The responsibility of internal communications is to inform, educate and motivate our employee audiences. To build cohesive employee communities cooperating towards common organizational objectives, executives, personnel managers, and operational leaders must communicate effectively. 

To this end, we must use the most effective strategies and channels, with email being the primary channel for most enterprises. The importance and value of email has only increased during recent periods of crisis and uncertainty, and ongoing to support hybrid and remote workforces. 

Even with the rapid rise in virtual meetings and video, 2023 surveys from HR.com and Ragan Communications reveal over 90% of respondents rate email as their primary channel and over 80% rate email as their most effective corporate communications channel.

Now that we have settled into the new norm — and email volume remains steady — it’s time to assess the emails that we are sending. 

Let’s start with the company newsletter.

Effective Newsletters

The best newsletters are concise, organized, relevant, timely, and the content is divided into skimmable chunks with interesting visuals. Ideally, your newsletter will provide short news and article summaries while linking to longer-form content.

Some people love newsletters while others hate them. Regardless, our data show that on average, you can expect to reach 68% of your employee audience with any given email message. At a minimum, this is the audience that pays attention, but how many folks actually read your newsletters?

Measuring Effectiveness

Before starting any redesign, it pays to get a baseline measurement of your attention and readership rates. 

With PoliteMail, the attention rate is the open rate minus immediate ignores. The read time rate calculates how long a message is viewed relative to the content length (calculated by the word count). A read occurs when a recipient keeps a message open for at least 30% of the content length.

Mastering the Employee Newsletter

In this course, we will explore data-informed best practices for creating, formatting, and sending engaging corporate newsletters. 

We will also share design recommendations, discuss what makes an engaging newsletter, and review which metrics are most valuable for measuring results.

Even small changes to your email newsletters can increase readership and foster higher engagement. Let’s dive in.