How to communicate well with the internal newsletter? 5 goals to follow
Are you responsible for communication within your SME? Do you want to set goals to better communicate at the heart of your organization? The corporate newsletter is a magical tool that allows you to stay connected with your employees. Also called “newsletter”, it is written in the form of an e-mail containing the latest news from your company. But without specific goals, there is a good chance that it will be ousted by your team and end up directly in spam. Here are the 5 objectives of an internal newsletter to follow.
1- Create content with high added value
Communicate with collaborators
Your first mission is above all to capture the attention of employees. Indeed, these are your main contacts when you send your newsletter. To build a community over the long term, it is therefore essential to exchange with your recipients. You can ask them what content they want to see. The more you consult your team, the more they have an interest in reading your internal letter.
Know your target
Each employee has their habits, their skills and their history depending on their seniority within the company. These elements can help you better identify the people you meet on a daily basis in your work environment. To create content with high added value, you must take into account 3 imperatives:
- what the reader likes;
- what your audience needs;
- how to solve his problems.
List all the information that is useful to you in order to find the right words, those that speak to your readers.
Transmitting the company’s DNA
Anna Rogala, researcher in economics at the University of Poznan, highlights three essential purposes in a study devoted to internal communication. These are efficiency, quality and effectiveness. By “effectiveness”, it implies that the dissemination of the company’s values and strategy forms its identity.
Communicating well with the newsletter also means transmitting the firm’s DNA. Any good communicator uses this correspondence tool to inform, build loyalty and share the values and successes of the group. The result of a successful strategy, internal email motivates employees. Moreover, when they are consulted on the definition of this DNA, the reflection is enriched and can progress more quickly.
2- Communicate better with the internal newsletter: optimize your e-mails
To easily get your message across and generate inbound traffic, your internal newsletter needs to be optimized. Here are some tips for writing it the best way possible.
Take care of your newsletter object
The e-mail subject must be short: 50 characters on average. Webmail’s can only display a certain number of characters and sentences that are too long will have little chance of being read. For example, if you are creating a newsletter with Gmail, a maximum of 77 characters are allowed.
The most important information must be visible: an event, a date or a promotion. Current events or the time of year can also be resources for writing your subject lines by the perfect Wikipedia page writing service.
Beware, however, of spam words and excessive capitalization or punctuation marks. Even if you want to be noticed, it is better to stay sober.
It is possible with certain platforms such as Sensible or Mailchimp to compose your tailor-made e-mail subjects by integrating the first and last names of your recipients. Thanks to dynamic personalization tags, you have the opportunity to speak directly to the reader. This method increases open and click-through rates.
Prefer interactive emails
Quizzes and polls
Quizzes and surveys are great for getting to know your employees better. You can ask a series of relevant questions to learn more about their interests, or possibly get some feedback. Some plugins like Smart Quiz Builder on WordPress allow you to insert the quiz or poll directly into the body of the email.
The slides
Also called carousels, the slides attract the eye with their attractive content. You can use them as a slideshow of the highlights of the week or the month, or to present the portraits of the different collaborators.
Countdown
The countdown can boost your interactivity for reminders or events, like company anniversary. It creates in the reader a sense of both excitement and urgency.
Un bouton call-to-action
Widely used in inbound marketing, the call-to-action button is the tool par excellence of what is called “employee advocacy”. Each employee is an actor in the dissemination of the company’s image. Even in internal communication, the sharing of articles by employees on social networks is a winning method. So, favor the “Share” buttons or with the “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “LinkedIn” icons.
You can also encourage your readers to sign up for training, download a new application or discover internal tools. Think of a short text, for example: “Read more”; “I register for this event”; “Download this tool”.
Visuals and videos
To publish a successful newsletter, give importance to a consistent design. The layout should be in perfect harmony with the whole structure. Prioritize photos, graphics, and set font colors that best represent your business. Insert your logo in the banner and finish with a call-to-action button at the bottom of the page. Many e-mailing software offer newsletter templates, if you lack ideas.
Adding videos or GIFS makes reading more engaging. For tired readers, it allows you to enjoy the content without making any particular effort. As it is usually impossible to embed a clip in an e-mail, there is an easy method: take a screenshot. You can then insert the image and attach the link to the video. By clicking on the photo, the reader is redirected to YouTube or to your own site.
If you want to go further in content optimization, train yourself or follow video tips, here are some examples.
3- Promote team spirit
A professional newsletter can fully fulfill its intentions provided it wants to create a link between the recipients. The introduction of new collaborators with a welcome message is essential to allow everyone to identify themselves. You can highlight the performance and successes of each employee.
In this way, their feeling of commitment and belonging to the company encourages them to perpetuate their subscription to the newsletter. Retirements, staff changes or internal mobility are all topics that can be highlighted. Activities aimed at strengthening team spirit are not to be neglected: team building, brunch or training.
4- Improve e-mailing deliverability
How not to be frustrated when the text you spent time on ends up in your recipient’s spam? Improving e-mailing deliverability consists of optimizing a few technical aspects:
- create an email address from your company’s domain name;
- make your emails responsive;
- pass through a high-quality intranet network.
The more secure your newsletter is, the more likely it is to be read.
5- Choose the right sending frequency
Last phase: find the right frequency for sending your e-mails. Even if no rules are established, launch the newsletter when there is really content to share. It is better to schedule it monthly than weekly if it talks about events taking place next month. Maintain regularity in your routing, otherwise your newsletter could lose credibility. Avoid airing it on weekends and holidays. This correspondence remains linked to the business world and should therefore not encroach on the free time of its potential readers.
6- The objectives of an internal newsletter: the summary
As you will have understood, writing an internal newsletter requires careful preparation. What to remember from these 5 objectives:
- Consider the newsletter as an informative and unifying tool.
- Take an interest in your colleagues.
- Give your employees the opportunity to express themselves.
- Get inspired by SEO copywriting and inbound marketing techniques.
- Be rigorous in the frequency of sending and on the deliverability.
Want to write impactful content for your internal communications? Let yourself be guided by the advice of Ann Handley, pioneer of digital marketing.
