If a third of your employees never open a company email, why does a 66 per cent open rate still get reported to leadership as a win?
PoliteMail’s 2026 Internal Email Benchmark Report, drawn from two billion internal emails, puts the average unique open rate at 66.2 per cent. That’s the industry ceiling, and it still means a third of the workforce never gets past the subject line. An open rate in the mid-sixties looks fine on a dashboard and tells you exactly nothing about whether the message did its job.
What I’d rather see reported: can employees explain the change in their own words weeks later, did the behaviour the message was meant to prompt actually follow, adoption, uptake, mobility, fewer helpdesk questions on something that was supposedly already explained. Trust matters just as much, tracked over time rather than after one send: are people more or less willing to take leadership communication at face value than they were a quarter ago.
The send is the easy, visible part of the job. Everything that proves the communication worked happens after it, quietly, where nobody’s dashboard is looking.
What would your comms report look like if opens and clicks were banned from it for a quarter?
