Why are internal email analytics important?
Without hard numbers, it’s difficult to know if an internal communications strategy is working. Indeed, in today’s data-driven workplace, effective leaders rely on metrics to guide decisions and refine strategy.
This is why internal email tracking, a system designed to measure how employees are engaging with messages, is essential for internal communicators. Are colleagues opening their emails? Are they reading the content? Are they clicking on the links? It’s impossible to say without email tracking tools in place to gather the results.
Robust email measurement software can provide a full picture of what’s happening within an organization, giving internal communicators an opportunity to both improve their campaigns and demonstrate the value of their work in a way that builds credibility with the C-suite.
How email tracking works
First, the basics: What is internal email tracking?
Internal mail tracking is the process of monitoring how employees behave when they receive internal communications sent via email. It involves collecting data on key performance indicators, such as open rates, read time, and how many recipients are clicking on embedded links. Depending on how an employee interacts with the message, the software records the response and reports it back to the sender.
The goal is not to keep tabs on particular colleagues or make everyone feel they must work harder because they’re under surveillance. The objective is to identify patterns, spot weaknesses, and uncover opportunities over time. Internal communicators, for example, can create dashboards to monitor how their latest email campaigns are performing in real time.
PoliteMail, like all email marketing software, uses standard web-page image beacon to determine opens. When measurement is turned on, PoliteMail will include a tiny transparent measurement image (sometimes called a web beacon) at the bottom of the email. Email open rates are the result of the recipient displaying the image within the email.
What internal communicators should measure
When it comes to email measurement, more is more. By collecting data from a variety of perspectives, internal communicators can better assess the effectiveness of their efforts.
That said, below are some standard metrics for internal email measurement:
1. Open rate:
This measures how many recipients are clicking on an email to open it. The figure can highlight winning subject lines and problems with outdated distribution lists.
2. Read time:
This measures how much time recipients spend looking at an email’s content. If the results feel brief relative to the message’s length, that could mean the text is dull or not relevant to certain groups of recipients
3. Click-through rate:
This measures how many recipients clicked on links embedded with the email. The figure can help gauge whether the calls to action were clear and offer feedback based on where the link was placed within the message.
While these are foundational metrics, relying on them alone limits visibility into the full spectrum of employee engagement.
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The benefits of internal email tracking
As mentioned above, internal email tracking allows professional communicators to go beyond guesswork and gut instinct. It provides solid guidance to make sure messages aren’t just sent – they’re seen, understood, and acted upon by the right employees at the right time.
Data on what’s working or not can help communicators create better list segments, design better templates, write better emails, and spot the topics employees care about. It allows room to experiment, too, as the numbers will quickly show if you’re moving in the wrong direction or discovering new territory with vast treasures.
Despite new messaging platforms popping up every few years, email remains the top channel for internal communicators. It’s familiar, scalable, and a great option for reducing information overload across the workplace. Another benefit: It’s measurable.
Because every successful business requires healthy communication among its staff, internal communicators have a key role to play in making sure employees remain informed and can pivot when necessary. Internal email tracking is necessary to pull this off.
How to choose an email tracking tool
PoliteMail is the go-to email measurement solution for internal communicators, delivering the insights needed to write better messages, boost engagement, and demonstrate ROI to leadership. While several email tracking services exist on the market, PoliteMail is superior for three reasons.
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PoliteMail is fully integrated with Microsoft’s suite of tools.
Offering seamless compatibility and making it the best email tracking for Outlook analytics, recipients will receive messages just like any other Outlook email without external warnings or security flags. There’s no need to open additional apps or add another layer of complexity. Users can simply open Outlook and get to work – no extra steps required.
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PoliteMail tracks metrics that go beyond the basics.
Not only does it count opens, but it also provides data on if an employee skimmed, read, or ignored a message. PoliteMail metrics also included engagement rates such as Reach, which captures the percentage of the intended audience that received the message, opened it, and paid the minimum amount of attention. Another is Engagement, a hybrid metric that combines the percentage of content read with the click-through rates.
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PoliteMail gives internal communicators the opportunity to benchmark their results.
The 2025 Internal Email Communications Benchmark Report, which examines over 4 billion internal emails sent to more than 12 million employees worldwide, allows internal communicators to see how their department is performing compared to the competition. Since the report organizes data by both industry sector and company size, any internal communicator can know where they stand—whether they work in the consumer, healthcare, or utilities field at an organization with a distribution list of under 1,000 employees, between 10,000 and 20,000, or more than 100,000.
In sum, PoliteMail empowers internal communicators to elevate their work through data-driven insights that foster clear, effective, and engaging communication.
Learn how our internal email software empowers communicators with data-driven insights on employee engagement.
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