Insights to Boost Internal Newsletter Campaign Results
Everyone is doing it. From tracking the quality of sleep and the number of steps in a day to noting down average calorie intake and productivity levels. It has become the norm to measure how well you are doing in every aspect of life.
In internal newsletter communications, it is no different. The ability to measure campaign results has proven indispensable for any serious internal communications specialist. Not so surprising, considering that campaign insights consequentially supply you with the ability to boost results.
Still, such abundance of static information can be overwhelming. Once you have all that valuable data in one place, how do you interpret it? And in what way do you make the most use out of your metrics?
Plan for Internal Newsletters in SharePoint
1. Why You Should be Sending Newsletters to Your Employees
2. How to Write an Internal Newsletter Your Employees Will Want to Read
3. 10 Topic Ideas to Help You Jumpstart your Internal Newsletter Campaign
4. Why Your Internal Newsletter Communications Should Be About Security, Too
5. How You Can Use Insights Into Your Internal Newsletter Campaign to Boost Results
6. How to Turn Your SharePoint into the Ultimate Engagement Platform
7. How Information Architecture Will Help You Automate Content Delivery
8. Responsive Email Templates, Why Do We Use Them?
9. Newsletter Metrics, Link Clicks and Opens, How They Work
Make Use of Internal Newsletter Campaign Metrics
It is all about knowing what elements you should look out for in the insights you gathered. For your convenience, I’ve outlined the ways in which we analyze and use our own data.
Pick a Suitable Time
Did you know that most people don’t open their emails on Friday afternoons? Probably you did. But did you also know that emails have a smaller chance of being read when they are sent on Tuesdays, or just before lunch? This is true for almost all companies. Still, make sure to check which sending times result in the most email opens for you. Makes notes and roll out a timely campaign.
Adjust Content to Audience
Knowing what it is your colleagues want to read will make the difference between an email open and an email being deleted. So, do they prefer longer or shorter articles? Factual or emotive headlines? Personal or broad topics?
It is very likely that different departments have different preferences. Track what works best, and play on these differences. Also, remember that you do not have to guess what it is people want before you’ve gathered your insights.
Just like different departments have a wide array of preferences, each individual has a distinctive appetite for information. Make note of these personal preferences. Then, use an app to gather from your existing SharePoint posts and information content to automatically populate emails, one-by-one and specifically for each recipient. Definitely, the most effective and intuitive way to create hyper-personalized emails.
Encourage Engagement
Your internal newsletters should not just be read. They should boost engagement with the different communication channels you have in place within your organization. Therefore, it is important to gauge what content rallies engagement. Knowing that you can focus on content with a similar subject-manner for the best results.
Know About Platforms
Just as it is important to know what the people reading your emails are interested in, you need to be aware of what platform they are reading it on. A story suitable for a computer might be a whole lot different from one read on-the-go on a smartphone.
Where Are You Sending from…?
There are several internal newsletter communication solutions available on the market. It is up to you to find which one of them suits your needs best. Today, with all these different providers, we can only look back in disdain at the time in which Outlook dominated the IC field. You’d be hoping people would click that notify the sender when read button, but knew deep down they’d always click ‘no’ or ‘cancel’.
Fortunately for all internal communications specialists, most bulk email providers now offer tracking and insights. But there is a downside: these are primary cloud-based solutions, and they do have their own disadvantages. If you are serious about your security you should go for an on-premise internal newsletter solution.
Conclusion
Now that you have analyzed your data, you are ready to implement it. To summarize, the internal newsletters you are sending should be:
• on time
• on target
• relevant
• platform conscious
To finalize your strategy, cross-examine each of these factors. Maybe your staff do not like reading about company policies on Mondays but are ok with taking in this information on Thursday mornings.
Always gauge engagement and adjust choice of content to time, platform and audience and you will surely crank up your internal newsletter results.
Coming up next in our Best Practices for Internal Newsletters series:
How to turn your SharePoint into the Ultimate Engagement Platform.
