Internal newsletter: how to create one employees read

By Nicolas Saliba · Updated October 2026 · 9 min read

In short

An internal newsletter keeps its readers when it has one job, a steady rhythm and a format people can scan in under a minute. Give it a one-line purpose, fix five slots in the same order every issue, choose a cadence your team can sustain, and judge it on who read what, not on opens. Below you will find a copy-and-use template, a comparison of Outlook Newsletters and classic email, and a quarterly review to decide what to cut.

Key takeaways

In Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2023/24, 71% of internal communicators used e-newsletters and 87% rated them effective.

In Nielsen Norman Group’s eyetracking study of email newsletters, readers fully read only 19% of newsletters and spent an average of 51 seconds after opening one.

A five-slot template in a fixed order, with word caps per slot, lets readers learn where to look and gives the editor a basis for saying no.

An Outlook read receipt only confirms that a message was opened, and recipients can decline to send it, so opens overstate reading.

84% of communicators in the same Gallagher survey wanted to measure more often or more comprehensively; lack of time and resources was the top barrier, cited by 58%.

An internal newsletter is a regular email, or email-like edition, that tells employees what changed, what they need to do and what is happening in the organisation. It is one of the most widely used internal channels: in Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2023/24, based on a record 2,300 respondents, 71% of communicators used e-newsletters and 87% rated them effective.^[1] Wide use is exactly why so many newsletters drift: every function wants a slot, and the issue grows until nobody finishes it.

Start with one sentence that states the newsletter’s job and audience. For example: “Every Friday, the newsletter tells all 6,000 employees about the changes that affect their work next week and the deadlines they own.” That sentence decides what goes in. A strong default is to treat the newsletter as a routing layer: it carries the change, the deadline and the link, while the intranet holds the full story. Long features belong on the intranet as news posts, with a short summary and one link in the newsletter.

Then decide who it is for. One all-employee edition is the right start for most organisations. Split only when the difference between audiences is operational, such as a shift pattern, a language, a regulatory regime or a site closure, and when someone will own the second edition every week in eighteen months’ time. Our note on audience segmentation for internal communications covers how to define those audiences.

Write the purpose sentence and get your director to agree to it, so you can point to it when a stakeholder asks for space.
Fix the template: five slots, a word cap for each and the same order every issue (see the template below).
Name the owners: one editor who chooses the lead item, contributors for each slot and a published rota for the rotating business slot.
Choose the tool: classic email, Outlook Newsletters or a dedicated newsletter platform, depending on what you need to measure.
Set the cadence: a fixed day and time you can sustain without filler.
Decide how you will measure it before the first issue: unique readers, clicks per slot and readership by department, reviewed every quarter.

A template readers can scan in a minute

Most employees will not read your newsletter from top to bottom. Nielsen Norman Group’s eyetracking research on email newsletters found that participants fully read only 19% of newsletters, spent an average of 51 seconds on a newsletter after opening it, and in two-thirds of cases did not look at the introduction at all.^[2] The study dates from 2006 and covered commercial newsletters, but the lesson holds for internal ones: skip the long introduction, put the point first and make every section readable on its own.

Copy this structure into your newsletter tool, replace everything in square brackets and keep the order identical in every issue, so readers learn where to look.

Element	Its job	Cap	Owner	Example line
Subject line	Formula: [what changes] + [when or for whom]; reuse the slot 1 headline	One line, no teaser	Editor	Expense approvals move to a new tool on 3 November
Preheader	A second reason to open: the top item from slot 2	One sentence	Editor	Also this issue: [site] shutdown dates and who joins [unit]
1. The one thing	The single most important item this issue	60 to 90 words, one link	Editor, who chooses it	Submit any pending expense claim before [date] so it is not caught in the switch. [How to submit a claim]
2. Changes that affect you	Operational changes: policy, systems, sites, safety, pay	Three items, 30 words each	Editor, with the function making the change	[Site] shutdown from [date] to [date]. Your manager confirms shifts by [date]. [Schedule]
3. From the business	One function or unit, from a published rota	One unit, 40-word summary, one link	The unit on the rota, cut to size by the editor	This issue, [unit]: what the team changed this quarter. [Read the full story]
4. People	Appointments, arrivals, recognition, milestones	Five lines	Editor, with HR and site contacts	[Name] joins [site] as [role] on [date].
5. Dates and actions	Anything with a deadline the reader owns	Five lines, each dated	Editor, with the team that sets each deadline	[Date]: complete [training name]. [Open the course]
Footer	Who edits it, when the next issue lands, how to submit items	One line	Editor	Edited by [name]. Next issue: Friday [date]. Submit items by Wednesday.

Two slots carry most of the weight. Slot 1 is where the editorial judgement lives: choosing it is the job. Slot 3 is where the political pressure lands, and a published rota protects you, because “you are in the 14 November issue” is an easier conversation than “not this week”. A few writing rules make the template work on a phone:

Headlines carry the information. “Expense approvals move to a new tool on 3 November”, not “An update on expenses”.
One link per item, with descriptive anchor text, so every click tells you which item it came from.
Single column and legible with images off, because many corporate mail clients block remote images and a headline inside an image becomes a blank rectangle.
No attachments. Link to the document on the intranet instead; an attachment cannot be measured and is hard to read on a phone.

Outlook Newsletters or classic email?

Microsoft 365 now offers a built-in option. Newsletters in Outlook gives each newsletter a consistent identity and subscriber base, with editions you publish over time; it can be visible to the whole organisation, unlisted (link only) or private (invited users only), and can have up to 100 co-owners. Owners can see analytics and subscribers and export the newsletter’s data.^[3] Readers can react to individual sections or the whole edition and comment at the end of each section. Authoring works in the new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web, editions are stored in SharePoint Embedded containers in your tenant, and only images can be uploaded as embedded content for now.^[4]

	Classic email from a shared mailbox	Outlook Newsletters	Dedicated newsletter platform
Setup	None: any mailbox and an HTML template	Built into Microsoft 365; admins control access through a mailbox policy	Separate tool, procurement and integration
Reader interaction	Replies only	Reactions per section and comments	Depends on the platform
Design control	Full, but fragile across mail clients	Structured editor; images only as uploads	Usually full, with tested templates
Measurement	None by default; read receipts are unreliable	Owner analytics and data export	Opens and clicks, often per link
Best for	Small organisations and short updates	Microsoft 365 organisations that want subscriptions and reactions without a new tool	Large organisations with several editions and segmented lists

Whichever tool you choose, the template above applies unchanged. The tool decides what you can measure, not what readers will read.

How often should an internal newsletter go out?

Set the cadence by your news volume and your team’s capacity, not by habit. Weekly suits organisations with something operational to route every week. Fortnightly beats a weekly edition that is half filler. Monthly works when the newsletter is a digest of intranet news rather than the place employees learn about changes, but it is too slow for deadlines.

Whatever you choose, keep the day and the send time fixed. Predictability does more work than frequency: readers learn when the issue arrives and what it will contain. An issue that is visibly shorter because little happened builds more trust than one padded to a fixed length. If you plan issues in an editorial calendar, our guide to measuring content calendar performance shows how to check that the rota earns its place.

Opens, reads and what to cut

Open rates are the number most newsletter reports stop at, and the least informative one. An Outlook read receipt only confirms that your message was opened, and the recipient can decline to send it.^[5] An open says the issue appeared on a screen; with an average of 51 seconds per newsletter in NN/g’s research, it says little about which items were read. Our note on why internal email open rate benchmarks mislead explains the problem in detail.

Communicators know they need better data. In Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2023/24, 84% of respondents wanted to measure more often or more comprehensively, and the top barrier was lack of time and resources, cited by 58%.^[1] The answer is a light routine rather than a bigger dashboard. Once a quarter, review the last ten or twelve issues:

Clicks per slot: if slot 1 regularly gets fewer clicks than slot 5, your editor and your readers disagree about what matters.
Unique readers of the linked intranet pages: the page view behind the click tells you who read the full story.
Readership by department and country: a healthy overall figure can hide a site or function that never reads the newsletter.
Cut or keep: any recurring section with low clicks for a whole quarter gets cut, merged or moved to the intranet. Tell readers what changed and why.

Our article on internal newsletter metrics beyond the open rate covers each measure and how to report it.

Which departments read each issue?

This is the question native email statistics cannot answer, because they do not know your organisational structure. Knowing that 4,000 people opened the issue does not tell you that operations in one country stopped reading three months ago, or that the same message reached them through Viva Engage instead. To act on the newsletter, you need readership by department and country, compared with your other channels, so you can adapt your strategy where the gap is. Our note on measuring cross-channel internal communications explains how to avoid counting the same reader twice, and measuring communications that reach frontline workers covers employees without a mailbox.

Communication Insights brings your email newsletters together with SharePoint, Viva Engage and the SharePoint app in Teams in one dashboard, with readership by department and country for each issue. To see how your newsletter performs next to your other channels, book a 15-minute call with Jérémy via his Calendly.

Frequently asked questions

What should an internal newsletter include?

Five slots in the same order every issue: the one most important item, the operational changes that affect the reader, one rotating function or unit, people news, and dates with actions the reader owns. Add a subject line built from the lead item and a footer saying who edits the newsletter and when the next issue lands. Anything else belongs on the intranet, linked rather than pasted in.

How long should an internal newsletter be?

Cap each slot rather than the total. With the caps in the template above, a normal issue lands at roughly 400 to 500 words and can run shorter in a quiet week. Readers in NN/g’s newsletter research spent an average of 51 seconds after opening, so the first screen has to carry the most important item.

How often should you send an internal newsletter?

Weekly when there is something operational to route every week, fortnightly when a weekly issue would need filler, monthly only as a digest. Keep the day and time fixed whichever you choose, because a predictable rhythm matters more than frequency.

What metrics should you track for an internal newsletter?

Track unique readers and clicks per slot rather than opens, since an open only shows the message appeared and read receipts can be declined. Add unique readers of the linked intranet pages and readership by department and country, and review them every quarter to decide which sections to cut.

Can you create an internal newsletter in Outlook?

Yes. Newsletters in Outlook lets you create a newsletter with its own identity and subscribers, publish editions, set visibility for the whole organisation, a link or invited users only, add up to 100 co-owners and see owner analytics. Authoring works in the new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web.

Should the newsletter contain the full article or a link?

A short summary and a link, in almost every case. Full text in email is hard to update once sent and invisible to intranet search, while the link gives you page-level data on who read the full story.

Sources

• ajg.com

• nngroup.com

• support.microsoft.com

• learn.microsoft.com