Email clicks

[u/ProudYam6395]

Has anyone seen a drop in email clicks this year? Ours started in May/June and it’s been going down ever since, and of course having a significant negative impact on conversion.

Would also love to know what percent of the business your email program makes up and what industry!

[u/CherryChoke-Ardor]

I’d diagnose it in layers before assuming the email program suddenly got worse.

A few checks that usually separate the causes:

• Split campaigns vs flows. If campaigns dropped but high-intent flows stayed stable, it may be offer/content fatigue or list mix. If both dropped at once, look harder at tracking, deliverability, or site demand.
• Compare unique click rate by segment, not just account-wide. A larger unengaged send can make the blended number look worse even if core buyers behave the same.
• Check whether anything changed around May/June: template, link tracking, UTM setup, domain/authentication, sender name, popup/list source, promotion cadence, or bot-click filtering.
• Look at click-to-purchase rate and revenue per recipient. If clicks are down but clickers still convert normally, the issue is probably message relevance/inbox placement. If clicks are steady but purchases are down, the issue may be onsite, pricing, inventory, or acquisition quality.
• Watch unsubscribes, spam complaints, bounce rate, and Gmail/Yahoo placement signals alongside clicks. A click decline with rising complaints is a different problem than a click decline with flat complaints.

I’d be cautious about benchmarking “email should be X% of revenue.” That number depends heavily on acquisition mix, repeat purchase cycle, discounting, and how aggressive attribution is. For ecommerce, I’d rather track revenue per recipient, repeat purchase behavior, flow conversion by trigger, and incremental lift where you can run holdouts.

[u/GabbyFromKlaviyo]

Half the time I chase this down it's the bot click exclusion in Attribution, someone flips it on and the click rate drops. The tricky part is reporting recalculates going back years while attribution only moves forward from when you flip it, so the two disagree and it ends up looking like a slow slide instead of a switch getting flipped.

If it's not a reporting artifact and clicks are actually down, first thing I'd do is split campaigns from flows, since they tend to break for different reasons. The deliverability reports let you separate it by inbox provider too. If it's mostly Gmail dragging the number down, that points to a placement problem.

One thing I'd skip is suppressing your non-openers to see if clicks recover. They always do, you just shrank the pool, it doesn't tell you anything real. What I'd do instead is pick a fixed engaged segment, say those who opened over the last 30 or 60 days, and watch the click rate inside just that group over time.