Amongst all the communication tools that we have, newsletters have had a very important spot in internal communication for the past years. And for those who say that “email is dead”, well it’s not the case! Just think about the quantity of emails that we open every day: work emails, the newsletter of our favorite e-commerce websites, that of the association we’re part of. In a few words, emails are still highly used and read, in both our personal and professional life.
How can we engage our collaborators with our internal newsletter, considering the large amount of emails they’re already receiving all the time? The following list will give you a series of tips on how to create a successful internal newsletter:
1. An email subject that strikes the eye
The subject of your email is without doubt one of the most important elements, because it will determine whether your collaborators will or will not open your email. Stay away from plain uninteresting subjects such as “September Newsletter”, “important communication”, etc. You need to make your collaborators want to click on your email, even if they still have 20 emails waiting for their attention.
- Get their attention
- Clearly explain what they’ll find in the email
- Be creative, fun, mysterious, direct
However, you should avoid exclamation marks, the overuse of capital letters or words that are often found in spam emails and could lead to an automatic filtering of your emails.
2. Customize the sender
You should NEVER send a newsletter that has a no-reply no-reply sender. No-reply emails are the most efficient way to get in the spams of your receivers or show them that they cannot contact you directly or give you their feedback.
Customize your sender with a communication@ (or even yourfirstname@) email and let them know who you are or the team you’re part of: “Alexandra – Marketing”, “Lindsay from HR”, etc.
3. Let your email “breathe”
Very often your collaborators have very little time to allocate to your internal communications, so you must make the process easier for them and use formats that are easy to scroll, clear titles and relevant key-words.
The structure of your email must make the reading process easier, so avoid putting too much text without enough space between paragraphs.
The best option is to use text blocks that are well separated and that contain maximum 3 lines of text for each information. Remember that the newsletter is mostly a teaser that will quickly present the main news and then send your readers to your blogs, press releases, intranet or external websites.
4. Without any relevant content, it’s better not to send anything
In order to send a newsletter you should of course have content to convey, but is this content worth communicating? Will your email bring an added value to your employees? If the answer is “no”, wait a bit before sending your next newsletter.
Always think about the quality of the information that you relay to your collaborators and its usefulness for them.
The segmentation of your contacts can be very useful during the content creation phase: you can personalize your content according to the segment you’re taking in consideration. This will allow you to send information only to the people that are likely to be interested by your communications.
An email that talks about the next Hackathon your IT guys will be participating to, might not be so interesting for your accountants or your business developers.
5. Don’t forget your Call-to-Action
What do you wish to obtain with your newsletter? Probably subscriptions to events, clicks on the article about your news free training the company proposes, downloads of the new internal app that just got launched. In order to obtain this, you need to use attractive and clear Call-to-Actions. Use nice coloured buttons next to your text paragraph and insert links on all your images.
In the next article we’ll present the rest of the 10 tips on how to create an engaging internal newsletter. So stay tuned!