You’ve carefully crafted each sentence. Your grammar is impeccable. Your action items are clear and you found the perfect gif. You finally press “publish” on your masterpiece and...
...nobody reads it. ❌
A successful business demands constant internal communication in order to raise awareness, strengthen relationships, and build a brand. But, as notifications pile up for a busy employee, your message becomes just another number--easily ignored and destined for the virtual graveyard. What's worse, this sets a dangerous precedent with regard to future internal communications.
Internal communicators face a serious dilemma--30% of emails are trashed or ignored and 74% of US employees feel they are missing out on company news and information, according to our research. Beyond creating quality content, are you making the most of your messaging?
Ensure that those receiving your content are fully engaging by following these three tips:
1. Segmentation: Getting the right message to the right people
Despite modern notions stressing the importance of company unity and singularity of culture, not all employees should be treated the same from a communications perspective. Individuals in different roles will have different interests and inherent biases that predispose them towards a specific type of content--for example, you wouldn’t send the same message to a frontline worker that you might to upper-level management.
The solution?
You need to segment your internal communications in order to ensure that you’re sending a personalized message likely to be read and acted upon. The more you can tailor your messaging according to people’s affinities, routines, and preferences, the more successful you’ll be in reaching them.
2. Be Concise
The Pew Research Center published study results in 2016 having found that people under the age of 35 feel “the need for instant gratification” and concede to an overarching “loss of patience.”
Take this to heart with your messaging--in our era of convenience and character counts, your employees are far less tolerant with regard to long- winded messaging. In order to connect with a workforce consisting primarily of millennials and Gen Z, your messages need to be brief, precise, and ideally transcend email altogether.
3. A/B Test
A/B testing is a content optimization tactic most commonly practiced in the realm of sales and marketing--creating two different versions of something and testing which one works better.
This same tactic can be applied to your internal communications too.
In a controlled experiment, create two versions of your content, relay it to two different target groups of employees, and measure how the results differ using your current analytics tool of choice. The more successful version will inform content strategy adjustments you can begin to make in order to achieve greater employee engagement.