Corporate Email Volume Grew In 2020, As Did Response, Study Finds

Companies send an average of 68 email broadcasts to employees per month, achieving an open rate of 70% -- a number many marketers might envy. 

But only 60.5% of employees ever read the emails, and 9.5% simply ignore them, according to Corporate Communications: Internal Benchmarks for 10 Industries, a study by PoliteMail. 

However, the email pace picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Starting in March 2020, corporate communications teams sent 72% more email, containing 58% more minutes of content than in the prior year. 

Despite the volume increase, read rates declined by only 1.3% and the click rate by 4.2%, while employees clicked 82% more links than they did in 2019. 

The average corporate email is 475 words, and takes 1:54 minutes to read.  However, of those who open it, 20% will read less than 30%, while 40.7% will red 30% or more. Another 36.3% will read over half.  

And 16% will read such emails on mobile devices. 

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Overall, each employee receives 16 emails per month, containing 34:50 minutes of content and 121 links. These emails will engage 76% of email openers and 43% of the total audience. They will spend 29:23 digesting the content.  

In general, recipients will click on at least one link 8% of the time, and openers will do so 11% of the time. 

The read  rate has averaged 33.9% and the “engaged read” rate 28.2%. 

Email readership peaked last summer, but fell off slightly in December. 

PoliteMail analyzed over 1.3 billion internal emails to over 8.5 million employees worldwide. 

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