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How to Create Corporate Emails Employees Want to Read
Creating a corporate email your employees both read and enjoy hinges on a combination of relevant and valuable information and creativity. But most companies don’t put that much effort into their internal emails, assuming your employees will read them anyway. Yet, internal communications often represent untapped potential when it comes to a company’s branding strategy.
Need to send out an impactful corporate email? Newsletter templates empower you to deliver an eye-catching, professional message not just once, but again and again.
Create compelling corporate emails
We’ve put together these guidelines so you can transform your corporate emails into delightful, valuable resources that help your employees excel. And when your employees feel empowered and informed, they enjoy coming to work every day and stay engaged with their work.
So, to help your company perform its best, level up your communications game by rethinking your internal emails from the perspective of a marketer.
1. Develop a standard communication style for your department or organization.
The easiest way to banish bland corporate emails is to develop guidelines for how, when, and where you communicate with your employees. Yes, we’re talking about internal branding. It’s a best practice for both effective internal communications and building a strong corporate culture.
Internal branding matters. As marketers, we’re concerned with how we convey our brand identity to our customers. Yet, internal communications offer an opportunity which often gets overlooked. Email is a direct connection with our employees, the people who make the company run. Internal branding seeks to harness this potential by turning employees into brand advocates.
Create an engaging brand culture through internal branding
Research indicates that internal branding positively affects employee engagement and loyalty. This occurs because branding makes the company and its goals relatable. It helps employees understand how their role contributes to the greater cause. A brand voice that humanizes the tone of your emails accomplishes this on an organic level.
When your employees relate to the emails they’ve received, they’re more likely to engage with them. Over time, such interactions promote an emotional connection to the company, driving up employee engagement across the board.
In this way, internal branding is both powerful and practical. Developing a brand voice gives you the freedom to be more creative with your communication, allowing you to include more interesting content. A standard brand voice also gives you more control over the way your employees understand your message: It puts everyone on the same page.
Likewise, developing a standard way of communicating:
- Helps departments or leadership present a unified face in communications.
- Increases clarity by standardizing language.
- Provides structure to make difficult or serious emails easier to write.
- Sets guidelines for when or why emails should be sent.
- Creates the expectation that emails will be useful and meaningful to employees.
- Allows you to tailor your communication to your employees.
With a standard style and brand voice, your employees will read your emails not because they’re well-written, but because they genuinely care.
2. Make email communication a part of your corporate culture.
Imagine this: You’re nonchalantly undertaking your Monday morning commute and you spot a notification flicker across your phone. It’s an email! From work! Which scenario excites you more?
- A) It’s the Monday Muse newsletter full of industry news, product trivia, and the scoop on the new hires.
- B) It’s something random, an unusual move for your boss and you’re not quite sure how to interpret the subject line.
You’d be far more stoked for the first option, right? We sure would be.
Build a habit with consistent communication.
Just like with external marketing, consistency in corporate emails keeps readers hooked. Employees need consistency, too. They need to know the Monday Muse newsletter will appear on Monday morning in order to look forward to it.
Similarly, consistency builds habits. Use email for as much of your general internal communication as is appropriate, including press releases, announcements, industry news roundups, and more. These are all opportunities to market the brand and culture to your employees.
Employees will more likely read your emails if they expect to receive them. And they know they’ll get to read something interesting, informative, and actionable.
For example, check out this internal newsletter example from Emma:
Image Source: Emma
Likewise, at Campaign Monitor, we set the precedent early by using email autoresponders to onboard new hires. This process helps make sure that new hires feel welcomed and valued. It also tips them off to resources, events, and even our dress code—while improving the efficiency of the new hire process.
An internal newsletter also normalizes email communication. Check out these tips to create a newsletter which turns your employees into enthusiastic brand ambassadors.
Finally, be consistent in more than just your delivery. A consistent corporate email newsletter template enables employees to scan for the most important or applicable pieces of information. A consistent format for emails which are trying to get an employee to perform a specific action (like clicking on a link), means less time wading through the text trying to find that link.
3. Pay attention to your email’s header and the design of its body.
The way you convey your company’s culture goes beyond the content and the types of emails you send to include your email header and body formatting. Your tracking might show that your employees are opening your emails, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re reading your internal emails in their entirety.
Communicate urgency with the email header.
Even in a corporate setting, the email header can do a lot. Take a few extra minutes to make sure yours are relevant, professional, and eye-catching. Doing so helps your employees filter the more urgent emails from the others sitting in their inboxes.
It also reiterates the relevance of your email and, if necessary, the urgency of it.
In general, strive to:
- Encourage transparency by using a name rather than a department in the sender line.
- Emphasize work-life balance by using an auto-scheduler to deliver emails shortly before people begin their day.
- Respect your recipient’s time with a subject line that tells them exactly what your email is about.
Spiff up corporate emails with newsletter templates
The best practices in email marketing apply to company emails, too. You should use a clean, mobile-ready format for your corporate email. Use templates to present a unified face to employees across different types of emails and communications. A well-dressed email indicates thoughtfulness, professionalism, and respect for your recipient’s time, which is just as important to your employees as it is to your customers.
Match your formatting to your email’s intent. You don’t always need to use a highly visual design if that doesn’t match your message.
Consider this internal press release by Armor when Chris Reif joined their team. The minimalist design lets the reader focus on the content while the use of text and color still emphasizes the brand. Other news articles at the end of the press release draw the eyes downward and reward the reader with other interesting news bits.
Image Source: Really Good Emails
4. Embrace interactivity to boost engagement.
Interactive content is proving to be a powerful tool to boost open and click-through rates. You can harness it in your corporate email to much the same effect.
Gamification is one such tool which we can put to good use in a corporate email. People like games, puzzles and quizzes and these things can also make boring but necessary processes more interesting.
For instance, if your department sends out a morning brief to its members, try adding secret codes that members can collect and turn in for small perks. It gets people reading the emails, and it rewards them for doing so.
Boost interactivity with your emails even more by:
- Including useful links, like one to add events to calendars.
- Promoting interaction with your company’s social media.
- Creating surveys and polls.
- Linking to videos or other informative content.
Like with developing your communication style, embracing interactivity also has practical uses. It’s well-established that we remember information when we interact with it. A weekly newsletter is also a low-stress setting which may lower survey anxiety. As such, you’ll gain the ability to gather more candid feedback about workplace topics.
With such feedback, you can adjust your internal brand to suit your audience. It might also show you where your corporate culture needs to evolve to better meet the company’s needs.
Wrap up
At its core, creating corporate emails that your employees want to read is all about incentivizing engagement with interesting, high-value, and actionable material. However, the added dimension of operating in a corporate environment demands we examine how we present what we communicate, not just what we type.
This means paying attention to not just content, but also the design of your corporate email. Newsletter templates give you the power to create professional, flawless internal correspondences. Your company’s internal communications present an opportunity for you to get employees excited to be a part of your company.
By embracing marketing concepts in your corporate emails, you’ll create not only more engaging emails, but also more engaged employees.
