Internal email marketing: why it is important and how to do it successfully
Bonn, March 13, 2019 - You may be asking yourself the question immediately: Why internal marketing at all? There are some very simple, yet convincing answers to this question. Internal email marketing can serve a variety of purposes. For example, you can promote your internal employer branding or onboard new employees with multi-level email routes. If implemented correctly, this pays off in employee retention and turns your employees into company influencers or brand ambassadors who also convey the positive image of your company to the outside world. If internal email marketing is controlled via professional email marketing technology, you can benefit from centralized archiving of emails, options for automating and customizing communication or managing editors from different company areas with different roles and right.
It depends on the length and the frequency
The obvious should also be mentioned: Of course, you should be as short as possible in internal emails or get to the point so that your employees can quickly filter out the content. Specifically, this means that emails that take no more than two minutes to read are best accepted. This means that if you limit yourself to 400-500 words, you can assume that your colleagues will read to the end and that the information will also be recorded and processed. The more you increase the number of words, the smaller the circle of your readers.
The same of course also applies to the subject line. Here you can see at a glance what it is about by a short word count. In addition, your colleagues most likely have a lot to do and that is why you should communicate as quickly as possible so that you can use your working time productively.
In order to get high attention for your mails, you should also take care not to send messages too often. Similar to the density of the content, the frequency of the messages should not be too high so that your employees do not feel annoyed. A certain regularity is also an advantage here. For example, send a message once a week. Studies show that you can achieve the best possible opening rate and that the response and reading rates also achieve an optimum. By introducing regularity, you can also ensure that your employees are already expecting the mail and, in the best case, that a small time window is already planned for it during the working day.
Nevertheless, the bottom line remains that it is rather important to keep the content of internal mails short and sweet so that interest does not dry up. You can therefore send mails more than once a week if the content is interesting, relevant and in a nutshell.
Find the right time
There are many studies about when is the right time to send marketing emails and generate the best opening rates, but the general conditions differ from internal and external email marketing. Therefore, you should not base your shipping time on external newsletter mailing or other marketing campaigns. When optimizing the shipping time of external marketing mail, it is often advised to send in the evening after rush hour, or on weekends and not on Mondays, as people then start their working week and are increasingly stressed, which is why you tend to prefer marketing emails are annoyed and take little time for it.
For your internal campaign, almost the opposite is the optimal shipping time. Studies have shown that the attention to internal mailing campaigns is highest at the beginning of the week, i.e. on Mondays but also on Tuesdays. In addition, it is an advantage if possible to send at the beginning of the average working day so that your email is at the top of the mailbox and is noticed immediately as soon as the email program is opened. As soon as the weekend approaches, i.e. on Thursdays and especially on Fridays, attention for internal e-mails goes down visibly, which may also be due to the fact that many employees leave work early on Fridays and therefore no longer see the mail. Another reason may be that many tasks still have to be done urgently at the weekend, which is why colleagues are more under pressure and sometimes overlook lower-priority items, or possibly postpone reading the email. At the beginning of the week, however, many employees are careful to organize the following days and therefore to view and classify all input. Internal email marketing is rarely lost here.
At best, you already know the ideal shipping time for your purpose, or you can roughly define it and then keep it. With professional marketing automation software, you can also automatically determine the optimal shipping time for your employee distribution list, individual segments or even individual employees and have the shipping controlled.
The design of a campaign
You should also think about segmentation when it comes to internal email marketing. Not every piece of information is important or interesting for every employee. Which attributes you use to segment recipient groups depends, of course, entirely on your content. For example, it can be segmented according to departments or according to qualifications, personal characteristics such as marital status or behavior patterns (often depending on work processes).
If you have segmented the recipient groups for your campaign, you should of course now create the content for these segments and design the email. There are two main options here:
- You can send e-mails that mainly contain visual language, that is, messages that are very heavy on images and graphics. This means: you should then consistently fill at least half of the mail with image content and only use text as an explanatory additional module. Images and graphics can act as eye-catchers and thus attract the attention of your readers. Appealing and suitable pictures can also make a direct statement about the information you want to convey and the reader does not have to inform himself by reading the text. You have a teaser like this, but it is already conveying your message, evoking emotions and involving the reader. Mails with predominantly graphic content are best suited for the promotion of internal campaigns, events or the introduction of new employees.
- Another option is emails that consist only of text. Here the content of the mail may appear more serious to the reader, since it comes in the same style as "normal" business mail. You should use this type of e-mail if the occasion requires seriousness, for example information about changes in work processes, data protection or general guidelines or if you want to introduce new internal concepts.
Basically, the results of email campaigns show that emails with image content have the best opening and reading rates. But if you have to convey somewhat longer content where some text cannot be avoided, then you should not additionally enrich it with many pictures, as this can lead to over-excitement or distract the reader from the actual text, so that only the pictures and the essential information is not perceived.
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