Did You Get My Email?

Speaker A: Awesome. So the recording has started here. First attendee in the door is Stacy and Meg. Awesome. Welcome everyone.

Speaker B: Welcome.

Speaker A: Another Megan and Claire. Perfect. So people are starting to trickle in here. It is 11:00 AM Eastern, right on the dot. We got Susan jumping in, Marissa, Wayne. Walid, lots of people trickling in. And if you're just tuning in, as always, we'll give a couple minutes just to give everyone time to kind of get into the event, get settled. Maybe it's a coffee, maybe it's a 5 o'clock somewhere drink, depending where you're tuning in from.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But it's 11 AM here in Canada, and we already have almost 20 in the door, so that's great.

Speaker B: Nice. Love to see punctual people today.

Speaker A: Awesome. Great. Well, while we get started, everyone, we have almost 20 in the door. Feel free to use the chat to mention where you're tuning in from. Let us know. Hoping we had about 200 registrations from all over the world. I'm sure those on the far side are maybe going to be watching the recording as they're probably sleeping right now. But yeah, use that chat function. Let us know if you can't use it, or if anything's not working, and I will get us started. Can you see me in the chat there, Grace?

Speaker B: I can.

Speaker A: Perfect. Hopefully everyone else can use the chat. I'm not seeing people write in there, so I'm worried they can't. So give me a second to go to the webinar.

Speaker B: Chime in. Well, if you can chat, why don't— we'd love to see somebody chat in their location, job title, anything like that, just so we can test our— that everything's working.

Speaker A: Feel free to try the Q&A as well. I'm gonna try and get the chat up and running. Seems like it's disabled right now, so bear with me, folks. We still need a couple minutes anyways while people come on in. So let's see how that works.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Probably get started at the 05 mark. So we have about 90 more seconds here. I'm just figuring it out, the chat, in the meantime.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker A: Chat is disabled. Okay, everyone, let's try and give that chat another chance now. See if you can write in there where you're tuning in from.

Speaker B: Oh, I see another message. Perfect.

Speaker A: Always fun to have some technical difficulties just to make sure everyone's on their toes here.

Speaker B: It's not a Zoom presentation if there isn't at least one technical difficulty. That's what I say.

Speaker A: Oh my God, everyone's writing in. I see Cardiff, UK. Love it over there. Lots of locals in Toronto. We've got some coming in from Texas. Amazing. And we're already past the 30 attendee mark. So it's 11:05 here. We'll let people trickle in. We'll do a kind of a slow intro, but thanks everyone for tuning in to ContactMonkeys. Did you get my email webinar with our head of Content, Grace McClure. My name's Tyler, and we're excited to host you. We had over 200 registrations for this webinar, and I'm sure many of you were excited to attend because this question, did you get my email, probably resonates with many of you communicators out there. You know, often we're not sure, we're just sending it into the abyss and just curious if people are even reading or interacting with all of our hard work and the content we create. And so with that being said, I'm excited to introduce Grace to you today. She's gonna take you through lots of our findings from our internal benchmark. We're able to give you our internal benchmark report after this presentation as well. I have a digital copy for you and a copy of the slides as well if you found them interesting or kind of want to digest them afterwards. But Grace, without further ado, I'll hand it over to you, and I'm here in the background if you need me.

Speaker B: Yes, thank you so much, Ty, and thank you to everybody on the line. We really appreciate you spending your morning, lunch break, happy hour, as Ty mentioned, with us. So We really hope that this is a fruitful session for everybody. As Ty just mentioned, did you get my email? I think it's a question that we all dread as communicators having to ask our colleagues, whomever, and it's something that happens all the time. So our hope here is that by the end of this presentation, you'll have some tools and tactics to challenge that and hopefully not have to ask that question to your employees anymore. But before we jump in, I will just briefly introduce myself. My name is Grace McClure. I am the head of content at ContactMonkey. Uh, so I had a hand in, uh, us grabbing this big report that we do annually. It's our internal benchmark email report for internal comms. Uh, and it's where we analyze 195,000 emails. It's a lot of emails sent via the ContactMonkey platform. Uh, and we use the real data to give us insight into how email performance is working, uh, with our clients and across Several industries. So that's the data from this large analysis that is fueling this presentation. So it's real numbers. Okay, so today's agenda. How do your emails stack up? So we want to be looking at what does good look like? What are some performance metrics that hopefully you can leave here with today that will help you better understand your overall email health? We will cover best practices to sending emails that actually get engaged with. And then finally, we'll touch on the secret sauce. Hint, hint, it is locking in the right internal comms software that can really just take your resourcing and time a lot further. Okay, so how do your emails stack up? As mentioned, this was our biggest report we've ever had, so we crunched 2024's Anonymized data, which was 195,000 emails sent through the ContactMonkey platform from thousands of organizations, really globally. So today's insights, we hope that you'll never have to ask, did you get my email? SaaS included or not? Okay, so we are fairly industry agnostic, meaning ContactMonkey works with a ton of different industries. organizations of all sizes. So just, this is a quick snapshot of the top 20 industries that we pulled in data from for 2024. Hopefully most of you see your industries on here. It doesn't mean that other industries weren't analyzed. They were. So far more than 20 make up our, our share. However, these were the top 20. So airlines, aviation, automation, banking, construction. I'll let you read through, but these were our top 20. For this year, for the 195,000 campaigns.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And again, our organization coverage is quite expansive. So we work with companies that have, you know, 50 employees or less, although it's our smallest sharehold, but then companies up to 10,000 or more. So over 50% of the companies that we analyze emails from sit in that 1K employees or higher. So we're talking about fairly large organizations. I'm sure that many of you are from organizations this size as well. 10% skewed at the, the mega corp, so above 10,000 employees. 38% were in the 1,000 to 5,000 employee range. So quite a breadth of employee sizes. And here are some of the industry highs. So we looked very closely at average open rates. average click rates, and average click-to-open rates. And we noticed, which may be surprising to some, but we've done this report for a few years now, that it really does vary a lot from industry to industry. So there isn't really apples-to-apples comparisons. We will touch on the averages across the board shortly here, but industries really do matter. So where, where you exercise your emails, if you're in automation or aviation, it does change what your averages will look like. So, uh, we implore you and we will at the end, uh, to really look at your industries to create your own benchmarks. Um, so if we look here, industry highs. So the highest average open rate for any industry was insurance. Uh, so go insurance. Hopefully we have some insurers on the line. Uh, we saw a 17% average click rate for leisure, travel, and tourism. And, uh, just a refresher, um, for anybody who, who may, may need one, uh, myself included. Click rate is, so click rate of an email is the percentage of recipients who clicked on links in an email out of the total number of sends. So every employee sent would be that click rate. Whereas click to open rate, which we saw leisure, travel, and tourism again having the highest click to open rate, is a bit more of a metric that marketers love. So it's a little bit more accurate. It actually looks at the people who have opened your email, what their click looks like. So it's like, this is our engaged pool. of employees and what are they clicking on. So it's a little bit more of a dialed-in metric. And the highest that we saw across the board was leisure, travel, and tourism, again, for highest click-to-open. So the people of leisure are loving your emails. And then on the opposite side, I'm sorry for anyone in media and entertainment, but 57% is the average open rate there. So we do see those in that industry maybe having a particularly difficult time getting their employees to open, let alone engage with their emails. 5% was our average lowest click rate across industries. So this was aviation, food and beverage, media and entertainment, and mining and metals. So this was a 4-way tie for the bottom here, unfortunately for, for this group of industries. And then the lowest average click-to-open rate, which generally scales higher, would be 10%. And that again was aviation. And food and beverage. Okay. And now we're going to do a quick poll. So we're going to get Ty back here and I would love if we could have some audience participation here. And again, it's all good. It's, it's anonymous. We just want to see where you think that your open rates lie for your comms. And if you don't measure your open rates or you don't know, feel free to click that as well. But, uh, I would love to just get some results for where you're sitting. All right, just give a couple more seconds here to roll in our open rates. Okay, this is interesting. So we are seeing that a lot of folks are actually— don't measure their open rates at all, or perhaps don't know. So 40% is, is that group of people, which is, you know, a little high, but this is why we're all here, is to make improvements or to better understand where we're sitting so that we can deliver more effective comms? Below 55%, 28%. So almost 1 in 3. 55 to 69, 20%, which is fabulous. 70 to 85, 12%. And then no one above the 85%, which I believe is honest. So we have an honest group here today. So thank you for participating in that.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And now we will look at the average open rates. So this is across the board. Now that we've had everybody weigh in, the average across all industries sent through the ContactMonkey platform were 68%. So we can see from the highs and lows that this is very much practically a median number. So 68%. Is where we're seeing the highest open rate we saw was 99%, and then the lowest rate was 2%. Okay, then for click rates, 8%. So 8% is a very hearty average. Just a reminder, for the high was leisure, travel, and tourism industry. So there is again that discrepancy that I mentioned off the top here where Not every industry is created equal. So I think that we have access to a lot of blanketed stats across the internet, or if we're doing research for where we should sit. And firstly, internal comms are not the same as external comms. And as we've seen, it really does jump from industry to industry. So maybe somebody in media is feeling a little bit bummed out about their open rate and their click rate, but we now know that Perhaps there's challenges that aren't equal to somebody who's, say, in insurance, who enjoys a higher, a higher click rate, click-to-open rate, and open rate. So really what I'm stressing here is to try to set your own benchmarks, and hopefully this will help you do that. And as just briefly touched on there, internal emails should far outperform external emails. So this is some research that we put together. I think at the end of last year, and it was quite surprising for me. So somebody who has played both on the external side, sending marketing emails to say consumers versus sending internal emails to your employees. So looking at these 2 different groups, this is on the left side of your screen is external emails sent via Mailchimp. So these would be marketing emails, B2B, B2C. External facing. So open rates, you know, about 36%, average click rate in the 2s, and then unsubscribe rate 0.22%. But then if we're looking at the averages across all internal emails sent via ContactMonkey, we're seeing that average open rate of 68% that we touched on a few slides ago, the average click rate of 8%. And an unsubscribe rate of, you guessed it, 0%. So this is one thing for certain. Your internal emails should far outperform any external emails. And the good news is that you have a primed audience. So while there is always improvements that can be made to how we engage our employees, they are there, they are getting your emails, and you do have a running start. So we're gonna try to break down And answer the question, how can you make the most out of it? And, uh, what can you do to really be increasing this engagement? Um, because we are seeing, and this was again a surprising stat for me that we pulled out of this year's report, but that employees, while they are receiving your emails and they might be opening your emails, they're not actually engaging with Your emails. So we see that 39% of employees are spending greater than 9 seconds on your emails, or sorry, within the 9-second realm. So this is classified as reading your emails. So 39% are classified as reading your emails, which is 9 seconds or greater. But this means that the rest are spending less than that. So at best, as an internal communicator who has spent blood, sweat, and tears crafting content that we believe that our employees are going to care about and actually read, click on, RSVP to, follow up with, they're really not. So they're not engaging in the way that I think we hope that they are. So I think that knowing that maybe only 4 out of 10 of the people you're sending to are really only hanging out for 9 seconds, to me is eye-opening. So I think that there's some work that can be done to ensure that once we do get the opens and people are hitting our emails, that they're actually doing the things that we hope that they're doing or learning from them. So this brings us to the title of our webinar, which is, did you get my email? Here's why you may still be asking, did you get my email? So we're going to work through some best practices To hopefully put that question to bed, and you'll never have to walk into a boardroom, a lunchroom again, and ask your employees, did you get my email? Okay. So in this part of the webinar, we're going to get a little bit more tactical. And again, if you have any questions that are cropping up, please feel free to chat them in or use the Q&A function. We're going to try to run through as many questions at the end. I always like to hold space at the end to try to engage with as many of you as possible on the line. So it doesn't feel like I'm just talking at you. So please know that we'll be holding that at the end. And if anything comes up, just chat, upvote, et cetera. And we will definitely get to it and be mindful of our hour here. So we're gonna walk through some of the best practices to improve email engagement. So those open rates, those click rates for your industry. And while it may seem obvious, When all of these small practices and tips and tricks that we're going to be covering combined, they really do make a difference. So it might seem like something that, okay, of course this is a simple tool or a simple fix. And once they all stack together, it really can change the game of your internal comms. So everything you do matters and they all play together and deliver better comms at the end of the day. So firstly, write attention-grabbing subject lines. I think that there is this thought that with internal communications, so whether you are the internal communicator or you're HR or you're marketing, but you're handling internal comms at your company, I think that we kind of sleep on sending exciting emails out to our employees. I think that maybe we have that customer-focused brain all the time, and that when it comes to our own employees, We don't really do that. So I think that if we are to reframe that and try to treat our internal comms and our emails as marketing emails, so emails that we're designing to capture attention, that I think they will. So if we can just adopt some of that marketer hat and, uh, try to impress our employees with how fun and witty and dazzling we can be, it might translate into some better open rates. Uh, so borrow best marketing tactics. So what is that for a subject line? That looks like being clean, clear, short, uh, not too wordy, use emojis, but use them sparingly, try to add excitement. So if you think about this, it's like, this is the headline to my email. So when I'm spending a lot of time, um, and I've been guilty of it too, you spend a majority of your time crafting the content of the email. Making sure the links are working, making sure that you have stakeholder buy-in, that this is the content that you're aiming to present. And then the subject line is just the, the afterthought. And similarly with a headline of an article, if you're writing or reading, it's, that's what hooks you. So to, I encourage everyone to spend just a little bit more time trying to make their subject lines grabbier. So not boring, not generic. Not overly verbose. Really try to build in personalization when you can. So if you can add an employee's name, great. Timing always works well. Deadlines— people love and hate a deadline. So if you can encourage that action into your subject line, that works. So instead of RSVP for 2025 Award Gala, RSVP now. 25 Award Gala, don't miss out. Number 1 event. So yes, the word count is higher on the subject line, and perhaps it could be trimmed a word or 2, but you can see the difference. So what you're able to accomplish just by baking in some urgency, you still hit on the who, what, when, where, why, how, but it's a little bit more exciting. Find the right email frequency. So of course, one-off emails happen and they will always happen in our line of work. What I'm referring to here is when you know that you will have a specific email go out, maybe it's your monthly outreach or your monthly newsletter or your quarterly CEO report, whatever it may be, any emails that you know that you're gonna be doing consistently and you can create a calendar around. Make sure that you're discovering the right frequency. So, uh, that means consistency. So develop the right cadence for your emails. Maybe it's instead of sending a weekly, it's a biweekly, and you'll get a little bit more engagement from that, that people, uh, don't want to hear from you every week, or maybe they do, and that could work for your company better. So maybe it's shorter, snappier emails that are sent out more frequently. So test it. Figure out what the right email frequency is for you and the right cadence. And it is about finding the sweet spot. So it could be, there's a Goldilocks to emails. So it could be too many or too few. And you'll know that once you start to actually pull in some reporting and data off of the emails that you're sending and then save the one-offs. So rather than just flippantly sending out ad hoc emails at the request of leadership or other departments or whomever, which we all know happen. If we can develop a placeholder in a weekly or monthly newsletter that we send out where we hold space for product, for engineering, for HR, and so that we're able to just always include some of those updates that maybe happen frequently, but they're not just getting sent out in one-off emails that employees quickly learn to ignore. Okay. Remember, day and time matter. So I think that everybody has it baked in their head that, okay, maybe Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are the best days. And yes, if you can look at the slide, that is mostly true. However, again, your industry really helps to dictate what the best send date and time are for you. So we encourage everyone to look at their specific industry. We've actually broken that down in this year's internal benchmark report. So You can see those top 20 industries mentioned on the, I believe, second slide. Those each have the best date and time for, for them. So for example, well, this is actually across the board. So this is our average. Monday is the best sending day for 15 out of those 20 top industries. So 75% of the industry we analyzed had best email performance on Monday. So maybe this can be part of your agenda, your evil agenda for getting out your most important updates, the things that you really want your employees to engage with. Save that for a Monday. Similarly, time matters. So 10 AM, we saw as cited the most across our top emails sent. So 13 out of 20 industries, 10 AM is the golden hour, the witching hour. So, uh, again, just be mindful of when you're sending. So Friday, 4 PM, likely not going to get the engagement that you would Monday at 10. And, uh, as mentioned, let your industry dictate your scheduling. So you can see the differences here. I just, um, poo-pooed Friday, uh, but not for 11 AM, uh, for pharmaceuticals. So this is actually the top performing window for pharmaceuticals. So I think that's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that. I wouldn't have known that, but we have the data To back up this identified time slot. So utilities, Monday, 9 to 10. So that fits in very well with that average that we just pulled. So if you don't know, Monday at 10, but if you do know and you have the opportunity to grab our report, definitely look into what is best for your specific industry. Okay, choosing the right layout. Again, these things may seem obvious, So, uh, choosing the right layout, of course, we don't want to send out unattractive, overly wordy, uh, no images or blurry images emails, but it's going from understanding that and then actually putting that into action and trying to make your comms as beautiful, fun, exciting, and engaging as possible. Um, so we favor 2 different types of layouts in the internal emails that we send. Uh, and these are the 2 patterns that we see perform the best. Um, so our template designs at Contact Monkey really help you to just plug and play while following these 2 patterns. So one is the F pattern and the Z pattern. So these are just visual hierarchies that really let your employees digest quite easily. Okay, use the F pattern. So the F pattern is simply, it's easy to read. I think it looks a little bit more formal in my opinion, which is nice. So I think that this works well for investor updates, leadership updates, Maybe training, um, just if you want to provide a little bit more information and maybe it's a little bit more of a formal announcement. I think this looks, uh, really nice. It makes for easy scanning, key info, clear CTA. The Z pattern. So I think of this one as a little bit more playful. Uh, it's also still very clean, nice aesthetic. It's great for links. So if you maybe have, uh, several different links. Links that you're trying to include. Uh, it's a roundup of content or maybe a roundup of monthly initiatives that have kicked off or, uh, events you're hosting, whatever it may be. And there's several links that you want to include. This is just a very nice, easy to read, easy to scan pattern that performs really well. So these are just 2 simple layout changes, uh, that you can deploy that will improve performance. And again, making your CTAs pop, uh, similarly to your subject line, uh, which is the headline of your email. I think that we often overlook the opportunity to make our CTAs a little bit more exciting. So CTAs, call to action is what it stands for. And it's basically how we direct our employees to engage with something that we're putting out. So in our email, we want them to RSVP to our event. We want them to leave feedback. Maybe we should make our buttons a little bit more exciting and to direct the focus to the activity that we want our employee to do. So explore workshops, register now, track my goals, play around with some color, play around with shape, shading. Again, it seems simple, mundane, but it really does again stack and help build up incrementally all of these minute improvements that will all combined improve your open click, click-to-open rates. Okay. Craft emails like your favorite brands. So, uh, this is the entire gist of this section, I would say, is to just try to up our comms and make them exciting. Like, what do you like opening in your inbox? What newsletters do you find exciting and engaging? And why do you open them? You probably open them because they look nice. They're branded. They're tailored to me as the recipient. So maybe my name is included. Maybe it's something that I'm most particularly interested in. So it's when people see themselves in their comms, in the comms that you're sending, they're much more likely to engage with them. So With that, with that aside, I think that these are all a lot of design best practices, but this one is maybe a little bit more technical, making sure that we're keeping communications mobile friendly. So this, and again, it's a little bit different if we were B2C, you know, sending out comms to customers. I think that mobile would be a little bit more front of mind and maybe as internal communicators, it's been less of the focus. However, this is changing every year. We see this mobile readership number increase, uh, and we saw 15% 2024. So, uh, 15% of your employees are going to be opening up and engaging with your emails on their mobile devices. Uh, perhaps that won't be the case if you have a policy against mobile, but, uh, we're not seeing that. Uh, it's trending upwards year over year. So really making sure that your emails actually look well and present nicely on mobile is more important than ever. So yeah, be mindful of mobile. Don't be boring. Try to make your emails exciting, punchy, something that you yourself would be enthusiastic about reading. Make sure they feel branded. This helps with consistency. It helps with just recognition and buy-in from your employees. And make sure to tailor your team and company, tailor for your team and company. So if there's an opportunity to get the right information to the right people, Try to do that instead of just generalized content out for everybody, which we will also touch on shortly. Okay. I'm just going to have a sip of water. It's a lot of talking. Beautiful. I hope everyone's hanging in there. I see lots of chatter chatting in. So thank you for your participation. Okay. So the secret sauce from our perspective, of course, is locking in the right software. So the right internal email software. Should allow you to show and grow your employee engagement. So the benefits of software, which we'll break down definitely in this, there's just a few slides left in this short section, is that internal comms software just helps you stretch further. So if you're spending most of your time with content creation, which is what we see and hear from most internal communicators that Content creation takes up a lot of time. Software helps with that. So building in, say, a ContactMonkey where you can follow easily those F and Z patterns and just zoom in your content, plug and play. You have sections that are already there and that just sits right on top of Outlook or Gmail. That's going to save a ton of time. And so will some of the analytics that are built in. Okay. So one of the key benefits, absolutely without a doubt, if not the number one biggest benefit to adopting an internal comms software is accessing powerful analytics. So like the benchmark report where you're able to grab hold of all this important data that's really tailored to you, nothing is more tailored than unlocking your actual analytics. So, if you are legacied into Outlook or Gmail and you really don't have a great view of what people are clicking on, what they're engaging with, what they're not engaging with, internal comms software will unlock all of that data that is in the underbelly. It'll raise it to the surface and you'll be able to really see what's going on. So instead of just making assumptions about what your employees like, You will know what your employees like and what they are do not like or are not engaging with. So you'll just have all the data in the world to help make some educated guesses, hypotheses to fuel some experiments that you want to run, and to just really be able to measure the impact that you're delivering to your organization through your internal comms. So analytics, hands down, the most important. Part of internal comms, in my opinion, email sending, internal comms emails, is accessing analytics. So for example, the fact that only 39% are glancing at your emails or 39% are actually reading it, we wouldn't have known that without having the analytics that actually give us the opportunity to measure how long your employees are spending on your email. So critical information that you can unlock with the right software. Personalizing content always in all ways. So audience segmentation, I think that it, we're all getting better at it and understanding that we have opportunities and options at our fingertips, but audience segmentation is something that is So instead of sending, for example, all of your employees the exact same email, what if you're able to send different employees in different locations a different email, or you're able to send out different languages to those who have indicated that their preference may be to receive your internal comms in Spanish or to receive your internal comms in French or whatever language it may be, being able to segment your audience and deliver more personalized content is always going to outperform content that is generic and meant for everybody. I think when something is meant for everybody, it's simultaneously meant for nobody. So if you can personalize your content always in all ways, that is the way to go. And internal comms software tools like Content Monkey have multi-language, which allows you to automatically translate your emails into preferred languages of your employees, and also has other personalization features that are pretty cool that will up your game. Ask for feedback. So this is another tip and trick that as communicators, we all know we love feedback. Employee feedback is how we measure engagement. It's very important to be part of what we do and what we're constantly asking for. So feedback matters. It also matters when it comes to engaging emails. So while you may not think that, okay, asking for feedback could be a trick to getting more engagement, it is. So if we look here, if 15% is the average click-to-open rate that we saw, and when we have a call to action that is around ENPS or offering quick pulse survey feedback, we actually see that go up 2% on average. So employees that include some kind of emoji reaction, star reaction, which is thumbs up, thumbs down, or to ask for more detailed feedback performs better than emails that do not include any of that. So I found that really interesting. I think it indicates that our employees want to weigh in. They like feeling like they're part of a conversation. So it's just one way where it really turns comms from a one-way to a two-way conversation pretty easily. So it's not difficult with software to bake in just easy moments within every monthly newsletter if you were to send it on a monthly cadence, just a thumbs up, thumbs down. Slide this poll, people like that. So it's another tip. Enhance your emails with AI assist. So again, AI, like mobile, is, is growing. So growing year over year, we're seeing more communicators leverage AI than ever. So depending on what your organization's policy is for AI, this could be something that having AI assist baked right into your platform where it can help with predictability and creating content for you, or it can be something that you use perhaps outside of any email platform just to help generate ideas, unique ideas, maybe improve subject lines, things like that, where it's just another way that you can fine-tune and test and see what's going to resonate. So if you're feeling a little bit stuck on ideas or things that you want to be including with your email, AI is a tool to leverage or not. It's, it's an opportunity for us to think a little bit differently or to include some sections in our content that maybe we wouldn't otherwise have thought to. And then this is optimize forever. So this was a little millennial nugget that I threw in just to make sure everyone's listening. And I think it also does weigh into some of the subject line where it's a little bit unique, a little bit quirky. We don't know. So apologies for the forever, but I'm just slipping it in here. But software like, again, ContactMonkey will let you understand your content by seeing click maps. So this is something that you wouldn't otherwise have if it was just Gmail or Outlook. It doesn't come with this feature. So click maps basically allows you to see where are your employees hovering, where are they clicking, what are they clicking on, what are they not clicking on. So, and it, the results can surprise you. So if you look on just just the right side image, nominate now for employee spotlight, 14% would have clicked there versus the 5% on learn more. So you can play with the different types of content, the different ordering. I think that we naturally think that whatever we put at the top of our email is the most important thing that will get the most clicks, but that's not necessarily true. So ClickMaps gives you insights into what's actually resonating with your employees. What are they clicking on? What are they enjoying? What aren't they enjoying? So with all of that information extrapolated and stretched over time, if you start measuring today, or if you're already measuring, then you have a boatload of information that can help to dictate your future plans. So just having all of this analytics and the ability to analyze all again stacks together and hopefully helps you never have to ask ask, did you get my email, to your employees or colleagues ever again. So I'm gonna pause here and invite Ty back, and he will read out some of your questions. And yeah, I hope that this was a fruitful session to everybody, and we will be sending out again the internal benchmark to everybody here on the line. And I also welcome— I think I have my email at the end— if you have any questions specifically about you or that doesn't get answered today, that we'll save that for email. So please everyone email me. I would love to hear from you. But Ty, we— do we have some questions?

Speaker A: Yeah, of course. Thanks so much, Grace. That was a wonderful presentation. Everyone, just a reminder, you can use the Q&A portion down below in the bar there to answer and ask your questions. Sorry. And you're actually able to upvote them as well. So if there's someone's question that you really want to get heard, be sure to kind of support those. To kick things off, Grace, curious if you have any tips for personalizing email content to employees? I know a lot of us are working in different kind of sectors or verticals. So when it comes to, you know, trying to get their attention, what tips do you think you would use for kind of curating that content and making it more personable?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And that's something that is important that we've seen as important is the more that you can personalize, the better. So Contact Monkey has a tool that was just released, was it 3 months ago or something? It was in beta for a while, but it's, it's now publicly released. It's called dynamic content. So in a single campaign without sending multiple times, which can skew your analytics, you can actually send out various SKUs of the same email that maybe swaps out different content for different employee groups. So for example, if you have a few headquarters, one is in London, England, one's in Toronto, Maybe spring has sprung a little bit earlier in London, and maybe that's some content that you want to be sharing with your London team. Or maybe if you're talking specifically to your engineers and product team, this might be content that your marketing and sales team don't care to hear about. So there might be some technical updates that maybe you don't send to everybody. So I guess my tip is to just really try to break down your audience. And when there is an opportunity, instead of sending one blanketed general email, if you can send 4 versions of that email, preferably within still one single campaign, so your metrics aren't getting segmented, the better. So I think the more that you see yourself in your specific department or role, or it's an event that is local to certain employees, include that for those employees. I think do not send things that are irrelevant to your employees, to certain groups of your employees, if you don't have to.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very good point. Definitely cut the fluff and kind of keep it only what specific people need to see. So the next question here that kind of has the most upvotes is from Linda Parsons. Thanks for tuning in, Linda. Wondering if you could talk through again click rate versus click-to-open rate and just provide some clarity between those two. To analytics.

Speaker B: Yes, I know they are confusing. So basically click rate is, if you were to send out an email, every person that gets your email, how many of those people clicked? So that's, that's click rate. It's just basically there's no, there's, it's not dialed in at all. It's like if I send out my email to 1,000 people and 100 people actually opened it That's the click rate. Um, click to open rate is, okay, so of the people that opened my email, which will not be all 1,000, like we saw 68% open. So say 680 people opened my email. Um, then we divide the average from click to open based off of the opens. So, uh, it's, there is nuance there and it's, uh, it is a little bit confusing. So I hope that I, uh, at all added clarity there, but it's basically just a more dialed in version of click rate. So clicked open is those that actually opened your email. Then we can look at this engaged pool of employees and what are they clicking on. So it's just, it provides a better view into those that are actually engaging with your emails versus the entire universal send list of those that never clicked anything.

Speaker A: Okay, great. Yeah, no, I mean, I thought that was a great answer.

Speaker B: I You didn't seem so certain, Ty.

Speaker A: I, you know what, I might still have to read about it. I always get confused by that one. But Linda, great question. Absolutely.

Speaker B: Thank you, Linda.

Speaker A: And Meg Ronan tuning in was curious if our report breaks down between, you know, the workers with the corporate kind of desk workers and the frontline employees. Is there any data in the internal benchmark report that kind of deciphers between those that use maybe more of an SMS approach with frontline versus those corporate desk workers that have a company email?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I believe there is a little bit of information inside the Internal Benchmark Report on frontline workers and SMS. I don't think we have a ton of coverage in the report for frontline workers who may not be desk workers. We do, however, have our other reports. So we do 2 annual reports a year, the Internal Benchmark, which we leverage the data for in this presentation. And then we have the Global State of Internal Communications, which is us survey that goes out that actually gets respondents from internal communicators all around the world. And there are more questions there for how we communicate with field workers, how we leverage SMS, how we— exactly. So a little bit more information, I believe, is covered in this upcoming report, the GSIC, which will be out. I think we're targeting April 1st. So in a week or so, there's just more data there. that's trends set by other communicators and how they leverage tools for workers that are maybe hybrid or deskless or frontline.

Speaker A: Great. Thanks, Grace. And we have a bit more time here. This question I got DM'd to me, but an interesting one I wanted to bring up. Do you recommend publishing your emails to the internet as well? So for those people that have internets out there, maybe the bigger companies, and there's multichannel approach to kind of communicating through Slack, Teams, internet, email. SMS and so forth. What do you feel about publishing your emails to your intranet? Is there any benefit in that?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that if we looked or recall back to our employee size, so the average number of employees, we're mostly playing with groups, organizations that have 1,000 or more employees. So I find typically larger orgs absolutely have the intranet. But there is a disconnect between, I think, email and intranet and when to use what where and what to plug on intranet versus what lives as email. So I think when there is some interplay between the two, it's more effective. So if you think about your email, for example, as shorter updates, maybe it doesn't live on forever and that's not the purpose of your email, but it includes important links. All of those links should go back to your intranet to, um, content that would then live on your intranet. So to have a hub is absolutely important. And I think that flowing all of your emails into your intranet, uh, just helps them with distribution. So it's the same where if you write an article, uh, maybe you send it over email, but then you also want it to live somewhere else. So somewhere that your employees know that they can go and find it and refer back to. So absolutely, I think that both should be leveraged together. ContactMonkey does have a SharePoint integration that makes that pretty easy. So always as many opportunities and touchpoints as you can bake into the activities that you're already doing as an internal communicator and tie them all together, definitely the better.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. We got quite a few more questions here. I know we're getting near the end of time. So people, if you have to hop off, totally understand, but let's keep going for a few more minutes. Yeah. Olivia Lengel, sorry if I'm not pronouncing the last name there correctly, Olivia, but asking, is the most effective day of the week and time of send a representation of global companies?

Speaker B: Yeah, so basically we always aim to send for local time. So you can queue your email so that you're not just sending for your time zone. So say we're Eastern. If you're Central, Pacific, whatever it may be, that you're sending 10 AM Monday local time across to all of your employees. So definitely always with that personalization note that I may have harped on perhaps a little bit too much, try to always think of the recipient. And if there is an opportunity to make it the easiest, best version for them, do that. So definitely Monday 10 AM would be the local time for that recipient, not for your headquarters. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know we get a lot of responses in from all over the world. So different company sizes, different countries, it certainly makes that report interesting. And then Patty Clements is asking, is the click rate for links within the email, or do you use that term meaning the same as open rate? So I believe just kind of answering the difference between click rate and open rate there, Grace.

Speaker B: Yes, exactly. So open rate is just, uh, I'm in my inbox. I see the email, I click the email. That's an open rate. So once somebody has actually done anything to view your email, uh, within their inbox, that's considered an open. So that would be open rate. Click rate is if they do anything within that email. So if I click one of the links within that email, then that would be the click rate. rate. So open is open, click is clicking within, and then click-to-open is isolating the percentage of those that actually opened that, that click rate. So there's the 3 different metrics, and I apologize if it wasn't very clear. I guess we could have built out a few slides there to make it make a little bit more sense, but hopefully that helps.

Speaker A: Awesome. And then, so Marissa's asking, Marissa's saying, thanks for tuning in. Is the click-to-open rate the analytic ContactMonkey offers for email engagement? I create quarterly internal comms reports for my unit using ContactMonkey, and I'm just curious if there's another analytic or maybe a better one I should be paying attention to reporting out for engagement with our emails. So once again, top of that question was, is the click-to-open rate the best analytic ContactMonkey offers for email engagement?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that I, I, I favor that metric personally because I do think it offers the most amount of insights based off of engaged employees and the type of content that they're engaging with. So I like that metric. I don't know that that would be the case for everybody. I think that it's a lot of these different elements combined. So click maps to be able to look at, okay, maybe this isn't the average click-to-open rate, but I'm seeing where people are engaging with in different emails. Maybe you build out a pattern over time and recognize that people just aren't scrolling to the bottom. So, uh, that, that wouldn't play into your click rate necessarily, but you're seeing that part of your content is getting ignored. So it's, I don't know that there's one, uh, be-all end-all metric. Uh, I certainly think that that's a very important one, but looking throughout the entire dashboard and just seeing how things are performing overall and especially over time and that things are improving would be where I would focus time on. But yes, love a click-to-open for sure.

Speaker A: Great stuff. And maybe we'll do one more. Oh my gosh, lots of questions coming in, folks. For any of those that don't get your question answered, we will follow up with you after the webinar. So, so So rest assured. But Susan Gerard, I want to give light to one of her questions. With click rates, would it be accurate to say that there are more readers than that would account for if the platform measured an open based upon image download?

Speaker B: Okay, say that one again, Ty.

Speaker A: With click rates, is it accurate to say that there are more readers Then that would account for if instead the platform measured on an open based upon the image download.

Speaker B: Truthfully, I'm not sure. So I'm not sure what that means for the open rate based on image download versus a click rate. So I'm sorry if this is out of my realm of expertise, but I just don't have a great answer for that. So Please feel free to email me and I will follow up with a better answer if that is of interest, and then we can get a little bit deeper on that and we can sort that out. But I'm just not able to visualize that right now.

Speaker A: No, I totally hear you. I'm also not sure about that one, but we can definitely get back to you, Susan, and get you a more detailed answer. And we'll swing it over to our last question here. We do have a few more, but running out of time. Patty's wondering, this is an interesting one. During your presentation, Grace, you did talk about kind of the F pattern or the Z pattern and such of how you can outline your emails for accessibility reasons. Do each of these patterns score similarly when it comes to accessibility tests? Do we have any data on that? Or maybe this is another follow-up we'll have to get back to Patti on, but curious between the F and the Z pattern, um, what those look like for accessibility reasons. Great question, Patti.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is a great question, and I wish I again had the answer to that. I do not. Not have the data right now, and I don't know if we collect the data totally from an accessibility standpoint on which different pattern performs better. I know that there are different parts of the world and different languages respond to the different patterns differently. So, for example, if you're somebody based in India, you might read a Z pattern a little bit differently from somebody based in North America. So, So there could be SKUs based off of where most of your employees reside that might affect some of the accessibility in which pattern performs best for them. And if we have this data, I would be very interested in it as well. So we will do some digging there and see if we have a little bit more information on different locations and overall accessibility on our patterns, because that's very interesting. I smell a blog post on that for sure. Great point.

Speaker A: If we get that published, we'll definitely get it sent over. I also see in chat here that someone added kind of a link to an article or such on pixels for tracking opens, which is always interesting. From my understanding, that's the longer you're on it, the more pixels that explode. It's just kind of back end of the coding takes care of that. You know, it is 11:58 here. I love to see a webinar where we have more questions than we can get to. That means people are engaged and we're excited, you know, 90% of you stayed on with us for the full hour. So very kind of you. All of your questions have been noted and we will get back to you kind of after the webinar. We can get you that recording, you know, the internal benchmark report, maybe even the slide deck if you wish. And Grace, big kudos and thanks to you for presenting. You did such an awesome job and this was so helpful. So thank you.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you so much to everyone who spent the hour with us. We really appreciate it. Please feel free to email me. Apologies for not getting to every question or giving the best answer to a couple of them. couple of them, so please circle back if you have any more, any more thoughts, and I'm happy to answer, and we will send you a copy of this benchmark report.

Speaker A: Awesome. Take care, everyone.

Speaker B: Thank you. Bye.