India clicks 31.8% of opened emails, the US 9.5%: why CTOR travels badly
GetResponse's country table and Mailchimp's industry averages, read for which email rate an Indian sender should report now that Apple counts machine opens. As of September 2026.
An Indian subscriber who opens a marketing email clicks something in it 31.81% of the time: the highest click-to-open rate in GetResponse’s country table and more than three times the American 9.51%. India’s open rate, 25.84%, is the lowest of the five countries charted below.1 That gap is mostly arithmetic, not enthusiasm, and it is why the 2023 version of this piece was too confident when it called a 10% click-to-open rate good.
The decision is which number to put in front of a manager. Click-through rate (CTR) is clicks divided by emails delivered. Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is clicks divided by emails opened. They differ only in the denominator, and since 2021 one of the two denominators is no longer measured honestly.
01Apple broke the denominator in 2021
Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection on 7 June 2021: it stops senders using invisible pixels to learn about the reader, including when a message was opened.3 In practice the mail app fetches the pixel itself, so the email tool records an open that no person made. Opens rise, clicks do not, and CTOR falls without a single reader changing behaviour. GetResponse says Apple’s auto-opens “distort the data” and leans on click metrics instead; Mailchimp warns that its open rates “may be impacted”.1 2
India has the lowest open rate of the five and the highest click-to-open rate
Open rate against click-to-open rate by recipient country, %, GetResponse senders, calendar 2023
Table view
| Open rate | Click-to-open rate | |
|---|---|---|
| India | 25.8 | 31.8 |
| Canada | 42.1 | 20.6 |
| United States | 45.6 | 9.51 |
| United Kingdom | 40 | 6.86 |
| Germany | 40.4 | 5.88 |
Source: GetResponse, Email Marketing Benchmarks (2024 edition) · as of 30 September 2026 · CTOR = CTR ÷ open rate; the pattern across five countries is not causal, and a difference in device mix is our reading
02Report CTR; keep CTOR for like-for-like tests
Our view: make CTR the headline number, because its denominator is the one you control and no mail client can inflate it. Use CTOR only where machine opens fall equally on both sides of the comparison: two versions of one email sent the same day to a split list, or the same audience month on month. Never compare CTOR across countries, industries or tools. India’s lead over the UK is as likely to reflect how many recipients read on Apple Mail as anything in the email, and the table cannot tell the two apart.
Buying in India. Measuring either rate costs nothing beyond the email tool itself; our segmentation note prices those tools from US$4.50 a month on Zoho Campaigns to US$20 on Mailchimp and HubSpot at the entry contact tier.5 Zoho Campaigns bills in rupees with a GST invoice; USD-billed tools bought direct leave an Indian company to self-assess 18% IGST under reverse charge. TechBag sells the Zoho suite.4 The regulation that bites is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: an open pixel and a tracked link record what a named person did, so tracking belongs in your notice and consent. The DPDP Rules were notified on 13 November 2025, with the consent and security duties applying from 13 May 2027.6
Sources
- GetResponse, Email Marketing Benchmarks (country table: open rate, CTR, CTOR; over 4.4 billion messages) — 2024 edition, 2023 data
- Mailchimp, Email Marketing Benchmarks by industry (all users 35.63% open, 2.62% click) — data last updated December 2023
- Apple Newsroom, Apple advances its privacy leadership with iOS 15 (Mail Privacy Protection) — 7 June 2021
- TechBag, Pipedrive Campaigns intel page (USD billing, no GST invoice, 18% IGST reverse charge; Zoho Campaigns bills in INR) — version of 30 September 2026
- TechBag Blog, Segmented emails got 2× the clicks (entry-tier segmentation prices) — 3 June 2025
- MeitY, Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and DPDP Rules, 2025 — 13 November 2025
Related on TechBag: the segmentation note for what each email tool charges, and the HubSpot Marketing Hub page for the contact-tier arithmetic.
Disclosure. TechBag is a software reseller: it earns a margin when a reader buys through it, including from vendors named here. The analysis is TechBag’s own; no vendor paid for or saw this piece before publication. Facts are labelled reported, TechBag count or our view.
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