When crafting an email or newsletter, organizations want to believe it will be opened and read by the vast majority of their employees. Unfortunately, as many employers quickly find out, this is not always the case. Oftentimes there are significantly fewer employees than expected reading their company’s internal communications.
For this reason, it is important that the employer tracks data, such as open rates and audience engagement, to analyze the internal communication. However, even if a company does track data, it is difficult to assess how their rates compare to competition. This article breaks down what constitutes a good open rate for internal communications.
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Daily Emails
For general, daily emails, the average open rates across all industries is around 65 percent. One key metric for employers to analyze their email clickthrough rate. This rate measures how many times employees click the materials and links within the email. Employers may be surprised to learn that this rate is only about 10 percent.
This means that despite 65 percent of employees opening the email, only about 10 percent are actually engaging with the material. In order to boost up clickthrough rates, the content must be relevant and intriguing, so that the audience willingly engages with the call to action.
Newsletters
To help drive employee engagement, companies often strive create sleek-looking company newsletters with in-depth content. This can make newsletters more complex, decreasing the open rates. However, this can be avoided by methods like making the newsletter more scannable, which will get more employees to open and read it.
Clickthrough rates for newsletters tends to be higher than normal emails, with the average being around 15 percent. Thus, the content embedded in newsletters is more valuable, making it a great opportunity to push out important information.
Event Invites
By far, one of the most successful forms of internal communication is event invites. When employees see this in their inbox, the vast majority of them will be fast to click on it. In fact, event invites have an average open rate of around 80 percent. The clickthrough rate of these invites is also quite impressive, with the average being around 30 percent.
This is an important example of why truly engaging content will naturally receive better numbers. When the internal comms team design their company communications in a way that captures the attention of their employees, they will naturally gravitate towards better engagement metrics.
Differences Among Industries
Besides the type of internal communications that are being used, the industry which the company belongs to is also a key player in determining what constitutes a good open rate. For example, some of the best open rates belong to the financial industry, pharmaceuticals, engineering, and logistics, which all have average email open rates in the mid-70 percent range.
On the other hand, some of the worst email open rates belong to the education, construction, healthcare, and government which have dismal open rates averages in the mid-50 percent range. Coupled with the fact that many employees in these industries do not have easy access to a computer or company provided email address, the challenges of engaging these workers are compounded. Organizations with these issues should utilize other methods to reach their employees, like adopting an employee mobile app that does not require email login.
Interested in boosting your metrics? Contact our team of professionals today to get assistance with improving your internal communications open rate so that you can join the elite industries in the mid-70 percent range or even higher.
