The importance of segmentation
An efficient internal communication can have a strong impact on the working conditions of your employees, their engagement level, but also on the results of their work and on your brand’s image.
The main goal of your internal communication must be conveying information, educating your employees and harmonizing their mentalities by making them adhere to the company’s culture. But keep in mind, harmonizing does not mean communicating to all your collaborators the same way! By doing that you can be sure you’ll lose the attention of a big chunk of your recipients.
The actual internal communication trends show that today we must give an equal importance to the collaborator’s journey as to the customer’s journey. How can we achieve that? It all starts by adapting external communication best practices to internal communication.
The base of a good customer (and employee!) experience is the customization of messages and actions that are dedicated to them. If you are an ecommerce website that sells all types of clothes and accessories, you’re surely not going to send a newsletter about man clothing to a woman subscriber under 30. You’ll need to target the population that really interests you, with the right message and at the right time.
Equally, your internal communication should target precise segments of your employees and channel them towards paths that are adapted to their behavior and centers of interest.
How to segment
There is different criteria you can use to segment your employees database. We are going to list the five main ones:
1. Demographic
This criteria can include age, geographical area, the business unit your employee is a part of, the language he speaks, his seniority in the company and other useful information that you possess and that can have an impact on his engagement.
2. Role
Being able to segment your contacts by their roles in the company is crucial, because their needs and availabilities change considerably from a department to another. A business developer that has meetings with the customers very often and spends little time at the office, will have different ways of consuming information, compared to a social media manager or an IT person.
3. Management responsibility
A special communication should be put in place for collaborators which have important management roles, that manage teams and need to know more details about the internal organisation, the decisions, …
Not all your collaborators will be interested by this type of information, so don’t spam them!
4. Behaviour
The behaviour can be examined in different ways and especially by analyzing the actions that your employees do when they receive your newsletter or fill out a form, if they download or not the new app you’ve talked about on your intranet, etc. This segmentation can be done once you’ve sent your first internal communication campaigns.
You’ll be able to add to a special list all your collaborators that open your emails, fill out most of your surveys, are active on the company’s social networks. These people are often those who understand the vision of the company and are engaged.
All those that ignore your communications and never get in the desirable journeys, can be added to a different list on which you’ll be able to AB test with other tools and types of communication, most adapted to their cases.
5. Communication channels used
There are employees that open your emails more often, there are those who check the company’s social networks, those who read the company-logbook, those who only read SMS because their email folder is so full that internal communications go by unnoticed, etc. In short, each employee has a preference for a certain communication channel, in his professional life, as in his private life. The best thing is to focus your internal communication efforts on the channels about which you’re sure that will be consulted.
So take a moment to analyze how your employees are mostly consuming the information you prepare for them and make sure to insert these contacts in the corresponding lists.
What shall I do with all these segments ?
Once you’ve set up your lists with precise segments, what shall you do with them? You have to use the tools that will allow you to better leverage them!
Automated communication platforms allow you to create customized workflows with the criteria mentioned above. These will help you measure your collaborators’ engagement by segment and act by proposing adapted paths.
Thus communication will be optimized and will allow you to obtain the desired engagement.
A few words about &shift:
&shift tackles with one of the biggest difficulties companies have encountered when going through a digital transformation: the resistance to change.
Not only &shift measures the engagement of each collaborator, but also allows you to move to the act with automated and custom actions.
Contact us to find out more!