Email benchmarks and tips, thesaurus rex

Insider Comms for internal comms

Jun 24, 2022

👋 Hello and welcome to all the new subscribers who joined after my appearance with @helendeverell in a webinar this week sponsored by Staffbase and Ragan. Replay coming soon!

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Apples to Apples

Two recent publications allow you to compare your internal email open rates across several industries. Both Poppulo and PoliteMail dropped reports you should reference throughout the year as you fine-tune your internal campaigns.

Poppulo: Internal Communication Email Benchmarks
PoliteMail: Internal Email Communication Benchmarks

Both reports are worth your time, so I won’t steal their thunder. But here are a couple of stats to get you excited:

According to Poppulo, the average open rate for all emails is 56.2% and the average click-through rate is 5.6%. The numbers are similar for newsletters.
According to PoliteMail, comms teams send 71 emails per month on average, with just 15% of employees reading the content on mobile devices.

The companies use different datasets, so they come to different conclusions. Choose your benchmarks wisely.

⚠️ Remember: The absolute best benchmark against which to measure your success is your own open and engagement rates. No two companies, cultures, and employee populations are alike.

While it’s nice to best industry averages, you should concentrate on improving over previous years. Look inside first before comparing outside.

More Email Insights

5 Ways to Ensure Your Employee Communication Emails Aren’t Ignored (Poppulo)

21 Employee Newsletter Examples, Ideas, and How-To (Jordie van Rijn)

h/t to Kyla Sims for that one

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where it happens i wanna go GIF by Official London Theatre

For all the kudos internal comms has received during the (ongoing) pandemic—you know, about helping the company/employees keep working, stay motivated, informed, etc.—I have yet to hear about any head of internal comms being elevated to a C-suite position.

I conducted an informal poll on social media and asked: to whom does the head of internal comms report:

42% - Chief Communications Officer
23% - Chief Marketing Officer
23% - Chief Human Resources Officer
12% - Chief Executive Officer

Look at your company masthead and ask yourself, what would happen if any of the “chiefs” were removed from the CEO’s roundtable. Could your org succeed without one or two of them at the tippy top?

Then imagine what could be achieved if a Chief Employee Communications Officer (CECO) sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the C-suite.

In addition to being at a remove from “the table,” in my conversations with peers at various companies in a variety of industries, I’m not hearing much about increased budgets, meaningful investments in tech resources, or increased headcounts for internal comms.

“Do more with less” continues to be the name of the game for internal comms, thank you very much.

Leadership may now have a newfound understanding and appreciation for internal comms, but as we settle into a new normal (or revert to old ways) the hoped-for seat at the table looks more like a seat in the back of the room (if that!).

Why?

I suggest three reasons why the Chief Internal Comms Officer is a rare bird.

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