What’s the future of email?
New data from PoliteMail lights the way for post-pandemic inbox mastery.
Despite new channels and innovative ways to reach employees, email persists as an indispensable messaging tool.
At most companies, it remains the linchpin of business communication. Productivity would plummet without it. Chaos would reign.
Despite the incessant pings, nettlesome requests and potential for miscommunication, email brings order to our lives and our workdays. Or at least it should.
PoliteMail’s new report, “Corporate communications internal email benchmarks for 10 industry sectors,” provides a data-backed framework for fueling smart email strategies. It sheds light on how to succeed with this essential medium in our current milieu—and in the post-pandemic era we’re hurtling toward.
The report distills email intelligence gleaned from 1.3 billion internal emails sent to 8.5 million employees globally and answers key questions such as:
- Do you send too much corporate email?
- What’s a good corporate email open rate?
- How much, or little, do employees actually read?
- What are the most valuable email KPIs?
- Does measuring results lead to improvements?
The guide also offers corporate email communication benchmarks for 10 S&P industry sectors, including technology, health care, financial, industrial and energy.
Benchmarking your efforts
As PoliteMail notes, email still “provides the most extensive reach of any corporate communications channel,” though whether those messages are doing much good is another matter entirely. PoliteMail shares that typical corporate comms teams send “68 email broadcasts per month,” and that an average email open rate is 70%. However, it’s wise to go beyond mere “open rate” when trying to analyze your inbox strategy.
If an employee opens an email and immediately deletes it, what good does that do? It’s far better to track more meaningful metrics that shed light on how, exactly, employees interact with your content.
It’s also wise to analyze email frequency, attention rates, readership and engagement—all of which PoliteMail advises “grading,” A-F, to track your progress.
Finding success now—and beyond COVID-19
PoliteMail data reveals interesting insights into pandemic-era email. Despite a 100% increase in corporate email volume in 2020, and a nearly 5% decline in corporate comms click rates, overall email engagement is actually significantly higher than it was in 2019. So, is it click fatigue—or are employees just getting more selective?
Likely the latter, as the data shows that, “Email was a corporate success story during the pandemic.”
Can you honestly say your email has been a “success story” during the pandemic? Would your employees agree? Even if your inbox game is strong, there is always room to improve attention rates, readership, clicks and engagement. But you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Download your free report today, and start making your internal emails an asset.
Thanks –
I have been asked to find out what mailboxes other corp comms teams send their emails from. For example, to they send their Diversity messages from an alias HR mailbox, from a D&I leader …. if a mailbox, what is the naming covention, and what other emails, if any, does that same mailbox send?
If there’s not something about that in this new report, maybe it’s another report you might consider producing.
thank you,
c.
Hi Cheryl – This would be a great question to ask Polite Mail: https://politemail.com/
If you’re keen to find out what competitors and colleagues are doing with email and find out other comms benchmarks, I’d suggest joining Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council! https://commscouncil.ragan.com/