Internal Email Tracking Software: Key Benefits and Use Cases

If you’re an internal communications professional, Outlook can be a major headache. But with the right tools, you can use Outlook to increase employee engagement and drive growth using email tracking.

Being able to measure your internal communications is crucial for internal communicators; email tracking can confirm the efficacy of your internal comms strategy, and even solicit employee feedback for insights on what to improve.

Internal email tracking software—such as ContactMonkey—shows you how many employees opened the internal email, what links they clicked on, what time they opened the email, whether they opened it on a desktop or mobile device, where they were when they opened it, and more. Internal email analytics are important to guiding your internal comms strategy to success.

Looking at all of this data, whether tracked at the individual or overall employee level, is an excellent way to understand employee engagement within your organization.

ContactMonkey offers internal communications email tracking that can help you pinpoint your best content. Using email tracking software in Outlook you can compare your recipients’ engagement against the emails you send to find what most resonates with your audience. Book a free demo with one of our friendly experts to see how ContactMonkey makes internal email tracking in Outlook incredibly easy.

Internal Email Tracking Software in Microsoft Outlook

ContactMonkey is an Outlook add-on that enables you to measure internal communications without leaving your inbox.

If you’ve ever looked for Outlook tracking software or Gmail tracking software, then you’ve likely somesales-oriented solutions like Hubspot or other alternatives to Hubspot. But ContactMonkey is the onlyinternal communications-oriented tool on the market that enables you to track both individual and overall Outlook email metrics from your existing Outlook distribution lists.These are essential data points for your internal communications audit checklist.

Below, we take a look at some of the Outlook hacks available with ContactMonkey. Be sure to also check out our internal communications case studies to see how other companies use ContactMonkey to improve employee engagement productivity.

Integrate ContactMonkey with your email client

With ContactMonkey, you don’t need an external web application (like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor) to track employee newsletters. Instead, you can stay right within your Outlook or Gmail inbox.

ContactMonkey’s internal communications employee newsletter platform works is available for:

• Outlook for Windows
• Outlook for Mac
• Office 365
• Gmail

Send internal emails to your Outlook distribution lists

Keeping things internal only increases your security level. This way, employee data never ends up in the hands of an external third party.

Plus, employees won’t have the opportunity to unsubscribe from the employee newsletter, simply because they won’t have the option.

One of the biggest differences between internal communication vs external communication that you MUST include an unsubscribe link—by law—with external communication. Not really something you want your employees doing, is it?

You can pretty much guarantee that all important internal information ends up in their inbox as all emails will be coming from your email address or from any email address you define, such as the CEO, Internal Communications or Human Resources.

By using your existing Outlook distribution lists (or Google Groups if you’re a G-Suite user) , you’ll never have to worry about maintaining or exporting your employee email lists to an external system.

If you need to repeatedly email a particular segment of your workforce, you can create custom email lists—without needing IT—using ContactMonkey’s List Management feature. Email lists you create with ContactMonkey integrate with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll automatically update as employees join and leave your organization.

Personalize Internal communications for every employee

The importance of internal communication extends beyond keeping employees informed about team absences and software upgrades. Your communications are designed to drive employee engagement.

Playing around and personalizing email subject lines can be one of the best ways to guarantee employee engagement. Think about it: Who wouldn’t want to open an email with their name in the subject line?

With a single click, you can also personalize the subject line or body copy of your internal emails to each employee. This can be done in your distribution list, a dynamic distribution group, or in a CSV file that you upload.

Measure at an individual employee or overall campaign level to identify what works and what doesn’t. Use this data to continually improve your employee communications.

Create Modern Internal Emails And Employee Newsletters With Email Template Builder

The whole point of tracking your emails is to gather actionable data that can improve your internal communications. Performance driven internal email marketing is the path to increasing employee engagement.

ContactMonkey’s drag-and-drop email template generator makes it super easy to take the data you get from your emails and materialize it in your content.

Choose your internal email template

Choose from dozens of pre-designed internal email templates or upload your existing responsive HTML email designs straight to Outlook to get started.

Add unique design elements to your email template

Customize your email template design to match your company’s brand colours, messaging, and imagery style.

Want to create more effective email newsletters? Use ContactMonkey’s click map reports to find out what your employees are paying attention to so you can optimize your email design.

Build mobile-friendly email templates

Preview your email designs on both desktop and mobile to make sure your messages are responsive and look just the way you intended, even in Outlook.

Try it yourself

When you build employee newsletters with ContactMonkey, you can rest assured that they will display perfectly across all platforms and devices.

How to Get Real-Time Employee Feedback from Internal Email

When you’re sending out your internal communications, you don’t just want to have evidence of your communications landing in employee inboxes, but you also want to know that they’re interacting with whatever lives inside those internal emails.

Being able to see what’s resonating is just as valuable as seeing what employees are less interested in.

Gather employee feedback with internal newsletters

Show how valuable your employees are by using their feedback to improve employee communications going forward. Ultimately, internal communications are for employees first.

The Employee Engagement team at Exemplis uses ContactMonkey to not only collect employee feedback, but keep a constant check on how employees are actually feeling. At present, they are averaging a 70% open rate on their internal communications since making the switch.

Emoji reactions

Give your employees the ability to love, like, and laugh at any content you send them via email. With emoji reactions your internal communications team can gather employee feedback and conduct employee opinion surveys in a seamless way:

Pulse surveys

With pulse surveys you’ll also get actionable data on your email communications in seconds. You’ll be able to see all of the responses live in real time on your ContactMonkey dashboard.

Pulse surveys come in two styles within ContactMonkey:

• The “Yes and No” options that we offer. These are used to gain a quick “pulse” response from your newsletter on specific binary questions.
• The “Star Rating.” These are used to gather quick feedback without bothering busy employees. Such as, “On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your work-life balance?”

If you’re struggling to create effective pulse survey questions, try using ContactMonkey’s OpenAI ChatGPT integration to generate unique and custom survey questions. Simply write a prompt describing what you want to learn, and edit the suggested questions according to your audience.

Send and track event participation

Whether you’re hosting an in-person event or activities for remote teams, you always need to know who is and isn’t attending. With ContactMonkey’s event management feature, you can create, send, and track event invitations with ease:

Your employees can even attach messages to their RSVPs, so you can gather feedback while learning who is and isn’t attending. Event management is a crucial part of your Gmail and Outlook email tracking for internal communications.

Employee comments

Ever wondered how employees feel about a specific topic? Now, you can incorporate employee surveys or simply add one question to your newsletters using your email template builder.

Simply enable “comments” through the template builder and start getting actionable feedback from your employees:

Gathering employee feedback is a great way to gather qualitative feedback about your large or small business internal communications. But qualitative feedback is represents only half of a data-based approach to internal communications.

Measure Internal Communications as a Team

ContactMonkey allows you to see the performance of internal communications campaigns at both the overall and individual employee levels. This includes data around open rates, link clicks, location, devices, and feedback results. This measurement is all part of internal email best practices.

Not sure what constitutes “good” email metrics? Use ContactMonkey’s internal email benchmarks to learn how others in your sector perform on their internal communications.

Internal email opens and link clicks

Email opens let you know whether people are being informed and in the know of important company announcements. When you’re using an internal email tracking tool like ContactMonkey, your employees have no option to unsubscribe, and you can see right down to the individual employee who has yet to open your message.

An increase in click-through rates tells you that the content you’re sending out is relevant and that the email was sent at a good time. On the flip side, if there are links that aren’t getting a high rate of employee engagement, you can drop them going forward, and avoid sharing similar content.

Location

Being able to tell where employees are opening their emails can be helpful for big companies:

If they’re opening it outside of office hours on a computer, or on their mobile devices, the content needs to move in that direction.

If your organization has internal or external regulations around email privacy, ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking allows you to gather email metrics while maintaining your employees’ privacy.

Segmented reporting

Get even more in-depth with segmented reporting. You can easily track employee engagement and filter tracking results across different departments, job titles, and office locations:

Email analytics

Did one of your email campaigns have much higher engagement than others? Are there certain types of content that resonate better with your audience? With reporting, you can measure email analytics across multiple email campaigns:

Finding your best performing emails has never been easier. Sort by various email metrics and choose how you view your statistics. And you can get even more granular by looking at internal email analytics from and individual or overall email perspective.

In addition email analytics, you can further refine your email campaign design via data gathered from click maps:

ContactMonkey’s click maps feature allows you to see what parts of your internal communications get the most attention from your employees. This data can help you refine optimize your email design so your employees can easily see the information they need to see.

Want to see more? You can book a free demo to see how ContactMonkey can supercharge your internal comms email tracking.

Why Add Internal Email Tracking to Your Communications Strategy

ContactMonkey’s internal communications tool is perfect for all teams to use, especially if they’re primarily focused on using email to send out internal messages.

What makes the tool so versatile is how easy it is to set up and the variety of internal email tracking statistics (like open rate and click-through rate) it provides. Key metrics vary from team to team, and organization to organization.

ContactMonkey seeks to facilitate better internal communication, and make relationship-building in the workplace a priority.

Ready to see our internal email tracking tool in action? Get in touch with us, and our team will work with you to perform a demo that caters to your needs!