Think of your year-end communications benchmarks like a holiday baking competition. You want to create the most delicious holiday dessert every employee wants a bite of.
To kick off your benchmarking project, assess the holiday treats (internal communications) your communications team served your employee audiences last year. Did they achieve above-average attention rates by serving irresistibly soft and warm chocolate chip cookies (interesting and concise internal news and announcements)? Or did their success lie in serving a quirky fruitcake full of spicy surprises (newsletters with engaging photos and videos featuring employees)?
Most importantly, did employees enjoy what you served them last year, on average? Did they smile with each bite? Did they make sour faces? Or worse, did they ignore the entire tray of goodies (email messages), even though you baked them with love?
Benchmarking is like lining up all the holiday desserts and seeing how yours compare, then calculating an average score for good, better, and under-performing. You might produce an overall average, as well as averages for each category: cakes, cookies, and pies (newsletters, leadership messages, announcements), or by audience group.
Then, you might wonder how your benchmarks compare to corporate averages for your industry sector. PoliteMail’s Internal Email Communications Benchmarks 2023 Report — email intelligence based on over 3 billion internal emails — can help you compare. For example, the Benchmark Report finds that the average corporate email open rate is 68%. Does your performance measure up? Other significant rates to benchmark include metrics like email reach, readership, and engagement.
What’s the value of benchmarking?
The primary benefits of benchmarking are (1) it enables continuous improvement, (2) it quickly identifies what is working and what isn’t, and (3) it helps to optimize your communications and reduce communications overload.
When you create a communications plan, you want to maximize your impact and minimize overload by efficiently using your time and resources. If your employees crave chocolate chip cookies (concise internal news), yet you keep serving stale panettone bread (overly long and dry emails), you can expose the underperformance compared to a good benchmark. This practice can help refine your communications strategy and plans by helping you identify what your employees want (and don’t want) and adjust your approach.
When you can course-correct your messaging campaigns and produce above-average results over time, you’ll know you are serving crowd-pleasing treats.
How to benchmark your internal communications
1. Identify your comms KPIs. The first step in benchmarking your comms is identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to your organization. When analyzing corporate email communications, the PoliteMail Benchmark Report emphasizes the following email KPIs: reach, readership, engagement, and clicks.
- Email reach measures the percentage of your audience that has received and opened your message and paid a minimum threshold of attention, meaning they didn’t immediately delete or skip.
- Email readership measures how much time recipients spend viewing your message, categorized into groups by minimum thresholds.
- Email engagement measures interaction with your email, combining the percent of the content read with click activity (if the message includes links).
- Email clicks are the sum of recipients’ unique link clicks within the email message. Click rate is the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link within the message (regardless of how many links were in the message).
When identifying KPIs to benchmark, other metrics may include average response time to employee queries or feedback, intranet usage (e.g., page views, unique visitors), platform usage (e.g., how many employees use your internal recognition platform), employee participation in training programs, and interactions on social media.
2. Research industry benchmarks. Next, you’ll want to explore industry reports and studies to understand the performance of your peers. Look for benchmark reports specific to your sector or industry, company size, and the communication channels you use. PoliteMail’s Benchmark Report examines metrics for 10 S&P industry sectors: technology, healthcare, financials, consumer, industrials, communications, materials, energy, utilities, and education/non-profit. Since a successful communication approach in one industry won’t always work in another, benchmarking against your specific sector helps provide a more accurate understanding of what may succeed.
3. Compare your performance. Equipped with data regarding your performance, along with industry benchmarks, you can assess the effectiveness of your communications to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Pinpointing your weaknesses can be helpful because you can modify your strategy by implementing proven best practices, like the data-informed recommendations outlined in PoliteMail’s Internal Email Broadcast Best Practices Guide. For instance, maybe you need to send more organizational emails from different leaders in your organization. Benchmarks show that while most companies send corporate email communications from shared mailboxes like “communications@,” employees tend to give 7% more attention to emails sent from individual names (typically executives or leaders) who are not the primary communicators.
When it comes to holiday desserts, there are many options to choose from, just like corporate communications! Benchmarking helps narrow your focus by informing you exactly which strategies employees find most appetizing. Now, for 2024, your company is well-positioned to create the most delicious internal communications that employees will eagerly anticipate.
