Are you using email for internal communications? Our top five tricks to boost employee engagement

The practice of producing and delivering important and useful messaging on behalf of your company may seem like a daunting task, but the significance of this activity is difficult to dispute. From promoting morale, through to ensuring everyone is working towards the same goal, internal communications should be taken seriously.

There are a variety of ways you can consider communicating with your employees, but email is often the most successful. It is a powerful and efficient way of communicating quickly and succinctly, and it is an activity you can closely monitor for engagement – what kind of content are people most interested in, what are they most interacting with in your emails?

In this blog, we take a look at the five top tricks to consider when using email, to boost employee engagement across your internal communications:

Do your emails stand out, visually?

The first and foremost important consideration when sending internal emails is to ensure they are aligned with your brand guidelines. A simple, but a key component to catch employee attention. The email must be easily identifiable and must also appear visually engaging to make it past an initial click.

Are your emails responsive?

Another consideration in today’s digitally savvy world, is how easily your employees can access your communications on their mobile or tablet devices – if they can’t open an email, or it doesn’t render properly, you will lose your reader’s interest, extremely quickly.

What do you want to say?

With a surge of communications coming in every day into everyone’s inbox, your emails will need to be impactful and convey important messages quickly. To stand out above the crowd, ensure your email is populated with valuable content that recipients want to engage with.

By standard, an internal communications mailer should include helpful messages that both impact your employees every day, but also some relevant thought leadership or blog content that may spark interest, conversation and inspiration.

Keep it short!

In terms of email content in general, it is best to keep it simple, short and impactful. Content must be created with short attention spans in mind, breaking the email up into easily digestible content areas. This can be achieved by including clear headers, powerful visuals and imagery, and a layout that is designed for skim reading.

To achieve successful levels of engagement, instead of long pieces of text for companywide announcements and communications, use video content where possible. As visual beings, humans find videos more engaging, more memorable and more popular than any other type of content.

Furthermore, to really encourage interaction, we recommend including a way for your audience to interact, participate and feedback on the email they are reading. This can be done in the form of competitions, games, polls or surveys – not only does this encourage engagement, but it can also provide useful insight into what your employees want to know or see more of / less of.

There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all email

A way to achieve relevance in email communications and to ensure your employees are best engaging with the email content is by effectively using data. Data is a significant driver to aid the delivery of the right messages, at the right time, to the right audience.

In the context of internal communications, it is a mistake to think that your audience is all the same. This is especially true for larger organisations. Whilst it requires some time upfront to set up, we recommend segmenting your audience by teams, locations, interests, areas of the business, preferences or by anything else you can gather from their interactions to really hone in and finely tune what you want to say, and to who.

Learn and optimise!

Lastly, it is very important to measure and analyse your results, so you can track and adjust your communications accordingly to target your audience better. Getting valuable data insights is possible with the help of an email communications tool which can do the hard work for you!

At onebite, one of our most recommended email platforms is currently is Dotdigital (formerly dotMailer) as it is a tool that is constantly ahead of the game, always looking at what integrations can exist between email and other comms channels. Also, dotdigital’s email building interface makes things really straightforward to set up, allowing your internal marketing team to build emails themselves, keeping your messaging and output fully on brand, and fully measurable!