowing stages of the funnel. Measuring each stage separately reveals where the audience is being lost, which is far more informative than a single overall number that blurs the stages together.

Two Clicks, Two Stages

This is exactly why there are two click rates. One measures clicks against everyone the email was delivered to, blending the effects of the subject line, which drives opens, and the content, which drives clicks. The other measures clicks only among those who already opened, isolating the content's performance from the subject line's. The two answer different questions about different funnel stages, and confusing them means comparing metrics that are not measuring the same behaviour. Each has its proper use depending on which stage you want to understand.

Diagnosing Where the Funnel Leaks

The real power of measuring separate stages is diagnosis. A low overall click rate paired with a healthy click-to-open rate points to a subject-line problem, since people who open do click but too few open. A low click-to-open rate points instead to a content or call-to-action problem, since people open but then fail to click. By comparing the metrics across funnel stages, a marketer can pinpoint exactly where the audience is dropping away. The calculator computes both click rates, giving the tools to trace the funnel and find precisely where a campaign is losing its audience.

Get the opens figure from the Email Open Rate Calculator; to see whether clicks became revenue, the Email ROI Calculator.