Let’s be honest, most businesses spend far more time measuring how they communicate with customers than they do with their own people.
Marketing teams obsess over email open rates, campaign attribution and engagement metrics, and HR teams work tirelessly to improve employee experience. Internal newsletters and company updates are shared and received, “how are we doing?” surveys are sent and completed – but then what?
Did people read that important announcement? Who actually engaged with it? What actions were taken? Did morale improve? Are people using the new bin system in the office kitchen? How do you know?
These are the types of questions that often don’t get answered because internal communications are sometimes built on assumptions rather than evidence.
The good news is that many organisations already have the tools to change that. If you’re using HubSpot, for example, your CRM can become a powerful platform for measuring, refining and improving internal communications, helping marketing and HR work together to build a more engaged organisation.
Internal comms deserves the same attention as external comms
When we work with organisations, we often see sophisticated marketing reporting sitting alongside internal comms that are almost impossible to measure. When you think about it, this should be surprising because your employees are arguably your most important audience. They’re your brand ambassadors, the people delivering your customer experience, and the ones who need to understand organisational change, business priorities and company values before anyone else does.
Yet, many internal comms strategies still rely on sending an email and hoping for the best. So, what’s the answer? What would you be telling your own team if they were a client of yours?
Start by understanding engagement
HubSpot’s emailing reporting gives you immediate visibility into how well that communication has landed. Rather than simply asking whether an email was send, you can begin asking much more valuable questions:
- How many employees actually received the email?
- What percentage opened it?
- Which subject lines generated the strongest engagement?
- Which links attracted the most interest?
- Which departments engaged most?
Those insights help you understand whether your communication was genuinely effective or simply delivered successfully - two very different things. Luckily, your CRM’s performance page can give you all this data in one place, allowing you to analyse email marketing performance, drill into delivery rates, and assess engagement for individual sends.
And if you spot some gaps in your email marketing and need support to fix them? The HubSpot Email Marketing Certification, part of the larger CRM’s academy, is a great way to learn how to maximise the effectiveness of your email marketing and make sure it resonates, both internally and externally.
Email metrics tell a story
As our Digital team will tell you, email reporting isn’t about chasing vanity metrics, it’s about understanding behaviour. For example, a low open rate could suggest the subject line failed to grab attention, or perhaps the timing wasn’t right.
A high open rate but poor click-through rate may indicate employees were interested enough to open the email but didn’t find the content compelling enough to take action.
If your internal comms include calls to action, perhaps asking colleagues to register for training, complete a survey or visit an internal resource, HubSpot allows you to monitor exactly how many people clicked through. This is super useful because suddenly you’re not guessing whether people engaged or not. And because HubSpot tracks engagement over time, you can begin identifying trends that help shape future communications.
Go beyond clicks with attribution
One of HubSpot’s biggest strengths is understanding what happens after someone clicks. Imagine you’re launching a company-wide wellbeing initiative – an employee clicks on an email, but what happens next? Did they visit your wellbeing resources, register for an event, download support guides, immediately leave the page?
HubSpot’s reporting helps you understand those journeys, allowing teams to move beyond basic engagement metrics and measure genuine outcomes. For marketing teams, this kind of attribution is of course second nature. But for HR and internal comms teams, HubSpot’s different attribution models can completely change how success is measured.
Instead of just reporting that you sent an email, you can report that “73% of staff who opened the email visited the wellbeing hub on the intranet, with most downloading the guide” – which makes for a much more valuable conversation.
Marketing and HR are stronger together
Marketing teams already understand audience segmentation, campaign reporting, personalisation and automation. HR teams understand employee engagement, culture and organisational priorities. HubSpot brings these know-hows together.
Rather than treating internal comms as occasional announcements, organisations can create targeted communications journeys based on employee needs. For example, new starters might receive structured onboarding campaigns, managers could receive leadership communications, and employees working in specific locations could receive regionally relevant updates. The best thing? These communications can be fully managed in HubSpot under the ‘Projects’ object, ensuring full visibility for everyone involved.
Those communications can then be monitored, refined and continually improved using the same reporting capabilities already supporting external marketing activity.
Use Service Hub to understand sentiment
Of course, good internal comms isn’t just about speaking, it’s about listening too. This is where HubSpot’s Service Hub becomes particularly valuable. With HubSpot,, organisations can build custom surveys, as well as analyse and tag employee responses quickly and consistently.
For example, you could measure:
- Employee satisfaction following organisational change
- Feedback after training programmes
- Onboarding experiences
- Internal event feedback
- Employee wellbeing initiatives
- Department-specific engagement
The real value comes from identifying patterns over time – are engagement scores improving? Has sentiment changed following a new initiative? Which departments consistently report lower satisfaction? Where should leadership focus next?
Rather than relying on engagement alone, organisations can build a much richer picture of employee sentiment throughout the year.
Build a plan in 4 weeks:
Organisations performing best aren’t necessarily communicating more, just more effectively – measuring engagement, listening to employees and refining campaigns based on evidence – and they’re using technology to support those decisions.
Those with HubSpot already have many of those capabilities to help them better understand and engage with their own people. And the best news? It doesn’t take long to see drastic improvements – in fact, four weeks might be enough to build and implement a first plan of action. It could look something like this:
Week 1: Import employees with department/location/start-date properties
Week 2: Build active lists and create the internal comms subscription type
Week 3: Send one measured email
Week 4: Review the click map and set a baseline
This simple plan of action gives organisations a baseline from which they can measure results and establish goals for future internal comms.
How Pod can help
As HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner, at Pod we help businesses unlock far more value from their CRM than they thought possible.
Whether you’re looking to improve employee engagement, build better reporting, automate internal comms or bring marketing and HR closer together, we can help you make HubSpot work harder for your business.
If you’d like to explore how HubSpot can support your internal comms strategy, we’d love to chat.
Alexander Costello
James Montgomery
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