Using an email platform to enhance internal communication

As the work environment has changed and more and more businesses are moving over to a work-from-home structure vs working from an office, email communication has become a lot more important. Using an email marketing platform can help you to enhance your internal communication and keep everyone in your organisation up to date about all the latest information and business processes within your organisation.

Why is internal communication so important?

Most companies don’t put much effort into their internal communication and therefore blast out boring email updates that might not excite and engage their employees. Most of these probably just get moved into their trash file, never to be read or opened.

Internal communication is crucial for a number of reasons:

1. Boosts employee engagement and morale

Internal communication can help to boost employee engagement and morale as you are actively reaching out and engaging with your employees. Especially where people have had to adjust to working from home with less face-to-face interaction.

2. Creates a sense of purpose and community

If you carefully consider your internal communication strategies, you can ensure that you give your employees a sense of community and purpose. This is especially important as you want your employees to feel valued and feel confident that they are contributing to the overall success of the company.

3. It’s a great retention tool for retaining your top talent

Great communication can help you retain your top talent. By providing timely, consistent feedback, you are valuing your employees and addressing any pain points/issues before they grow. In turn, when you have engaged employees you are able to lessen your overall employee turnover.

4. It’s a great channel for crisis communication

Internal communication can be a great source of comfort and support crisis management in times of need. A formal line of internal communication means that employees know what to expect, what is happening and what the next steps are to resolve a crisis. This is especially important in large companies.

5. Enhances transparency within the organisation

While it’s really important that a business and its employees are able to engage informally, internal communication serves a great purpose in terms of enhancing transparency. By communicating openly about company developments, employees feel secure and don’t need to wonder or worry about certain things within the organisation. This means the office rumour mill isn’t as active as it would be otherwise. Being transparent in your business communication also promotes transparency of information from your employees.

Why use email rather than other channels?

Let’s look at some great benefits of using email above other channels:

• FACT: Everyone checks their emails, in fact 70% of people check their emails before they check their social media and 99% of people check their emails daily.

• It’s a very personal channel, which means it gives you a great way to connect.

• Your employees can easily refer back to previous emails without trawling through massive amounts of social posts, intranet sites or employee portals.

• You can resend campaigns to subscribers/employees who haven’t opened your campaigns.

• News can easily get lost in other channels like Slack, etc.

• Your employees across all ages are already familiar with and already use their email accounts daily. This means it’s not another platform/channel they need to use or learn about on top of the other business platforms you use internally.

How can an email sending platform help you with internal communication:

Structured information

• Firstly, you can ensure that you set up different structures for different departments to communicate information that is uniquely curated for that segment of your organisation.
• Structured communications via an email sending platform also means that you are empowering middle management to communicate clearly.
• You can split your email lists by department (which means you don’t use a “one size fits all approach for everyone” which can often lead to some departments feeling left out or less important).

Internal branding

• Using an email sending platform allows you to make the best of the opportunity to brand internally.
• This makes your updates more exciting as you can add well designed visuals to draw employees in.
• You can reaffirm your brand values, company mission and vision through your email communication in a beautiful way.

Culture driver

• Using an email sending platform can actually help you establish or further existing company culture as you have an opportunity to highlight and showcase this. This could be through event invites, employee showcases, welcome to the team emails, etc.

Consistent communication channel

• If you use an email sending platform to communicate with your employees consistently, they will come to expect and look forward to updates from you. It also provides another feedback loop that employees can utilise to pass on ideas.

Reporting and Segmentation

• An email sending platform gives you the ability to see in-depth reports about campaigns you sent. As a business, manager or HR professional, you can see which of your employees are actively engaged in what you send, if employees are engaging with your campaigns, etc. - This helps you keep enhancing your internal communications.
• Furthermore you could also segment your employee base much easier and identify engaged employees for future projects or champions of company engagements.

What should you be saying? (here are some internal email communication Ideas)

Product releases: Let your team know about upcoming product releases, before they hear it from others. Project updates: Keep your organisation informed about how a crucial project is going and any learnings from completed projects which might help others. Employee Welcome Emails: Welcome new team members and highlight some skills or qualities they bring to the table to help other employees welcome them from different departments. Special Events/ Culture: Invite employees to special events or culture celebrations to ensure you boost morale. You could also provide a low-down of past events and how they went.