Article

What to Measure in your Email Communications

« Go Back

Information

 
Full Story

Poppulo Reports provide detailed analysis of how your emails are being consumed by your readers. There’s a range of reports available, covering content popularity, click maps, performance trends over time and what platforms are being used to by employees to view your communications.

To help you measure your email performance, we’ve suggested a few tips on what to measure once you’ve sent your communication.
 

Delivery statistics:

This sounds obvious, but always check your delivery stats after any email you send. The Overview Reports page shows the total number of employees that the message was sent to, how many opened and clicked the communication, as well as any instances were an email was not delivered (bounces). If you notice a large number of emails bouncing, contact Poppulo Support for help. 

  • Top tip: If you have an important message that needs to be viewed by all employees, use Search to identify all employees that haven’t opened your communication. You can then send a follow-up to these employees directly. 

 

Content Popularity:

The Content Popularity widget ranks articles according to how many employees opened and clicked each. It gives you a quick view of what content employees find most engaging, as well as the content that’s not capturing their attention. You can also view the most popular content over 3, 6 or 12 issues to identify trends within each of your Folders.

  • Top Tip: Share content popularity results with your team, and discuss how you can feed this information into your wider content strategy.

  • You might notice stories about employees receive high numbers of opens/clicks, or those with videos and images. Identifying what tactics work can make a big difference to how you craft your communications.

  • If you spot articles that are not performing well, think about how you can make those more engaging or whether they can be dropped from your email communications completely. 

 

Use Click Maps:

Click maps provide you with a virtual heat map of what content employees are clicking once the message lands in your inbox. It’s a great way to see what content is popular, as well as the design features of your template that are grabbing the attention of your readers.

  • Top tip: See our article on Email Design Best Practice for more tips and tricks on how to use design to ‘surprise and delight’ your readers. 

 

Measure Social Activity:

The Social Activity widget ranks articles based on how many comments, ratings or likes each received. However, don’t stop there. Make sure you share the comments received under each article with your team and other internal stakeholders when reporting on your Emails – they’re a great source of feedback and provide insight into how messages are landing across the organisation.

  • Top tip: Click on the comments sub-tab to view the full list of comments received in that Email. You can sort the comments by date added, or by specific articles – making it much easier to copy this information into any reports you’re compiling for your team.

 

See what Devices Employees use to view Emails:

The Platform Reports page provides you with a range of metrics showing which operating systems, internet browsers, Email clients and the type of device are being used by employees to view your communications. If you notice large numbers of employees are reading your Emails on a smartphone or tablet in the Device Type Report, think about how you could make your templates more mobile-friendly to ensure the user experience is as simple as possible for those employees. 

 

Don’t just use Poppulo to Measure Email Performance:

Complement your Poppulo Reports with examples of how your email communications are helping to deliver value across the business. Below we’ve listed a few examples of how you can measure your impact in common Internal Comms scenarios:

  • HR policies and promotions e.g. if you’re promoting the latest benefit scheme, measure the number of people that signed up to it following your article

  • Performance and Development Plans e.g. work with HR to measure how many people submitted their PDF reports on time

  • Event attendance e.g. measure the number of employees that attended any events that were promoted in your communications

  • Internal campaigns (e.g. Environmental or Product initiatives): measure the number of people that signed up or registered interest in taking part in any campaign or initiative publicised through your communications

  • Top tip: Thoughtfarmer.com has a great blog post outlining a number of different ways you can use intranet metrics to measure business outcomes (a lot of the ideas can be used across any internal channel).
     

 

Share your Results:

Again, this might sound obvious but be sure to share your results with stakeholders across the organisation. Senior Executives, Programme and Project Managers and other internal teams (e.g. HR, Product and Environment teams) find a huge amount of value seeing reports outlining how many people have read or commented on particular articles. Sharing this information with relevant stakeholders is one of the easiest ways to improve visibility of internal communications within your organisation.
 
In fact, we think that this last point is so powerful that we’ve written a whole article on it – Share reports with Stakeholders
 

Related Articles: 

Was this article helpful?

   

Feedback

Please tell us how we can make this article more useful.

Characters Remaining: 255