Best ways to gauge whether employees read your content

This is the third article in a four-part content series on internal email measurement. This series, in partnership with PoliteMail, offers tips and multiple ways to improve your internal email communications.

For some corporate editors, it can sometimes feel as though creating content happens in a vacuum. They think they know what the audience wants, but how can they really be sure?

That’s basically where the team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found itself before it began using a Microsoft Outlook plugin called PoliteMail to measure open rates and clicks on links within email newsletters.

What internal communications strategist Abby Bronstein wound up discovering was that some employees were waiting up to three weeks to open messages, which meant employees would probably want content that would still be relevant weeks after the message was sent. Breaking news wouldn’t mean much to them. Likewise, employees who work outside the main campus were interested in totally different topics and events.

You’ve got to get feedback to know what your employees want. That’s the key to creating a newsletter that employees can really dig into, communicators and experts say.