PoliteMail is a great measurement-oriented internal communications email platform. They mine the 586 million emails they process every year to put out an annual benchmark report that is full of wonderful data points.
They do a deep, deep dive into their data, sliced across by 10 industry sectors. The most useful part might be their investigation of engagement by click activity and the presence of links. They have a great way of presenting results on a scale of A – F.
Here’s a preview: The poorest performers see readership rates below 44% with more than 86% skimming emails.
When you have that much internal email data, you can analyze it to get some pretty interesting numbers:
23
That’s the number of emails per month that the average employee of a large U.S. company receives. That’s a threefold increase since 2018!
44
That’s how many minutes the average employee spends reading emails—double that of 2018.
60
That’s the percentage of all your content that employees actually pay attention to. Another 21% is skimmed.
10
The percentage of internal email that is totally ignored.
9
The percent of employees that actually click on a link included in your message—down 3 percentage points from 2018.
40
The percent of employees that read at least 30% of your message.
∞
Image above from PoliteMail’s 2020 Corporate Communications Internal Email Benchmarks.
