Think your employees are reading all your emails? Think again.
On average, employees received 16 corporate emails per month last year. The combined messages contained 170 links and took around 52 minutes to read.
Many recipients, however, didn’t consume all the content. Indeed, the overall internal email open rate finished at 64%, meaning just over one in three employees didn’t even click on the message.
Figures like these come from PoliteMail’s 2025 Internal Email Benchmark Report, which examined 4.8 billion internal emails sent to more than 12 million employees around the globe. Since email remains the primary channel internal communicators use to keep employees both engaged and informed, it’s a valuable resource for measuring the industry’s performance.
And since the report looks at 10 S&P industry sectors across seven distribution sizes ranging from under 1,000 recipients to more than 100,000, there’s relevant benchmark data for every comms professional regardless of their situation.
As the research highlights, email volumes spiked during the pandemic, sending internal communication metrics spinning in different directions. Now that workers are returning to the office and companies are adjusting to the new normal, internal comms teams are putting lessons learned from years of disruption and instability into practice.
“There’s been some general improvements in how people execute their corporate communications,” said Michael DesRochers, managing director of PoliteMail.
Below are three key insights from PoliteMail’s 2025 Internal Email Benchmark Report for building a better internal comms strategy.
Insight No.1: Know when less is more
In an attempt to avoid burdening employees with information overload, many internal communicators will scale back the number of emails they send to colleagues. Rather than, say, a weekly message with news of recent hires and policy updates, they’ll save all this information for one email on the last day of each month.
While the effort is well-intentioned, it’s also misguided.
Benchmark data shows the best approach is to send more messages with fewer details, as opposed to fewer messages with more details.
As DesRochers put it: “Email overload isn’t the number of messages; it’s the amount of content in the messages.”
Ultimately, internal communicators can increase the volume of emails they send without hurting their performance, as long as the messages are short. The ideal length for corporate communications is 500 words or less.
For those who struggle with brevity, this is a perfect opportunity to embrace artificial intelligence tools, such as Microsoft’s Copilot, which can summarize large blocks of text and offer the information in succinct bullet points.
All that said, sometimes long emails are necessary. That’s okay. Research indicates internal communicators should just keep them to a minimum. Otherwise, they won’t get read.
Insight No.2: Open rates are just the beginning
Plenty of internal comms professionals use open rates to measure the success or failure of their various projects. Whether it’s an ongoing newsletter or one-time message reminding staff about an upcoming Summer Friday, they want to know how many colleagues are clicking on it.
As PoliteMail’s 2025 Internal Email Benchmark Report makes clear, however, open rates are just the tip of the iceberg.
“An open rate is the base rate — you’ve got to measure it to measure anything else,” said DesRochers. “But it’s the least actionable measurement.”
The metric is limited because it doesn’t account for employees who open a message, then either delete it or move on to the next email a second later.
It’s also not always accurate. Some email security features, for example, will automatically “open” a message before the intended recipient even notices it. If a company’s email distribution list contains errors or the accounts of former employees, that will also throw the gauge off.
“The fastest way to improve your open rates is to clean up your distribution group,” DesRochers noted.
Rather than stick with just email open rates, PoliteMail’s annual report focuses on several internal communication benchmarks that reveal whether a strategy is working or not. This includes metrics such as email reach, readership and engagement, which measure if employees are paying attention to messages, how long they’re viewing them, and whether or not they’re clicking on any embedded links
One example of why this matters: While internal communicators working in the financial sector have a higher open rate than their counterparts in the energy sector (73.9% vs. 70.9%), more employees in finance are skimming the message than those in the energy field (17.2% vs. 15.5%).
Insight No.3: Limit options
Sometimes the best way to get colleagues to do something — whether that’s watching an online training video or filling out a workplace survey — involves limiting their choices.
This is especially the case when it comes to including links in emails. Too many, it turns out, can lead to indecision and fatigue among readers — much like how it’s easier to choose between two boxes of cereal than pick one among dozens of varieties displayed on a grocery store shelf. It might also suggest a lack of urgency or importance.
“You would think, ‘If I give people lots of stuff to click on, I should get more clicks,’ but the opposite is true,” said DesRochers. “You get the most clicks from having one or two links in an email.”
Click-through rates, after all, are a strong sign of engagement. If a call to action receives a robust number of clicks despite appearing near the bottom of an email, that means employees are scrolling through the entire message. Data in the Benchmark report reveals that the average click-through rate for internal communicators is 6.8%.
Know where you stand
Since the benefit of benchmarking is knowing where you stand compared to others like you, PoliteMail’s 2025 Internal Email Benchmark Report organizes the data by both industry sector and company size.
That means whether you work in the consumer, healthcare, or utilities field at an organization with a distribution list of under 1,000, between 10,000 and 20,000, or more than 100,000 employees, there’s relevant information for you. Download it here.
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