What do internal email open and click rates actually tell you?
Emma Fischer in Internal Communication
The short answer
Internal email open and click rates are useful signals, but only if you read them in context. Because list size, industry, workforce type, and send timing all shape the numbers, a raw comparison against benchmarks won't tell you why your rates look the way they do or what to do about them. The more useful question isn't "are we above or below average?" It's "what's causing the gap, and can we influence it?"
What most communicators get wrong about benchmarks
Most internal comms benchmarks are treated as targets. That's the wrong frame. A benchmark tells you where others land, but it doesn't tell you whether their conditions match yours. A healthcare organization with rotating shift workers and a high-volume inbox will almost always underperform a 200-person tech company on open rates. That gap reflects workforce structure, not communication quality. Chasing the wrong benchmark can lead you to optimize for the wrong things.
Why does list size affect open and click rates?
Larger distribution lists tend to show lower open and click rates than smaller ones, data that has remained consistent over the years.
According to PoliteMail's 2024/2025 Internal Email Communications Benchmark Report, which analyzed over 4 billion emails across more than 12 million employees, the average internal email open rate sits at around 64%. Organizations sending to smaller lists (fewer than 1,000 employees) typically see open rates above 80% and click rates around 17–20%. For larger distribution lists (over 1,000 employees), open rates tend to drop below 80%, with click rates ranging between 7–15%.
There are a few plausible reasons for this:
Content fit. The larger the list, the harder it is to make the content relevant to everyone. Employees who consistently receive emails that don't apply to their role or location often stop opening them.
Workforce access. Larger lists frequently include employees who aren't on regular schedules, aren't always at a desk, or work across time zones. Emails sent at the wrong time get buried.
Company size as a confound. Smaller list sizes often correlate with smaller overall company size, and smaller companies tend to have higher engagement across the board, for reasons that have more to do with culture and proximity than distribution mechanics.
This matters for how you interpret segmentation. Splitting a 5,000-person list into five segments of 1,000 may not automatically lift your open rates, because the underlying factors — shift work, inbox overload, content relevance — don't go away just because the list is smaller. Segmentation helps when it allows you to make content more relevant. It doesn't help when it's just a numbers exercise.
Should you still trust open rates as a benchmark?
It's worth noting that open rate data has become less reliable in recent years. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection automatically preloads email content for Apple Mail users, even if they never actually open the email, which has significantly skewed open rate figures upward across the industry, as reported by HubSpot research, which proposes the following benchmarks for email open rates:
Above 30% is a solid open rate
45-50% is a strong open rate
50%+ is an exceptional open rate
For context, Hubspot reports the average email open rate across industries at around 42% as of 2025 — well below the internal comms average of 64% cited in PoliteMail's report. Employees are more likely to open a company email than a promotional message, which is why internal and external benchmarks shouldn't be compared directly.
A lack of reliability is one reason open rate is increasingly treated as the base rate and not something that's particularly actionable on its own. Click-through rates and attention rates tend to give a clearer picture of whether employees actually engaged with the content.
Why do open and click rates vary so much by industry?
Industry norms, workforce rhythms, and email culture all shape the baseline. According to ContactMonkey's 2026 Internal Email Benchmark Report, which analyzed more than 100,000 anonymized internal email campaigns across 20+ industries, the average open rate for internal comms across all industries is 81% — well above what most external marketing benchmarks report, because employees treat company communications differently than promotional emails.
The industry breakdown shows meaningful variation.
Banks lead with an average open rate of 89%, followed by Capital Goods and Pharmaceuticals (87%), and Biotechnology and Life Sciences (86%)
At the lower end, Transportation sits at 72% and Consumer Durables and Apparel at 73%.
The report notes that industries with the strongest engagement tend to be those where communications carry a direct action requirement, such as a policy acknowledgment, a compliance deadline, or an operational update. Industries where employees are less likely to be at a desk when communications arrive naturally see lower rates.
Why do some industries consistently underperform?
Differing email open rate patterns make sense when you look at the conditions behind them. Banks, Capital Goods, and Pharmaceuticals employees are largely desk-based, operate in regulated environments, and are accustomed to treating internal email as requiring a response. Transportation and Consumer Durables workers are more likely to be on the floor, on a route, or in a warehouse when communications arrive, which means even a well-written email may simply land at the wrong moment.
These aren't conclusions about communication quality. They reflect structural differences. If your rates don't match your industry average, the first question to ask is whether your conditions match the benchmark's conditions.
Connecting employees on the frontline
Transdev Australia, a public transport operator with 6,900 employees across Australia and New Zealand, is a good example of what reaching frontline workers looks like in practice. Most of their workforce consists of drivers, operators, and field staff who aren't at a desk when communications arrive. Email open rates in that environment will never reflect the industry average for a bank or a pharmaceuticals company, and treating them as if they should leads to the wrong conclusions. Transdev's solution wasn't to optimize their emails — it was to rethink the channel entirely.
Using Staffbase, Transdev moved to a mobile-first approach that gave frontline employees simple, immediate access to company communications without complex setups. The results reflected the change in approach: 85% employee engagement and 89% employee satisfaction, which is 30% higher engagement than their industry average.
What other factors affect your specific numbers?
Beyond industry and list size, several variables tend to move the needle in ways benchmarks can't capture:
Audience email habits — Do your employees get high volumes of external email, too? Have they been trained to treat internal comms as low priority?
Workforce location and access — Are employees desk-based, field-based, or hybrid? Do they check email throughout the day or only at set times?
Send timing — Are emails landing during shift changes, at the start of high-volume workdays, or when employees are actively at their desks?
Content relevance — Is the email clearly about something that affects this employee, or does it read like it was sent to everyone?
None of these can be fixed by tracking benchmarks. They require testing within your own environment.
When do benchmarks actually help?
The metrics worth tracking alongside open rates are click-through rate (did they engage with the content?), read time (did they actually absorb it?), and, where available, sentiment or alignment signals (did it land the way you intended?). Tracked consistently over time and segmented by audience group, these give you a much more actionable picture than a single open rate compared against an industry average.
Think of it this way: You can use benchmarks to calibrate your starting point and identify whether you're dramatically under or over typical patterns. They're useful if you've never tracked internal email data before and need a rough frame of reference.
When are benchmarks not useful?
Don't use benchmarks to set performance goals or to declare success. Your goal isn't to beat the healthcare average. Your goal is to understand why your numbers look the way they do. Then you can identify what you can change.
This is especially true for segmentation decisions. If your open rates are low because your workforce is largely shift-based and field-facing, segmenting by department won't fix that. You may need to rethink the delivery channel altogether — email may not be the right primary channel for some employee groups.
Where this advice doesn't apply
If your organization has fewer than a few hundred employees, industry benchmarks are likely too noisy to be useful as reference points. Variance in smaller datasets is high, and a single campaign can move your averages significantly. Focus instead on trend lines within your own data over time.
How do you move from tracking open rates to measuring real impact?
Benchmarks tell you where you stand relative to peers. They don't tell you whether employees understood the message, agreed with it, or took the action you needed.
Staffbase Email gives you the segmented analytics to go beyond open rates: who read what, how long they spent reading, and how engagement varies across teams, locations, and roles. For critical updates, you can follow up automatically with only the employees who haven't opened it yet, meaning no noise for everyone else or manual chasing.
Staffbase Smart Impact goes further, letting you build campaigns tied to strategic goals, measure employee sentiment and alignment through integrated surveys, and track whether your narrative is actually resonating and not just whether the email was opened. When leadership asks whether the all-hands message landed, you'll have the evidence to answer.
The gap between sending a message and knowing it worked is where most IC teams traditionally get stuck. With AI-powered tools, it doesn't have to be.
Next steps
If you don't have internal email analytics in place yet, that's the starting point, because you'll need a baseline before benchmarks mean anything.
If you do have data, the next useful step is to segment your sends by workforce type (desk vs. non-desk, for example) and compare open rates within those segments rather than against a single overall number.
Want to see how Staffbase tracks and surfaces this data? We'll show you how to start collecting your own benchmarks and building a measurement strategy that actually reflects your workforce.
This article reflects benchmark data and market conditions as of April 2026.
