Optimizing Internal Emails for Engagement: The Role of Benchmarking

Why benchmarking matters in business

Benchmarking plays a crucial role in business, whether it involves internal assessments or comparisons with industry standards. By evaluating metrics such as sales and employee retention rates, companies can determine their strengths and weaknesses in relation to both their own past performance and that of their competitors. One organization’s metrics may appear strong internally yet underperform when compared against industry peers

A company that communicates with employees efficiently and effectively, and doesn’t overload them with irrelevant messaging, is far more likely to have higher employee productivity and lower turnover than one that doesn’t. It’s also better prepared to handle change management activities, embrace industry innovations, and deal with difficult industry challenges when they arise, because the channels are open, and employees are engaged and listening. All of this, of course, helps drive financial performance.

Despite the importance of benchmarking, measuring internal communication effectiveness has historically been far more difficult than measuring sales or marketing performance.

Why internal communication analytics are harder to measure

The ROI of sales and marketing analytics is fairly straight-forward, starting by simply calculating revenue – costs. Marketing and sales teams can likely tell you how many leads they produce per month. They tend to have tools that measure performance, such as 4.5% of new opportunities that came from content posted to a particular social media channel, for example.

Can the same be said for internal communications? (this is just bold, no Header)

Like marketing and sales teams, internal communicators create and distribute content designed to educate, engage, and motivate action across employee audiences. However, measuring the impact of those communications is often far more difficult because internal communication ROI is not always directly tied to revenue. Worse, companies might attempt to force-fit existing external tools for these internal use-cases, turning what was authentic internal email into externally flagged messaging on a level similar to spam — which is unfortunate at best and detrimental at worst.

How benchmarking improves internal communication strategy

Accurately sourced benchmark data provides valuable reference points for your company’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Collecting your own data, and comparing it against relevant internal communication benchmarks helps identify the KPIs, channels, cadence, and messaging strategies that matter most to your organization.

Benchmarking also helps organizations measure internal communication effectiveness more objectively by providing context for engagement trends, communication performance metrics, and employee behavior over time. Reliable benchmark data is essential for understanding whether communication strategies are actually improving employee engagement and communication effectiveness over time.

Instead of evaluating employee communication metrics in isolation, benchmarking provides the context needed to understand whether internal communication strategies are truly improving engagement, visibility, and message effectiveness over time.

How to compare your company’s internal communication with industry standards

Internal communicators looking for a benchmark resource should look no further than our 2026 Internal Email Communications Benchmark Report, which examines more than 2 billion emails sent to nearly 11 million employees around the globe. The annual study arranges the findings by S&P industry sector and distribution size — from fewer than 1,000 people to 50,000 or more — so that professional communicators of all sorts can compare and contrast their results with benchmark data relevant to their particular company.

Key findings from the 2026 Internal Communications Benchmark Report

• Employees receive an average of 13 corporate email broadcasts per month
• Employees spend approximately 30:44 minutes reading internal email content monthly
• Employees encounter roughly 112 links per month
• The average corporate email open rate is 66%
• Top-performing organizations average an 82% open rate

As companies evaluate their communication analytics and make improvements, messages get shorter, more frequent, and have less linked content per message – which reduces information overload and leads to higher engagement rates.

Best practices for improving internal email engagement

Maintain clean distribution lists

One of the key best practices is having clean, accurate distribution groups. Too often, corporate distribution lists contain a large number of former employee email addresses, yet neglect to include the newest employees. This creates a denominator problem whereby the exaggerated list size reduces the open rate.

Don’t rely solely on open rates

Focusing on the right combination of metrics is also crucial. Communicators and the people they broadcast for tend to get fixated on the email open rate, despite the fact that recipients often immediately delete or skip past email messages they open. And open rates can be deceptive for other reasons, as today many email security tools automatically open messages and links to scan them, generating superfluous data. Updated versions of Outlook open emails multiple times to increase download performance.

Focus on attention, readership, and engagement

For these reasons, PoliteMail’s internal email analytics go beyond counting opens and clicks, with a focus on attention, readership and engagement. More than just monitoring whether an email was opened or not, an attention rate reveals if employees are actually absorbing what they’re seeing.

Readership measures how long an employee spends viewing a message and whether the length of time is enough to read all the content, giving internal communicators valuable insights on length and subject matter. These deeper internal communication metrics provide a more accurate picture of how employees interact with content and help organizations better measure internal communication effectiveness.

Why specialized internal communication tools matter

Unlike marketing and sales software, PoliteMail’s internal email measurement tool is integrated directly with Microsoft 365 and Outlook, allowing communicators to continue sending email through the platforms they already use every day while measuring a variety of internal communication KPIs and engagement metrics.

Beyond standard analytics, PoliteMail’s Compare to Benchmark feature allows users to instantly compare their internal email performance against benchmark data from the annual Internal Email Communications Benchmark Report directly within the platform. Instead of relying on isolated metrics alone, communicators can immediately see how their open rates, readership, attention, and engagement metrics compare against organizations of similar size and industry.

This built-in benchmarking capability helps internal communicators identify opportunities for improvement faster, optimize communication strategies with greater confidence, and make more evidence-based decisions across campaigns.

Armed with actionable analytics and industry benchmarks, organizations can build stronger communication plans, improve employee engagement, and better measure internal communication effectiveness.

Turning benchmark data into better communication

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Effective internal communication strategies are built on objective, reliable, and actionable data. Benchmarking provides organizations with the context needed to evaluate communication performance, improve employee engagement, reduce information overload, and make smarter decisions long term. With the right analytics and benchmarking tools, internal communication becomes a measurable strategic advantage rather than a guessing game.