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While email teams typically focus on email marketing campaigns, they can also be called upon to assist with internal email communications. This can include everything from employee newsletters to HR communications and special executive announcements.
Employees look to their employer for information and your work emails represent an important connection between them and the company.
However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't invest time in designing your internal emails. After all, you only have a few seconds to impress your employees. A good email design will captivate your readers and add value to the email's content.
In this article, we'll cover the basics of internal email, give you seven best practices, and show you how Email on Acid can optimize your internal email workflow.
What types of internal emails are there?
Not all internal emails are the same. But before we dive into internal email best practices, let's break down the different types of internal emails. To streamline your internal email creation process, you can create an email template for each type of internal email:
Newsletter
Send regular newsletters—whether quarterly or monthly—to share updates, goals achieved, new initiatives, milestones, insights into the next month or quarter, upcoming events, or policy changes with your entire organization. Since newsletters are a regular form of communication, you can also use this space to recognize employees and promote best practices.
Warnings
Use alerts as a one-off email type rather than a newsletter. While newsletters are a good place for company updates, alerts are great for highlighting urgent news. If there's a bug in production, an alert can be a great way to fix the problem internally and give your teams a path forward. Different types of alerts include security alerts, IT issues, and security issues.
Events
Inform your employees about upcoming events. These can be one-time emails interspersed between monthly or quarterly newsletter emails.
Internal changes
Change is never easy, so you should be extra careful when crafting internal change emails to keep your employees informed and soften the news. You should send an internal change email when your company is restructuring, forming a new team, or experiencing management changes. Start by outlining the change and add a call to action (CTA) that tells your employees how to proceed.
Why are internal emails important?
You've been tasked with helping your HR or management send internal emails, but why are they important? Think of internal emails as a game plan that HR or management wants to communicate to all employees, and a way to align goals and expectations across your company. Here are some benefits of sending internal emails regularly:
- Ensure high levels of trust through transparency
- Increase employee engagement
- Ensure regular communication throughout the company
Keeping this in mind when designing and writing internal emails for your brand can help your employers drive positive growth for your company.
Why is transparency important?
While not everything looks great beneath the surface, the more an employer can share with its employees, the more likely employees will trust the brand. As an email marketer, you can do your part by sending an internal email to that effect. Help HR and management boost morale and quality of work by promoting the integrity of your brand.
Why is employee engagement important?
That's right: Internal emails not only provide transparency and keep employees informed, but also encourage employee engagement. Help your company align employees across different teams with different metrics toward the same goals and expectations.
Check out the following engagement methods:
- Comment fields: You can anonymize them if necessary to protect employees' identities and encourage more honest feedback.
- Pulse surveys: These are short and regular surveys that employees can answer quickly. They're a great way for your company to feel the pulse of the business. To optimize pulse surveys, try embedding them in your internal email. This way, your employees don't have to leave their inboxes to take your survey.
- The teams introduce themselves: Have each team take turns writing a short introduction or update, or creating an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) for internal newsletters. This helps the company put faces to certain teams and better understand their role in the organization.
You can use these tactics in internal emails for HR or management teams.
Why is it so important to maintain regular communication throughout the company?
Help your brand use regular, scheduled internal emails to create a regular form of planned communication across the company. Employees will expect newsletters at specific times and begin to value email as a form of internal communication, making them more likely to engage with other internal emails, such as event updates and notifications.
How can I create better internal emails?
To create the best internal employee emails, tailor the following advice to your internal brand guidelines and your employees' sensibilities. While there's no magic formula for creating highly engaging emails, these best practices are a great place to start to improve your email content.
1. Use short subject lines
An engaging subject line will make employees interested in the information in the email. There are several reasons to choose shorter subject lines instead of longer ones:
- On mobile devices, space for previewing the subject line is limited.
- Research by Retention Science has shown that Subject lines with 6-10 words have the highest open rates
- Longer subject lines can be too informative and employees may feel like they have received the message without opening the email
2. Make it personal
Personalize your emails by including your recipient's full name in the subject line and body text. Grab the recipient's attention before they even open your email. If there's no incentive for employees to open your emails, you might as well not send an email.
3. Show, don’t tell
Creating visually appealing internal emails for Microsoft Outlook or Gmail can seem daunting, but it is definitely worth it.
Using a well-designed infographic or short video instead of text can save space and make your message more engaging. Multimedia can convey complex information where words cannot.
Email editors like Email on Acid allow you to customize your emails with code. Your editor allows you to make real-time code changes, saving you time and helping you streamline your email production process.
If you're not so good at coding, Sinch Mailjet's drag-and-drop email builder makes it easy and intuitive to create internal emails. There are even templates for email newsletters.
Mailjet's email editor
4. Check your content
There's no worse feeling than composing a well-crafted email and then experiencing errors when sending it. Broken images, crazy hyperlinks, and incorrect merge tags are just a few of the many problems that can arise when sending HTML emails. Remember to consider accessibility and responsive development when creating content.
With tools like our email preview and spell checker, you can Make sure your emails are typo-free and display well on major clients and devices. before sending it to the entire company.
Acid Previews Email
5. Check your links
Checking your emails before sending them can help you identify text-based errors. With Email on Acid's URL validation tool, you can easily Identify any link problems before clicking Send..
6. Trust the data
It is always a good idea to think about what your employees think about your emails; after all, they are the ones who read them! You can Collect data on your employees’ email preferences – both qualitatively and quantitatively – through your internal communication.
7. Track engagement
Collect detailed information about how your employees interact with your emails. Improve your understanding of your audience with email engagement analytics, heat mapping, and comprehensive email user breakdowns.
Both Email on Acid and Sinch Mailjet offer email analytics that help you measure the performance of your internal company emails using valuable statistics.
Mailjet Email Analytics
However, quantitative tracking only shows part of your true email engagement situation. Give your employees the opportunity to take surveys, leave anonymous feedback and emoji reactions, and sign up for events.
Email tracking helps you identify your best content and quantify the success of your internal emails to stakeholders.
Wrap up
Whether you're creating an email for 500 or 50,000 employees, your content needs to look and function optimally.
Following these best practices will help ensure your internal communications resonate with your audience and help you create better emails in the future.
So you could call it a win-win situation.
This article was updated on August 25, 2022. It was first published in March 2021 and includes insights from our friends at ContactMonkey.
Author: The Email on Acid Team
The Email on Acid content team is made up of digital marketers, content creators, and real email geeks. Connect with us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook, and tweet us at @EmailonAcid on Twitter for more interesting stuff and great conversations about email marketing.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
