Internal email benchmark report key findings

PoliteMail’s 2026 Internal Email Benchmark Report is an annual report that examines two billion corporate, internal emails sent to nearly 11 million employees globally. The report includes metrics like email open rate, reach, volume, readership, engagement, clicks and more. It also breaks down benchmarks for 10 S&P industry sectors: technology, healthcare, consumer, financials, industrials, materials, communications, energy, education/nonprofit and utilities.

Last year, employees received an average of 14 corporate emails per month, with a total read time of 33 minutes. However, with an overall email open rate of 66%, one-third of employees aren’t even getting past the subject line. If you want to boost readership and improve employee engagement, it’s helpful to understand how your organization compares to others. Below are three key insights from PoliteMail’s Benchmarks Report to help you send emails employees will read.

Insight No.1: The real signal isn’t opens. It’s attention.

Open rates remain a foundational metric for internal communicators, but on their own, they offer limited insight. They reflect list health, delivery and whether a message was surfaced in the inbox, not whether it made an impact.

That’s where attention comes in.

When you filter out recipients who open an email but spend less than three seconds on it or immediately delete it, a clearer picture emerges. Across industries, the average open attention rate is 83.7%, meaning that most employees who open an email spend meaningful time engaging with the content.

This reframes how communicators should think about open rates. They are still a critical leading indicator, but they are not the outcome. Opens tell you your message had a chance. Attention tells you whether it resonated.

This distinction matters because open rates can be misleading. Automated security scans, outdated distribution lists and passive opens can inflate performance, giving a false sense of success. Cleaning distribution lists and improving measurement accuracy can quickly improve reported open rates, but those gains do not necessarily translate to better communication.

Across industries, the average unique open rate for internal email is 66.2%. The opportunity is not just to increase that number, but to ensure those opens convert into meaningful attention. That starts with optimizing the elements that drive opens, such as sender, subject line, timing and preview text, and continues with delivering content that holds attention once the message is opened.

Insight No.2: The value of a message is in the body of the email

For messages containing links, only 7% of recipients will click at least one link. And of employees who actually open the email, on average, 10% will click. This low click-rate benchmark means your email body needs to do the heavy lifting. You can’t rely on recipients to click for additional information.

Additionally, year-over-year data show that corporate communicators are sending fewer links overall. While the click rate — the number of recipients who click on a link — remains steady, hovering around 7%, the number of “links sent” by corporate communicators is down 47% since 2024 and down 72% since 2023.

This shift to sending significantly fewer links likely reflects a deliberate response to employee information overload. Because link-heavy messages typically underperform, reducing link volume suggests communicators are prioritizing clarity and engagement over content volume.

If you want your employees to perform a specific call-to-action, a best practice is to put a link or a button at the top of the email, so it appears in the preview pane. This high visibility will increase the likelihood of your link being clicked and acted upon.

Insight No.3: Employees engage with short, skimmable emails

Since information overload is a common issue for employees, PoliteMail’s Benchmark Data shows that the best approach is to send more messages with fewer details, rather than fewer messages with more details. The average corporate email takes about two minutes to read and contains about 500 words.

Additionally, 14% of recipients who open an email skim it (spend significantly less time reading than the predicted read time). For example, if the calculated read time is two minutes, “skimmers” spend a maximum of 36 seconds (30% of two minutes) engaging with the email.

Rather than feel discouraged by this, use this data to inform how you structure your emails. Make it skimmable. Use headers and subheaders, bullet points and bold relevant text.

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.

Access benchmark data for your industry

The data shared in this article is just the tip of the iceberg. To access benchmark data for your industry, check out PoliteMail’s 2026 Internal Email Communications Benchmarks Report.