By: Robert Soares | The company newsletter went out Tuesday. 2,400 employees. 12% open rate.
That's 288 people who clicked. Most of them probably skimmed and closed. The CEO's quarterly update? Buried below the fold. The new benefits enrollment deadline? Maybe 50 people saw it.
Three weeks later, employees complain they "never got the memo."
They got it. They just didn't read it.
Why Does Nobody Read Internal Communications?
Because email is broken for this purpose.
Your employees get dozens of emails per day. External emails. Meeting invites. Slack overflow. Task notifications. And somewhere in that noise, your monthly newsletter. According to Staffbase research, even well-performing internal communications only achieve around 80% open rates at smaller companies, and it drops significantly as company size increases.
The subject line says "Company Update - March 2026." Their brain registers "not urgent, ignore."
It's not that employees don't care about company news. They do. They just don't have time to care about it right now. And "right now" is always when you're sending.
So the newsletter sits unopened. Or it gets opened, glanced at, and closed. Same difference.
The problem isn't your content. It's the channel. Email trains people to triage ruthlessly. Internal comms always loses that triage.
The numbers back this up. A Staffbase and USC Annenberg study found that 61% of employees considering leaving their jobs cite poor internal communication as a factor. And Gallup reports that only 7% of U.S. workers strongly agree that communication at work is accurate, timely, and open.
Seven percent.
What Actually Works for Internal Communications?
Three things: format, accessibility, and measurement.
Format That Stands Out
Your newsletter needs to feel different from email.
When someone opens a wall of text that looks like every other email they received today, they treat it like every other email. Skim and delete.
But when something looks visually different, they engage differently. An interactive flipbook with pages to turn feels more like browsing a magazine than reading email. The animation catches attention. The format suggests "this is worth exploring."
This isn't gimmicky. It's psychology. Interactive content generates 52.6% more engagement than static content, with users spending 13 minutes on interactive formats versus 8.5 minutes on static ones. The same information, delivered differently, gets read more.
Does it sound like extra work to make a flipbook instead of an email? It's not. Upload your content. The tool creates the flipbook. Same amount of work for you, more engagement from them.
Accessibility That Removes Friction
Every click you require loses readers.
Email with PDF attachment? Click to download, wait for it to open, find the file, click again. Too many steps.
Link to SharePoint document? Click, authenticate (because SSO always forgets you), navigate to folder, find file, click to open, wait for it to load. Way too many steps.
Link to interactive flipbook? Click. It opens instantly in the browser. That's it. One click, already reading.
The difference seems small. It's not. Funnel analysis research shows that roughly 79% of users drop off at the awareness stage alone. Each additional step you add gives people another reason to quit.
Make it one click to read. No logins. No downloads. No SharePoint hunting.
Measurement That Shows Reality
You need to know what's actually happening.
Email open rates are unreliable. Someone's email client might auto-load images (counts as open). Someone might glance at preview text without clicking (doesn't count). As PoliteMail's 2025 benchmark report put it after analyzing 4.8 billion internal emails: "An open rate is the base rate... But it's the least actionable measurement."
And email opens tell you nothing about engagement. They clicked. Did they read? Did they make it past the first paragraph? Did they see the important announcement on page 3?
Better measurement looks like this:
- Unique readers (not just opens)
- Time spent reading
- Pages viewed (for longer content)
- Which sections got attention
- Who read vs. who didn't (yes, by person)
When you know that 400 people read your newsletter but only 50 made it to the benefits announcement, you've learned something important. Either the benefits info needs to move up, or people need a separate communication for it.
Data turns guessing into knowing.
What Do Internal Comms Teams Need From Tools?
Easy Content Creation
Nobody has time for complicated design work.
Your tool should let you upload existing content (Word, PDF, whatever you have), add images and video, customize branding with company colors and logo, and preview how it looks on mobile. Most internal comms teams aren't designers. The tool should make them look like designers without the learning curve.
Templates help. Pre-built layouts for newsletters, announcements, CEO messages. Drop your content in, adjust as needed, done.
Distribution That Meets People Where They Are
Your audience is scattered across platforms. Some people live in email. Some live in Slack. Some live in Teams. Some check the intranet. Some do none of these things reliably.
One piece of content, multiple distribution points. Direct email with embedded preview. Slack channel posting. Teams integration. Intranet embed. QR code for physical locations. Direct link for whatever else. Meet employees where they already are, because asking them to come to you hasn't been working.
Analytics That Answer Real Questions
Not just aggregate stats. Individual tracking.
Why? Because when the CEO asks "did the New York office get the message about the policy change?" you need a real answer. Not a percentage. A list.
Reader-level tracking tells you who has read (and who hasn't), when they read, how much they read, and which sections they engaged with. This isn't surveillance. It's basic accountability. If you're sending important information, you should know if it arrived.
Some organizations use this for compliance. "All employees must read the updated code of conduct." With reader-level tracking, you know exactly who hasn't complied.
Segmentation and Mobile
Not every message is for everyone. Company-wide announcements, department-specific updates, region-specific news, manager-only briefings. Your tool should let you define audience segments, target content to specific groups, and send follow-ups only to non-readers. Relevance drives engagement. If someone consistently gets messages that don't apply to them, they learn to ignore everything you send.
And mobile isn't optional. More than half your employees will first see your content on their phone. If your newsletter requires pinch-and-zoom, you've lost them before you started.
What Does Effective Internal Comms Look Like?
The Monthly Newsletter, Rethought
You have 1,500 employees across 4 offices. Monthly newsletter covers a CEO message, department highlights, benefits reminders, upcoming events, and an employee spotlight.
The traditional approach: create a 2,000-word email, add some images, send to all@company.com. Results: 15% open rate (225 people). No idea how many actually read it. CEO asks why nobody knew about the Q2 priorities. You show the open rate and shrug.
What works better: create an interactive flipbook. Eight pages. CEO message first. Department highlights in the middle. Benefits reminder on page 5 where it gets its own space. Employee spotlight at the end.
Upload it to your document platform. Send via email AND post to Slack AND embed on the intranet. Three distribution channels, one piece of content.
Results look different. 45% engagement rate (675 people). You see that 500+ people made it to page 5 (benefits reminder). The employee spotlight got the most time-per-page. Page 3 (operations department highlight) had 40% drop-off.
Now you know things. The benefits message reached 500+ people. Employee spotlights are popular (do more of them). Page 3 is boring (fix it or cut it). And 825 people haven't engaged yet, so maybe send a targeted reminder.
The second approach isn't harder. It's just smarter.
The Compliance Document That Proves Itself
New harassment policy takes effect in 30 days. All employees must read and acknowledge.
The traditional approach: email the PDF, ask people to reply confirming they read it, chase non-responders manually, hope your spreadsheet is accurate. After two weeks of chasing: 60% response rate. You have no idea if that 60% actually read it or just replied to make you go away.
The better approach: create an interactive document with acknowledgment required at the end. Enable tracking. Set up automated reminders at day 7, 14, and 21. You get 85% completion in week one because the reminders do the work. 97% by deadline. The 3% remaining are on leave, and you have documentation.
Six months later, someone claims they "didn't know about the new policy." You pull up their completion record with a timestamp. Conversation over.
How Do You Measure Internal Comms Effectiveness?
Reach vs. Engagement
Reach metrics tell you how many people accessed your content. Unique readers, reach rate (readers divided by total audience), and platform breakdown (how many came from email vs. Slack vs. intranet, so you know which channels actually work).
But reach isn't enough. Engagement metrics tell you what happened after they opened it. Average time spent tells you if people are skimming or reading. Completion rate tells you who finished. Page-level engagement shows which sections held attention and which ones lost people. Return visits indicate reference value.
Track both. One tells you "they showed up." The other tells you "they cared."
Trends Over Time
Month-over-month comparison shows whether engagement is improving or declining. Topic performance reveals whether CEO messages outperform HR updates, or if events get more traction than policy announcements. Segment differences show whether the sales team engages more than engineering, or whether the London office reads more than New York.
Set baselines. Watch for trends. If engagement drops suddenly, something changed. Figure out what.
Common Internal Comms Challenges
"People say they never see our messages"
They're not lying. They're overwhelmed.
Fix it with redundancy. Don't rely on email alone. Post in Slack. Embed on the intranet. Drop a link in the all-hands meeting chat. Redundancy isn't annoying for important messages. It's necessary.
"Open rates are terrible"
Open rates are a limited metric anyway. According to PoliteMail's 2025 benchmark research, the average internal email open rate across 4.8 billion emails is around 64%, meaning one in three employees don't even open corporate messages. If you want to improve them: better subject lines (specific beats generic), send timing (Tuesday-Thursday, 10am or 2pm), sender name (a person's name beats a department name), and preview text that hooks instead of defaulting to boilerplate.
But really, focus on engagement metrics. Someone who opens and reads is worth 10 people who open and skim.
"Leadership wants to know if people read the CEO message"
Now you need reader-level tracking. Without it, you're guessing. With it, you have a list. "342 people read the CEO message in the first week. Here's the breakdown by department." If leadership wants accountability, give them accountability.
"We send too many communications"
Probably true. Consolidate. Can the HR update and the IT update and the Facilities update all go in one monthly newsletter? Yes. Should they? Probably. Every separate communication competes with the others. Fewer, better communications beat frequent, forgettable ones.
What's the Real Cost of Unread Communications?
You spend 5 hours creating a monthly newsletter. If 15% of employees read it, you're spending 5 hours to reach 15%. Same 5 hours with a 45% engagement rate? Your effort goes 3x further.
But the real cost isn't your time. It's the consequences of people not knowing things. Benefits enrollment deadlines missed because nobody read the reminder. Policy violations because employees "didn't know." Initiatives failing because nobody understood them. Employee frustration because they feel out of the loop.
Bad internal communications create problems that cost far more than any tool subscription. Good internal communications build culture, alignment, and engagement. That's hard to put a number on, but it's real.
Getting Started
If your company newsletter has a 12% open rate, the fix isn't writing a better email. It's changing the format, expanding distribution, and actually measuring what happens after you hit send.
Take your next newsletter and convert it to interactive format. Track engagement at the reader and page level. Compare to your email-only baseline. Most internal comms teams see significant improvement just from the format change alone, before they even start optimizing content.
See how internal comms teams use Flipbooker
Your employees aren't ignoring your messages because they don't care. They're ignoring them because the messages don't cut through the noise. Give them something different. Then track what happens.