Benchmark Breakdown: Decoding Internal Email Metrics for Impact

Speaker A: Excellent. So good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the IABC and Contact Monkey webinar titled Benchmark Breakdown: Decoding Internal Email Metrics for Impact. My name is Daniel Nimi, Vice President of Sponsorships and Partnerships with IABC Toronto. Before we begin with this session, IABC Toronto acknowledges the land we're hosting this virtual event from in Toronto. is on Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, which is the ancestral homeland and original territories of many nations. This includes the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, and the Haudenosaunee and Wendat peoples. Today, the traditional meeting place of Toronto is still home to many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples across from Turtle Island. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work in these communities. IBC Toronto's hope is to do its part by starting honest conversations in its own circles and professional community to support a journey and commitment to reconciliation. We want to learn and share more about how, as professional communicators, marketers, and PR professionals, we can do our part and use the power of communication to help achieve The 94 Calls to Action outlined in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. We acknowledge that IBC Toronto is early in its reconciliation journey. We are committed to honouring, upholding, and uplifting the voices of Indigenous peoples within our communities. There is much work to be done, and we commit to refining and continuing our reconciliation journey. Please note that today's session is being recorded. And while we finally— and if— sorry, while we wait for others to join, I wanted to note that IBC Toronto is proud to be the largest chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators worldwide and was the host of the 2023 IBC World Conference that took place in June 2023. The 2024 IBC World Conference is in Chicago from June 23rd to 26th. IBC Toronto supports our community of business communication professionals with innovative thinking, shared best practices, in-depth learning, and career guidance. Visit toronto.ibc.to for more information. So we are in for an informative and fun session today. We'll hear from Elmar Rook, Content Specialist from Contact Monkey. Helen will share the latest industry benchmarks that will empower you to elevate your internal communication strategy. ContactMonkey is an internal email software known for helping organizations create beautiful, engaging company newsletters in minutes. They empower internal communicators to drive better employee engagement and track and measure email performance, all within Outlook and Gmail. During today's session, please feel free to post live about the webinar today on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and any other social media, and please tag @IBCtoronto and @ContactMonkey. I encourage you to enter your questions into the chat, and we will do our best to answer as many questions as we can towards the end of the session. In this webinar, Helen will cover using internal communication metrics to craft a cohesive internal communication strategy. and show undeniable ROI on your efforts. Key internal email benchmarks for 2024, including industry-specific benchmarks from 20 top industries. Combining insights from tracking data and email best practices to supercharge your internal email performance. Take it away, Helen.

Speaker B: Thanks so much, Daniel. Okay, so before we get started, um, why don't I take you all through the agenda for today? Um, so before we talk benchmarks, I'm just going to give you a quick intro to Contact Monkey and what we do. And I promise it's relevant because a lot of the benchmarks you're going to be seeing today are from, uh, emails sent through Contact Monkey. I'm going to talk a little bit about the state of internal comms and why we care so much about benchmarks, benchmarking and data tracking. And then I will take you through the 2024 benchmark report that we'll be pulling these benchmarks from, look at some general email metrics for the year, and then do a deep dive into industry metrics. Finally, I'll leave you with some best practices for boosting clicks, opens, and all the email metrics that you Collect. So to start with, what is Contact Monkey? So we are your dedicated internal email solution. Contact Monkey is a comprehensive internal communication email solution. It works directly with your Outlook or Gmail. So through Contact Monkey, you can create content like email newsletters quickly using either prebuilt templates, or you can start from scratch. With our drag-and-drop email builder, you can engage employees with embedded surveys, ENPS questions, anonymous commenting, and more. Contact Monkey also integrates with your existing email architecture, so you can send it from your own inbox. You can use your own distribution lists and send over your own internal server, so your email isn't getting sent back or blocked by an internal firewall or sent to spam. Finally, you're able to track how your emails perform in real time with a comprehensive email analytics dashboard. Very important for what we're talking about today. And also where external email marketing tools like Mailchimp require an unsubscribe button, Contact Monkey is an internal comms tool. So you won't be at risk of someone deciding to unsubscribe from, say, the CEO. And As far as how Contact Monkey works, if we take a little bit of a closer look at the drag and drop email builder, it looks probably similar to other tools you may be familiar with. To create a newsletter, you can just drag any of the content blocks on the right, such as paragraph, image, button, or video, place them where you want them in the page, edit them to add whatever content you need. You can drag in, for example, an image block, and you'll be given the option to upload an existing image or use something something from our stock image library for anything you need. You'll be able to add alt text, change the size it displays at, and even change how it displays on mobile right in the blocks menu. You can also embed Pulse surveys for employees to answer right into your regular newsletters. So rather than having them go to an external platform of some sort, you just drag in surveys. You can include simple things like a thumbs up and a thumbs down or star ratings, emoji ratings. Even ENPS surveys and the results of those surveys will be available for you right in your ContactMonkey dashboard. Plus, you can toggle the ability for employees to include an anonymous comment with their survey response for more in-depth information gathering. One last little feature I want to highlight is our OpenAI-powered writing assistant. So anytime you add in a paragraph block, you have the option to just generate some copy for that block. Using AI, you open the AI assistant, prompt it with as much information as you have or, or would want to, and have it generate copy, then insert it right into the email, at which point you're free to continue editing if it doesn't work for you, or if you want to add some more later on. So it can be a great way to break through writer's block and just get something on the page to bounce ideas off of. In terms of how Contact Monkey affects our clients, Teams that have used Contact Monkey have seen a 33% lift in open rates after adoption, 70% boost in employee engagement, 25 days saved annually on content creation, and have seen a 9+ second read time for the newsletters that they send. And as you can see here, just some quotes from our clients. But before Before we go on, I actually have a question for the audience here. And that is, how are you currently measuring employee engagement at your organization? And Ty, if we could throw that poll up, please. So just give it a little bit of time for everybody to vote. And maybe give it a couple more seconds. Nice. Okay. And if everybody has voted, Ty, why don't we see the results for that, please? All right, that's awesome. So it's really great to see that a good half of you are currently collecting analytics. And this leads me into my next point, which is the state of internal comms. And For this particular, for this particular section, we're going to get a little bit of context about what communicators are currently up against and why email benchmarks are so important to your internal comms strategy. And for that, I'm going to be bringing in some metrics from another report that ContactMonkey puts out every year. It's the Global State of Internal Communication Survey Report. So we send out a large industry survey. And get responses from communicators all around the world about what is happening in their organizations and their teams and what the state of internal communications is at their companies. And the metrics you'll be seeing here will actually be from the upcoming 2024 edition. That should be out next week. So you're getting a sneak preview here today. And So first off, I wanna say it seems like everyone is doing really well here today because the larger trend that we've seen is that tracking and measuring internal communication has been the biggest challenge for communicators. It's the biggest challenge that they report facing for the 4th year in a row now. And Daniel, I don't know, have you How have you seen the lack of tracking or measurement as an issue in your own?

Speaker A: Yeah, great question. So in my personal opinion, without measuring internal communications, you're sort of looking at a threefold battle. The number one is with your, your team's internal reputation within your organization, how your employees view your internal communication strategy, and also leadership support for your internal communication strategy. I think when you're driven by data and insights, measuring the success of your internal communications is— goes appreciated, it's understood, and I think it's given the importance that it deserves from an internal perspective. But also, I think by measuring the success of your email campaigns, you can then make data-driven decisions to then improve your messaging and engagement, which will hopefully result in more effective communications with your employees, which I think is the overall goal.

Speaker B: Absolutely, completely agreed. And I think one of the things that we've seen at Contact Monkey is A lot of the times clients come to us and the reason they're going for Contact Monkey is they're just saying, we have no tracking right now. And, you know, I want to make strategic decisions, but I don't know how to form a strategy with no information. I don't know how we're doing currently. And so, of course, that is one of the main benefits of tracking and measuring. It gets you a clear picture of how effective your internal communications currently are. So you can see your reach, you can see how, how your internal comms support changes over time. And as you yourself said, Daniel, you can get support from leadership and show ROI on your efforts. And it's one thing to say, you know, employees are more engaged, but another to show with numbers more employees are opening messages, they're clicking on links, there are more employees responding to surveys, the responses to those surveys are more positive. It's also where benchmarks come in, because any metrics are only going to tell a complete story when put in context. So let's, let's give a little more context. First of all, I've been talking about engagement a bit, and there is a good reason for that. Because let's talk about Disengagement. I think engagement is a huge part of the mandate for a lot of communicators, and the cost of a disengaged workforce is very high. So it makes sense. So research shows disengaged employees have a 37% higher absenteeism rate, resulting in an 18% lower productivity and 15% lower profitability. Employee disengagement has a hefty impact on the US economy. costs of nearly $350 billion a year. And on an individual level, the average business loses a minimum of $2,246 for every disengaged employee. So how is employee engagement going? Well, according to the State of Internal Comms survey, not as great as we could hope. So this year, 73% of communicators reported low to moderate engagement at their organizations. And 57%, so greater than half, just said moderate. Similarly, 66% of communicators reported low to moderate organizational alignment at their organizations. So in terms of how employees are following kind of the direction of the company as a whole, we're seeing employees are struggling. And so where measurement comes in, where benchmarks come in, is first of all, you just need to be able to know these things to have any impact on them. You need to be able to measure what that what that alignment and what that engagement looks like. But you also need to be able to say, hey, this is how we're doing in context of the industry, you know. And the last thing I will say is, this is a question we get asked a lot at Contact Monkey. We get asked, why email? A lot of people, you know, have diversified their tech stack. They're going, why is email the thing that I should focus on when I'm looking at tracking, when I'm looking at measuring internal comms and making an impact with internal comms? And simply put, email is still just at the center of communications for the majority of companies. So as of this year, 75% of communicators report relying more on email in a hybrid or remote environment. 62% of companies in 2024 reported having either a hybrid or fully remote structure. So this is not a small amount of companies. This is the large majority are using email for most of their internal comms. Similarly, 48% of communicators report relying most on email newsletters for employee communication. And that's actually, that number has seen growth. Since last year. And the next most popular tool is— our tools are like intranet at 30% and instant messengers at 7%. So in terms of what tools communicators are using, it is email. And that means if you want to make an impact, you have to start where you're currently communicating. You have to start with understanding how the bulk of your communications are being viewed, received, opened, etc. Which brings me into our benchmark report. So the benchmarks that I'll be showing you today are coming from ContactMonkey's 2024 Internal Email Benchmarks Report. This is something that we publish every year. By analyzing campaign data for all email campaigns sent through ContactMonkey in that year. This year, the report comprised data from over 140,000 email campaigns and included deep dives on benchmarks for 20 top industries, which you can see there. We will be looking into them in a little bit more detail later on. In terms of the size of company that were included, There were metrics from companies as small as 50 employees all the way to over 10,000 employees. And the majority of companies that were included in this report sit in the about 1,000 to 5,000 mark. So let's look at some general averages for internal emails in 2024. Average email open rates. So the percentage of recipients who received an email that opened it. In terms of all emails sent through Contact Monkey, 69% was the average email open rate with the highest being about 99% and the lowest being about 10%. For click rate, so this is the number who clicked on at least one link in an email out of the total number of recipients. 10% is where we're hovering at. With the highest click rate being about 98% and the lowest being about 1%. Now I know a lot of people prefer click-to-open rate because, as we saw earlier, a lot of emails just don't get opened. So the average click-to-open rate this year is 14%, with the highest click-to-open at 99% and the lowest at 1%. And read times. So the way that we define read times at Contact Monkey is glance. We split them into glance, skimmed, and read. So anyone who has an email open for 1 to 3 seconds, just, you know, pops in and then closes it again. That's glanced. And that was 36% of emails sent this year. 3 to 9 seconds is skimmed and 27%. Skimmed their emails this year, and 37% read the email. So they were on the page for more than 9 seconds, which is actually a number that's going up, which is pretty exciting. So if we look at last year to this year and what the changes have looked like, so Last year, the average open rate was sitting at 76%. So that's a 7% decline from 2023. Click rate went down 1% from 11 to 10 this year. Average click-to-open rate, interestingly though, stayed the same at 14%.

Speaker A: Helen, Helen, can you talk to Can you share your thoughts on, you know, why open rates have declined from 20, you know, in this comparison slide?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, this might be something that's different at every company. It might be a whole host of trends. But I think what is probably likely is you know, a communications overload issue. It also might be that communicators are focusing on kind of the content of an email rather than looking at something like subject line or when to send it. And these are all things that affect open rate. And in fact, we will look at some, some best practices for open rates later on. But, you know, you look at something like a 7% drop, and it seems quite scary. But what it actually is, is it gives you a good strategic place to start looking at your comms. So you know that the click-to-open rate hasn't changed. So the content isn't the problem. Those employees who are opening the content are state— like, are clicking on the links. So you focus your attention on open rates. So, you know, you find ways to boost opens because, you know, content, we've got it in the bag. So why don't we look at some more specific metrics? We want to take a look at how email metrics are affected by industry and size of organization. And for that, I'm actually going to ask the audience here today. Here we have the 20 industries that we do a deep dive on in the report, and I would really love to ask everybody to just speak up in the chat. Which industries would you expect to have the highest average open rates and the lowest average open rates? Just write them out or think to yourself. I'll give you a second. But, uh, Daniel, I also want to ask you this question. Do you— would you care to venture a guess?

Speaker A: I will hedge my bet on automotive being the highest and media and entertainment being the lowest. That's where I'm placing.

Speaker B: That seems fair. And yeah, I would love anyone else, if you just have some thoughts, you can even just say highest or lowest. What would you expect? All right, if everybody's feeling shy, that is also okay. I will reveal in just a second here. So in terms of the highest average open rates by industry— oh, we're getting some responses. I'll give you a second more. I want to make sure everybody gets their guesses in. All right. So in terms of the highest, we see high open rates in industries like automotive, construction, consulting, financial services, insurance, real estate, retail, technology, and utilities. As for the lowest, telecom, not-for-profit, mining and metals, media and entertainment. Daniel, I do believe that was one of your answers. And law, hospital, healthcare, food and beverage, education, consumer. As for click rate, we see— oh, I see someone in the chat saying 60% seems pretty high. What determines low and high? That's a good question. So these are above and below the average that we saw in that in the general metrics. So in terms of where do these industries sit, you know, below or above kind of general averages. So we can look at average open rates, 69% was the average overall. And pharmaceuticals and government were the ones that were sitting at that specific average. Click rates. So a lot of overlap with the highs and lows for open rates, but not everywhere. And in terms of lows, you see both click rates and click-to-open rates. Again, just a wide variety. And what I'm kind of trying to really emphasize here is that Email metrics, email benchmarks, when you're comparing your company against benchmarks that you're looking at, these vary wildly industry by industry. So the more of a specific look that you have, the better. So let's look at those highs and lows from those highest average open rate. For the year was 79% with consulting. Lowest was 57% in media entertainment. Highest average click rate, 15% in insurance, 7% in telecommunications was the lowest. And then 20% was the highest average with in the mining and metals industry, 10% in technology. So Averages and general metrics are helpful when you have nothing else to work with. But as you can see, it's wildly differing.

Speaker A: Helen?

Speaker B: And yeah, Helen.

Speaker A: Sorry, just quick question. Sorry to interrupt. So what sort of conclusions can you draw from these highs and lows stats that we're seeing before us?

Speaker B: I mean, that's a great question. And I am sure there are people in the chat who are in some of these industries that might have some great insights. But just looking at these numbers right now, you know, I can certainly venture some guesses. For example, that high click-to-open rate with mining and metals, you know, an industry like mining and metals, I would imagine have, you know, very pressing crisis comms. So if you have crisis comms going out and people are opening those, there's probably a high degree of people who are Clicking on things because they're urgent versus something like technology. You know, as somebody who technically works in the tech industry, I can tell you we get a lot of emails and we get a lot of emails that don't really require a lot of input from us, both not even internal, just external. So you might just be getting overloaded with emails and you're just taking time to to glance and then clicking right back out again. You know, something like consulting where you're probably getting a lot of emails that are again, like quite important and pressing. Maybe you're opening those and just seeing very quickly, is this relevant or not? Media entertainment, you're probably seeing just, you know, a real slew of comms, and maybe you're not bothering. And so somebody in the chat mentioned org size. That's actually what we're going to be looking at next. So how does company size affect things like open rate, click rate, and click-to-open? So this one, I'm not going to ask anyone to guess, but in terms of sizes that are kind of hitting that average or above average. Really only 200 and about like 200 to 500 employees is kind of that sweet spot. Everyone else we're seeing— or 10,000 plus, sorry. Click rate, click-to-open rate, we see very similar trends. And obviously this is a little bit hard to kind of grasp on this kind of— in this kind of format. So handy graph. So as you can kind of see, engagement with internal comms tends to peak in the 51 to 500 employee range, and it starts to climb back up after about 10K employees. So which is an interesting thing to see graphed that way. And in terms of, you know, what can you, you know, what, why you might be seeing data like this. It could be that, for example, in that 51 to 500 range, that's where, you know, you're still at an organization where everybody kind of knows each other. You're still getting comms that are very relevant to you specifically rather than being sent out to a very large team. That might, you know, only 20% of the people in that team actually need to know any of that information. And you're probably just less inundated with emails altogether. And why I would imagine that 10,000+ bump is happening is that's the level where, you know, a company of 10,000 is not all crammed into a single office. They are probably, you know, siloed off in regional offices. So in terms of like the size of the office, we're actually looking at in some ways a bunch of smaller companies. Again, those are my guesses based on the data. I'm sure there are people here who also have some thoughts. So let's look at some email best practices. How do we use this data in, in our communications practice? And don't worry, there will be more data coming. In this section. Before I say anything, I want to emphasize the first step of any internal communication strategy overhaul is collecting comprehensive data. So you have those benchmarks, but you have nothing to compare them against unless you have your own benchmarks being set internally, unless you're collecting data internally. So once you have those, how do you get your comms, you know, buzzing? And first off, let's talk about email frequency. Kind of the big ones. Consistency is key. So you want to establish a consistent cadence for things like newsletters and other communications. If employees know that you are getting a newsletter out every Friday at such and such time, they know to expect it, they know what it is when it hits their inbox, they are much more likely to open it. Also, don't over or under communicate. So adjust your email frequency based on engagement. This is where measurement once again comes in. You don't want to inundate employees, but you also don't want to be not communicative. And when you do have a lot of news to to send, to share, prioritize it. So any less time-sensitive emails, you can combine those into a single digest. They don't necessarily all need to go out as an individual email all at once. In terms of open rates, so if we think back to open rates dropping this year, how do we get those back up? The first one is really simple. Subject lines. That's the first thing employees see of any email. Your subject line can make or break it, your open rate. You also want to identify the best sending times. So you want to reach employees just as they're opening their inbox. You want to reach them at a time when they're— when your email isn't getting buried by a bunch of other emails, and you want to reach them at a time when they have time to read. You also want to segment your email lists. So get the right information to the right people. By this, I just mean You know, if this is an email that really is only going to be interesting to people in marketing, send it to the people in marketing. Don't send it to the whole organization. So why don't we kind of go into a little more detail with some of that? Subject lines. So what are the elements of an attention-grabbing subject line? The first one is just specificity and detail. So if we look here at these 2, so something like can't miss tactics for internal communicators versus something like bad culture is the number one employee reason employees leave. Can't miss tactics, can't miss, you know, you hear that kind of wording all the time. It's overused. There's not really— there's a sense of urgency, but it's a very false sense of urgency. And there's just not enough detail about what makes these tactics valuable. Bad culture, number one reason employees leave. First of all, you get kind of a sneak peek of what's in this email. You— it identifies a culprit right away. And it has kind of a punchy sentiment that hinges on a pain point that you might be seeing. So you're much more likely, I think, to open something like that. Also something like dates or times that are relevant to the content of the email. Just kind of give as much information as you can upfront without going overboard in terms of subject line length. You also want to create a sense of urgency. So something like top internal email templates of 2024, it's not compelling, it's not generic, it's kind of generic, and it won't really give you a reason to open right away. 8 email templates you need right now and can send by lunch. It's, it's going to immediately tell you, hey, you can look through this really quickly. You can start using it right away. And it's not going to be, you know, it's not going to be a painful experience. Open this right now and get going. And that's always going to have more of an impact. The final one, curiosity and personalization. So you want to make it feel like this email is for the person you're sending it to, even if it's for them and everybody else. So something like engaging employee feedback tips for you. Just because you say something's engaging doesn't mean it actually is. It's kind of boring. It's not memorable. What if you got an email in your inbox saying, are you asking your team the right questions, Stan? Now, if your name is actually Stan, you probably got a bit of a spook right now. But even if it isn't, if that was your name, I think you can imagine that that would feel like it was for you. So things like merge fields to add a first name or other information into an email. Is going to make it more personable and make it connect more with your audience. And now, in terms of sending times, so when you're creating internal guidelines and best practices for sending times, you want to start with the data. I'm gonna emphasize this so much. I'm gonna continue emphasizing this. You need data. You need data about your organization, and if you don't have data or you don't know how you're doing in terms of other companies in your industry, you need those benchmarks. So both time of day and day of the week will have an effect on your open rate and on your click rates. Effective sending times, like I said, differ wildly from industry to industry. And benchmarks have limited uses if you're not collecting your own metrics. So what are you going to compare to a benchmark if you don't have your own data? So first off, just thinking about choosing a sending time, you want to choose one based on your own analytics data, obviously. So you want to consider both overall open rates and the timeline of open. So what you're seeing here is from the ContactMonkey dashboard, the engagement distribution timeline. It's basically from sending when did that email get opened and clicked on? And you can see that, you know, where that peak is. And over time, you can get a sense of, you know, not just how soon after an email is sent people are opening it, but also what time of day. And you kind of want to find a balance between getting the most opens overall and getting opens soon. So if you have a send time that's less optimized for getting the most overall opens, but you need a response right away, then maybe you want to look at this distribution timeline and figure out kind of the next soonest time people are likely to be opening their emails. And that could be a balancing act for you. Like I said, day and time matter. So Of the 20 industries that we looked at in the benchmark report, we had the— in general, the most effective day of the week to send was Monday, and that was the best sending day for 12 out of 20 industries. The least effective day of the week to send was Sunday, which was only the best sending day for 2 of the 20 industries. Most effective sending time was 10 AM, and the least effective sending time was 7 AM. Now, I do want to emphasize this is a generalization. If you work on any of those industries that are comprising the data on the right, so that's Sunday, that's 7 AM, those are still your best sending times. So you want to look industry by industry whenever possible. So, you know, just to kind of really drive home the differences here. If you look, if you work in the legal industry versus the utilities industry, your best time and day for internal emails, wildly different. So you want to make sure that you understand, and the benchmark report does have best days and times for all of the 20 industries that we look at. In terms of improving click rates, you don't want to overlook design. Design helps make an email easier and more engaging to read. That's what it's there for. It's not just for making things look pretty. And also making things look pretty also makes a design, an email pretty, like not just prettier, but more engaging, easier to read. You want to have an intuitive layout. So think of your email layout as a roadmap for your reader. Guide them through the information in the order that you want. And drive a 2-way conversation. Use feedback tools, do surveys, have— let your employees have a say. And what, when we're talking about optimizing design, you know, what do we mean and how do we do that? Well, first of all, I'm a big advocate of click maps. So what is a click map? It's basically an activity heat map that lets you see your link click-throughs in the context of the original email. So it's useful for strategizing about changes you want to make. So if you look at something like this newsletter right here on the right, what does a click map for that look like? Something like this. So you can see that of the 3 links included in the email, 2 of them got 30% plus click rate, but then that skill boost alert at the very top is only getting 15% click. click-throughs. So this is useful, this specific click map, because you can look at the newsletter with those metrics. So you're not trying to kind of map those 2 things in your head. You're just going like, okay, this is, this is what it looks like. What are my instincts about why this isn't working? And so if you're looking at something like that skill boost alert, what might be the problem. It could be that learn more is very generic button text. If they're just skimming the email, maybe they're just not interested in learning more because they don't really know what they're learning more about. Also, if you see something like the RSVP button down below, it's, you know, bright and colorful. It just pops out more on the page. Maybe it's just a design issue. Maybe the button needs to look a little bit more inviting. On the other hand, if something like the team building event weren't getting clicks and the other 2 were, then you might come to the conclusion, oh, all of the content on one side is getting clicks and not on the other. Maybe it's just a matter of people skimming down the page. And I really want to emphasize, it could be content. There's You know, there's no doubt that it could just be the content, but this is something that you can try, that you can iterate on, and that you can make changes based on the data and then see data in future newsletters to kind of see what the best practices for your organization are. And so in this case, you could change the copy, you could change the design. So that skill boost alert now says Empower Career. It's bright blue. You know, it might not work, but it gives you something to try based on your actual observations of your content. And as you collect data over time, you see trends, you make changes, you test your hypotheses, and those design standards get kind of solidified. And so we're, we're almost at the end. So these are just kind of some extra best practices that you might want to think about. Keep communications mobile-friendly. Make sure your emails are able to be opened on mobile. Make sure they're responsive. Make sure they look okay and aren't broken on mobile. Include custom branding. So make sure your communications are on brand, not just externally, but internally. Always important. Take advantage of collaboration tools. So anything where you can keep communicators and stakeholders on the same page is always helpful. And solve writer's block with AI tools. You just want to get something down on the page sometimes. That's okay. Go from there. And those are kind of the benchmarks that I wanted to talk about with you today. You will be getting a copy of the report that these are all coming from, so you can kind of look at your own industry. But you can also download your own copy if you can't quite wait for that email. And Thank you so much for, for coming out and listening to this. I would love if there are any questions to answer them.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you, Helen. Really like your last point in a couple of slides ago about email and how it's sort of like a blank canvas to revise and see what works best for your internal communication strategy. It's sort of like a blank canvas. You can You can do some A/B testing, see what results you get, and then whatever receives the best engagement, pivot and go from there. So really enjoyed that part. Thank you. If anyone does— you're welcome. If anyone does have any questions, please enter them in the chat. But until we start getting some questions, I did have a question, Helen. Maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, if I've recently joined a large corporation and the internal comms team is very new and doesn't have many processes in place, where would you recommend starting to improve internal communication ROI?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And I think my answer is going to come as No shock to after this presentation. And that's, you know, you bring in the tools that will help you measure your internal comms. You, the first thing you're going to need is always tools that work for you, but always keep an eye to tracking and measurement and finding ways to show progress. as you make any further changes. So understanding what is and what isn't working is great. It also gives you a place to focus your efforts because you might in some ways have great comms and in other ways not, not really have as much happening. So, you know, if you can measure it, you can get that information and you can strategize From there forward.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you. We do have a question from Marianne. Thank you so much for your question and putting it in the chat. Do you know offhand what the 2 industries are that Sunday is the best email time? And Marianne works for Girl Guides of Canada, and she finds that weekends work well to reach our volunteers. So I'm curious if not-for-profit is one of them.

Speaker B: That is a good question. Let me actually— I think I could probably pull that up for you. I know offhand, I know that one of them is retail. And let me just find that other one for you real quick. I bet I could do it. So it's actually retail and insurance are the 2 where you're getting responses and opens more. for Sundays. And that doesn't mean that no other industries, you know, will get, you know, that no other industries get opens and clicks-throughs if they send on Sundays. It just means that for those particular industries, it's a higher than average amount of opens that you see if you send something through on a Sunday. Thanks so much for that question, though, Marianne.

Speaker A: Excellent. And Helen, another question from me. What's more important for internal communications metric? Would you say it's click rates or open rates? What would you generally focus on?

Speaker B: I would say that's— I mean, that's a great question. And with so many things, my answer is going to be it depends, unfortunately. But I do actually think that in this case, you know, if we think back to that kind of drop in open rates that we saw this year, you might want to start with something like that. Is looking like, what is there a one of those things that is, you know, dropping or that you're seeing like a really infrequent amount of engagement with emails, but those people who are clicking, like who are opening them are clicking through, maybe that's not the thing to focus on. On the other hand, you know, maybe if your organizational mandate is like, you know, get, get people going to these links, get people, you know, engaging with the content inside the emails. Maybe even if your open rates aren't as high, you're really focusing on those click-through rates. I think it, it really depends, but you want to start with the data first and foremost is look at what does your actual organizational, you know, What are your problems? What are your challenges in your organization? And if you don't necessarily know, you know, start with that. And also, I would emphasize, look at your industry because, you know, you might have that general benchmark in mind. So like that general 69% open rate, that's the average this year. And you might be looking at something like a 67 and you're going like, oh my God, you know, like, it's so low. What are we going to do? We're below our competitors. And then if you actually look at your industry, maybe your industry is sitting at like a 65% open rate and you're actually way ahead of the curve. So in that case, you're golden. Maybe that's not the thing that you focus on.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you for answering that. Also, what would you recommend doing if your organization is in an industry that wasn't mentioned in the report?

Speaker B: That's a great question. I mean, first of all, I will say that as much as I've been harping on these industry-specific ones, we do have the general ones that you can start with. But more importantly, you can start, you know, share— you can start building and sharing and working off of your own internal benchmarks. So the industry ones are great to start off with, but if you are collecting data consistently and if you have, you know, several years of data going back, that's a great place to start and look at, you know, like, what are our averages? What can we look at in terms of improving? And, you know, what goals do we want to set for ourselves vis-à-vis our own internal benchmarks. And so start with tracking, start with your own internal tracking information. And, you know, industry benchmarks are a great tool to use in combination with that. But I would say your own tracking is always going to trump everything else. So, you know, it's okay if you don't have those industry benchmarks, as long as you have your own internal benchmarks.

Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you for that. And one final question. How important is optimizing email for mobile, mobile for employees?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I did, I touched on it a little bit in the end, but that's actually, you know, I would like to kind of talk about it a little bit more because so one of the things that we look at in this report, and I didn't include it so much in these slides, but it is good to know is desktop versus email versus mobile opens for emails. And what we're kind of seeing year over year is that, you know, most people are opening their emails on mobile— on desktop, but not all. And certainly in some industries, quite a few are opening on mobile because You know, you have frontline workers, you have deskless employees that are just not going to be sitting at a desk and opening their emails. And regardless, you want employees to be able to open those emails kind of wherever and whenever. You don't want something that breaks when it gets to your mobile device. You don't want something that can't be displayed on mobile. And that's definitely, you know, a concern. So when you have something like Contact Monkey, for example, that works to make sure those emails are responsive, then you can preview what those are going to look like on mobile. And you want to take the time to do that. You want to take the time to think about what the experience for employees will be on different devices. Because employees are just going to have different preferences and they're going to get emails at different times. You know, it's not a bad idea to make sure that they're helpful, that those emails are helpful for them and are useful to them no matter how they engage with them.

Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you so much for that answer. So I think that brings us to the conclusion of our webinar. I don't see any further questions in the chat. So I wanted to thank our audience. Thank you so much for joining today's session. Thank you, Helen, for your insights around the benchmark results and the report. And I wish you a wonderful day.