Cures For The Common Employee Newsletter

Internal newsletters can drive employee engagement, break up organizational silos, and cultivate workplace culture. But they can also have the opposite effect.?

Lackluster employee newsletters simply add up to more information overload for employees. Not to mention, they're a waste of effort on the part of internal communicators.?

So how can IC pros create meaningful newsletters that employees actually want to read?

In our last ContactMonkey Webinar, we sat down with Becky and Gabriel of Brilliant Ink – an internal communications consultancy – to chat about the biggest employee newsletter challenges and how to solve them.?

Below, we break down the top internal newsletter tips and tricks the team had to share and show you how to incorporate them across your internal communications strategy .??

Recognizing the Symptoms of a Bad Newsletter

At Brilliant Ink, Becky and Gabriel help clients get more mileage out of the work they pour into their employee newsletters.?

In the process, they discovered that most internal communicators suffer from the same three mistakes. Namely:

1. Information overload?
2. Data dumps
3. Ugly newsletters

Any of those concerns sound familiar? The team at Brilliant Ink took a deep dive into each of these challenges and showed us how to overcome them with the help of employee feedback, data technology, and great design.?

Let’s take a closer look at what they had to say:

Information overload and reader’s fatigue

Information overload can take on many forms: overflowing inboxes, too much text on a page, too many buttons to click—the list goes on.?

According to Brilliant Ink, when employees stop to check their notifications, it can take them up to 16 minutes to get back to whatever they were doing before. So it’s important to make sure your content is worth the interruption.?

The best way to make sure you’re sending valuable content: tapping into employee preferences.?

The solution

Ensuring that your content is worth the interruption means understanding what types of content is important to your people. With employee preference pulse surveys, it’s easy to find out.?

Brilliant Ink recommends making a list of internal newsletter topics and inputting them into a list of survey response options. Using a pulse survey software like ContactMonkey, ask employees to rate their level of agreement with the statement: “Information on this topic is important to me: strongly agree, somewhat agree, disagree, strongly disagree.”?

With ContactMonkey’s survey analytics , you’ll see the roles, titles, and office locations of your survey respondents. When you have this information under your belt, you’ll be able to use ContactMonkey to create targeted sends—i.e., target audiences based on topics that they find interesting.?

Once you identify the highly important topics among your audience you can start sourcing additional content around the popular topics (such as eBooks or employee coaching manuals).?

In addition, you can get more mileage out of popular content by packaging it up in different ways. For instance, you might explore supplemental channels, such as employee SMS to share critical information throughout your corporate landscape.

When it comes to things that survey respondents rate as less important: limit the frequency of publication or house it on an intranet or Wiki—somewhere that's a little bit more passive.?

Data dumps

“What kind of open rate is considered good?” “Why does my click rate vary so much and what are the KPIs that I should pay attention to?” These are the questions internal communicators ask all the time.

Without answering these questions and making sense of your data, any metrics you gain add up to “data dumps.”?

According to Brilliant Ink, the trick to managing data dumps is understanding what the behaviors around newsletters really mean.?

The solution

The best way to avoid data dumps is by understanding the behaviours driving your IC analytics, and setting clear priorities for your internal communications.?

It’s also important to use email tracking tools to break down your data into easy-to-understand formats.?

With these two points in mind, you can begin to approach your data more proactively.?

First, consider the lenses with which you can assess reader behaviour. The most common ones are: email open rates , click-through rates , and read times.

Let's start with open rates. If an employee at your company opens your email, it could mean, that a) they’re super interested in what you sent, b) they’re familiar with the content, or c) you simply caught them at the right time.

If an employee opens your emails consistently, it means they truly rely on this content. They trust the information you send and it might help them do their job better.

Email clicks are a different story. Your click rate is the percentage of people who click on specific links in your email or newsletter among all the people who received it.

Those clicking through your newsletter might be, a) taking an action that you want them to take, (such as filling out a survey), or b) clicking through because they want to know more about what you shared. For example, you gave a teaser about an employee profile and they want to learn more.?

Once you know what all these metrics mean, it becomes easier to set priorities. In other words, you can establish an end goal for your newsletter, and have a hierarchy based on the metrics that you're trying to drive.?

Ugly newsletters

Even when your newsletter includes a ton of valuable info and lots of helpful resources, the poor display will easily repel readers.??

If your newsletter is hard to read, boring to look at, or full of stock photos, you have a case of the uglies.

The solution

Newsletter design applies to both the visual and written aspects of your newsletter. In order to fully appreciate and enhance this process, Brilliant Ink recommends taking a step back to truly think about the journey that you want readers to take.?

Most likely, you want employees to open your email, read it, and finally, click through to wherever you’re trying to direct them.

However, there are opportunities in each stage of the email journey for employees to fall victim to the uglies. Let’s examine the pivotal areas more closely:

The headline

Avoid generic, lack-luster headlines by pretending you’re an employee and asking yourself the question: “What's in it for me?”?

Brilliant Ink newsletter audits and independent studies have observed a 20% - 35% increase in open rates when the subject line includes features or highlights that a reader can look forward to (versus just including the date and the newsletter name).

In other words, try piquing your reader’s interest by using stats, being specific, and adding personality. Here are a few examples of quality headlines:?

• 12 stats to sum up Q3 earnings
• Q3 earnings in three minutes or less
• These two regions crushed it in Q3?

These headlines show personality, incorporate concrete numbers, and are much better at piquing reader interest.

With ContactMonkey, you can even add employee names to email subject lines and headlines for added personalization:

Preview text

People only read 20% of texts on a digital content page. Once someone sees an endless sea of text, they're going to move on to the next thing.?

Brilliant Ink recommends chunking content instead.?

This means dividing your content into short, concise paragraphs that focus on a single message or point. And limiting paragraphs on digital pages to no more than three lines per paragraph.

Visuals

Newsletter visuals should be intriguing—not cryptic. And they should always reinforce the overall message your newsletter is trying to send.?

In other words: avoid the classic “scrabble tiles” image and stock photos of the CEO looking very male and very serious.

(Source: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/ceo/)

Instead, why not add videos, infographics, and customized banners?

(Source: https://venngage.com/blog/internal-communication-tools/)

Creating a Q3 earnings overview? Pick the key numbers and turn them into an infographic or chart. Want to give instructions for a new safety procedure? Use Canva or video internal communications to create a step-by-step visual guide.?

Final Thoughts

We hope you’re excited to implement the lessons covered above. But when it comes to improving your internal newsletter, it’s best to heed the motto “Walk, don't run!”

If you change everything about your current newsletter right away, how will you know what actually had an impact?

In other words, focus on tackling one variable at a time. Do a few tests using an email tracking software like ContactMonkey, experiment with new layouts and see what’s working and what’s not. From there, move on to the next thing.

If you examine one variable at a time, you'll be able to measure results better and see what’s making the biggest impact.?

Want to learn all of Brilliant Ink’s internal newsletter secrets? Download our webinar recording for even more tips and tricks for creating killer newsletters.?

Get access to a full suite of tools, templates, and tips for improving your internal communications by visiting the ContactMonkey blog .?