There are 306.4 billion emails sent each day. Yep, that’s billion with a ‘b.’ It’s becoming increasingly difficult to capture your employees’ attention with your corporate emails. As an internal communicator, you need to implement new tactics that make your employees excited to receive their organizational newsletters.
The open rate is the percent of employees that have opened your internal email; it’s one of the easiest KPIs to measure.
This post is specifically focused on best practices for increasing your open rate, but if you want to dive deeper into other vital IC measurements, check out our Internal Comms Measurement Cheat Sheet.
You might wonder how your current open rate compares to others, but truthfully, it depends. Internal communications usually have pretty high open rates; we improve our customer’s average open rates on average by 32%. How can you reach out and connect with the rest of your organization?
Let’s see what small changes you can make to increase your stats and ensure that your employees don’t miss time-sensitive communications.
1. Spend Time Crafting Your Email Subject Lines
It can be easy to make your subject line the key takeaway of the communication that you’re sending. But, that can make for a pretty unenticing email. Try putting yourself in the recipient’s shoes and have the subject line answer the question, “What’s the benefit the employee would they get if they were to read this email?”
For example, “New Volunteer Opportunities” could turn into “You can give back to our Chicago community.”
One thing that we have found very successful with our Cerkl clients is the use of personalized subject lines. When their employees know that they are receiving content just for them, they’re more likely to open it.
2. Speak the Office Slanguage
Your corporate news shouldn’t read like a press release.
Sometimes, company language can get stuffy and annoying, especially if your employees are using the same jargon day in and day out.
Instead, try to become the virtual water cooler of the office. Yes, there are imperative legal and benefit updates that you still have to send out. But creating spotlights and testing with different types of content will make employees excited to see your email pop up in their inbox.
3. Make Sure Your Employee Newsletter is Mobile-friendly
Before the mobile content revolution, 65 character headlines were the norm. But now, 69.1% percent of audiences are opening their email messages on their mobile phones. Now, the best practice is to keep your headline text to 40 characters or less to ensure that it appears complete on all devices.
Letters and spaces both count towards your limit. If you need some help counting characters, there’s a Chrome plugin that can help. If you use Microsoft Word, select the text you want to count, and then on the Review tab, click Word Count.
When your employees view their inbox on their smartphones, most email platforms surface the first few lines of an email or designated alternate text. Make sure you don’t waste this opportunity and define your preview text to make your employee newsletter more compelling.
4. A/B Test Your Email Send Time and Date
Mid-week is definitely more preferred than getting emails from your employer on a Monday or weekend. As for peak send times, it’s hard to give communicators a standard because every organization is unique. Some employees have more traditional 9-5 workdays, then you have to consider different timezones and mobile workers.
With clients across many different industries, we’ve kept this in mind which is why individual employees can select their own delivery time and frequency. That way, you’re not drowning your organization with your corporate emails.
5. Make Your Employee Email Matter
Send emails to the audience that needs it. Not everyone needs to know that your downtown location is having elevator service issues, but you’ll want to tip off the employees in that location who don’t want to walk up 12 flights of stairs. Our clients love our Audience Feature for making sure that the right audience is getting the right message.
What’s Next?
How can you can increase your click rates every communication? Book a demo with us today.
