What are the benefits of benchmarking?
What’s a reasonable email open rate for a small business? What about a large corporation with offices in multiple countries? What about a young startup that only has fully remote employees? And how would anyone even know?
The answer to all these questions: benchmarking.
Using a variety of metrics, benchmarking allows companies to compare their performance with the performance of their rivals. It sets a reference point to help uncover both areas of weakness and opportunities for growth. It’s also a tool for measuring progress.
Internal communicators armed with company averages and industry standards ultimately have more meaningful ways of gauging the effectiveness of their strategy and making evidence-based decisions than those who don’t.
Where can benchmarking data be gathered?
A big part of setting benchmarks, of course, is gathering benchmarks. Where does one begin?
One place to start is trade groups. Working directly with an assortment of companies competing in the same industry, these neutral organizations tend to publish a variety of reports that benefit everyone involved.
Consulting firms and market research companies are also reliable sources of information that can provide overviews of both new trends and established norms within a particular sector of the economy.
Sometimes quality data can come from service providers that have a unique insight into how businesses operate. PoliteMail’s annual Benchmark Report, for instance, examines more than 4 billion emails sent to over 15 million employees around the globe. The latest study arranges its findings by S&P industry sector and distribution size—from fewer than 1,000 people to 50,000 or more—so that internal communicators can compare and contrast their results with benchmark data relevant to their particular company.
Wherever the statistics come from, it’s important to make sure your KPIs align with what’s available. If they don’t, you’ll be comparing apples to oranges—a task that’s bound to result in endless confusion and frustration. If required, find a way to adjust your metrics to mirror the benchmarked metrics.
How to use benchmarks
Internal communicators can use benchmarks in a number of ways. Examples include, but aren’t limited to, improving employee readership rates and engagement levels by monitoring digital channels, such as email and chat apps. They can also evaluate customer satisfaction and the robustness of social media shares across multiple platforms.
Benchmark data can help communications professionals understand what strategies influence employee behavior. This might involve tweaking the headline of a message, experimenting with its cadence, or rethinking its means of distribution. Benchmarking can show which initiatives would benefit from a larger investment of time and resources, while shining a light on certain programs that should either be revamped or retired.
The crucial thing to remember is that benchmarks exist to improve your department’s performance, and, by extent, your company’s overall success. Comparing your numbers to the numbers of your biggest rival may not always be a fun exercise—especially if yours are lower—but it’s a necessary step in fixing what might be broken. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed.
If the statistics reveal you’re falling short of industry averages, it’s time to set new objectives and actively monitor the impact of the changes you implement on your way back to the top.
