Beyond Open Rates: Cerkl's New Bid to Decode Employee Engagement

CINCINNATI, OH – June 23, 2026 – For years, the metric for a successful internal email was simple: did they open it? Did they click the link? But in today's world of hybrid work and information overload, these simple numbers feel increasingly hollow. They report an action, but they don’t tell a story. Now, Cincinnati-based Cerkl is making a bold claim that it can help companies find that story with the launch of ‘Insights,’ a complete overhaul of the analytics engine for its Broadcast internal communications platform.

The announcement promises to transform how organizations measure and understand employee engagement by making complex data more visual, navigable, and, most importantly, actionable for the communications teams on the front lines—no data science degree required.

The Agony of the Analyst

For most internal communication professionals, data is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s the key to proving their strategic value. On the other, it’s a mountain of spreadsheets and disconnected metrics that takes precious time to climb. Nearly 70% of internal communicators admit that measuring the ROI of their work is a significant challenge. It’s not for a lack of data, but a surplus of it.

“It’s a constant battle to prove our value when we’re buried in numbers,” one communications director at a large tech firm told me recently. “We can show how many people opened a newsletter, but we can’t easily show if it helped them understand a new benefits policy or feel more connected to the company’s mission. We have the data, but not always the story.”

This is the “friction” Cerkl’s CEO Tarek Kamil says his new platform is designed to remove. “Internal communicators are expected to make decisions quickly, often without the time or tools to fully interpret their data,” Kamil stated in the official announcement. The goal of Insights, he explained, is to give teams “a clearer view of what's working, what isn’t, and where to adjust, without requiring them to be analysts.”

Analytics Without the Analysis?

Cerkl’s solution is a multi-layered system that aims to serve everyone from the C-suite looking for a high-level summary to the communications specialist digging into campaign specifics. The new platform moves beyond just tracking emails, bringing data from channels like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Slack into a single, unified view. This allows a communications team to finally compare the performance of a message on Teams versus a traditional email, for instance.

The real promise, however, lies in its depth. ‘Insights’ allows users to drill down from a dashboard overview to see how specific pieces of content perform, how different audience segments (like ‘new hires’ or ‘sales leadership’) are engaging, and even track how individual employees interact with content over time. It can surface which topics are resonating most with engineers versus the marketing department, or which headlines drive the most engagement on the company’s mobile app.

This is a significant step away from the vanity metrics of the past. Instead of just knowing a video was viewed, communicators can now see if it was viewed more by employees in a specific region, on a particular device, and whether those viewers are more or less engaged than their peers. It’s about connecting the dots between the content being pushed out and the audience it’s meant to serve.

A Crowded Field with High Stakes

Cerkl, whose platform reaches nearly 6 million employees monthly, is not alone in recognizing this need. The internal communications technology market is a competitive space, with major players like Staffbase and Poppulo also offering sophisticated, multi-channel analytics. The industry as a whole is racing to provide tools that can quantify the often-intangible value of employee engagement, a factor estimated to cost the global economy trillions in lost productivity when it falters.

What seems to differentiate Cerkl’s approach is its sharp focus on usability and interpretation. The platform integrates AI not just for personalizing content delivery, but for interpreting the results. In a recent demo, Head of Product Rachel Folz showed how a user could ask the system a question in plain English—like “What is the best time to send an email to our leadership team?”—and receive a data-backed answer.

This shift from presenting charts to providing answers is crucial. It’s one thing to give a communicator a bar graph; it’s another to give them a recommendation they can immediately act upon. The success of ‘Insights’ will hinge on its ability to do the latter consistently and accurately.

From Dashboards to Decisions

Beyond the visuals, Cerkl has also built in features that address the practical realities of a large organization. New governance controls allow administrators to have full visibility while enabling teams to share specific dashboards for collaboration. This controlled transparency helps ensure that data is used responsibly and strategically, protecting brand consistency and security.

Furthermore, the platform allows for benchmarking against an organization's own historical performance, providing much-needed context to the numbers. A 40% open rate might seem low, but if it’s up from 25% last quarter for a notoriously hard-to-reach department, it’s a significant win. Context is what turns data into intelligence.

Ultimately, Cerkl is betting that the future of internal communications lies not in generating more data, but in making existing data more meaningful. As Rachel Folz put it, “Analytics should not stop at reporting what happened. It should help teams communicate what that data means and what to do next.” With Insights, the focus is squarely on making data easier to understand and share, so it can finally influence how organizations communicate.