Your company intranet can be a powerful internal communications tool—if your employees actually use it. We’ll show you how you can use your existing internal communications channels to set up your employee intranet for success.
Your intranet is the central hub for your employees to get the information they need to know. But if your employees don’t make checking it a regular part of their work experience, your intranet will flounder.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through how to set up your intranet so your employees know what it is and how to use it. We’ll also examine how you can use other internal communication channels to drive traffic to your intranet.
What Is an Intranet?
An intranet is an internal computer network that businesses use to share files, distribute information, facilitate collaboration, and communicate with employees. You can think of an intranet as a website or application that only your employees can access which helps them stay connected to your business and other employees.
Microsoft’s SharePoint is a good example of an intranet. Employees can access it remotely to share and store files, communicate with coworkers, and get information directly from the company.
Why use an intranet?
An intranet can be a powerful tool for your business. Rather than depend on separate applications, intranets can help centralize your business activities within a single location. Their flexibility allows you to customize your intranet to meet your unique business needs.
How to Set up an Effective Intranet
The success of your intranet depends entirely on your employees’ willingness to use it. If your employees do not make it a habit to log in, check its updates, share information on it, etc., then your intranet will flounder.
Onboarding
To set up your intranet to be as effective as possible, you need to make it a priority to your employees as soon as they start at your company. Highlight the importance of your intranet during your employee onboarding process, and include sections in your employee handbook to show employees how to use it.
Regular reminders
After getting your employees started out on your intranet, you need to consistently feature it within your internal communications, linking to it whenever possible. With email still being the most used internal communication channel for businesses, it’s important to funnel employees from email to your intranet:
- Highlight information on your intranet regularly on your employee newsletters.
- Provide tutorials to employees on how to use your intranet to its full potential.
- Link to important resources on your intranet from the employee emails you send.
Confirming intranet use
You may make your intranet indispensable for your employees, but how can you know if they’re actually using it? Intranets provide you with usage metrics that measure quantitative data about how many users access your intranet and how often.
But these metrics won’t tell you if your employees really get your intranet and why it’s important. Confirm your employees understand the importance of your intranet by asking them directly via employee surveys. Employee feedback can be a powerful tool for understanding your employees’ comfort with your intranet, and be a useful venue for them to ask questions
We’ll explore how you can combine your existing internal communications with employee feedback to ensure your intranet fulfills its potential.
Quick Tip: Instantly generate employee reminders directly from your newsletter builder with ContactMonkey’s OpenAI integration.
How to Use Email to Promote Your Employee Intranet
Even with a comprehensive intranet in place, your business will still depend on email to share information with employees. The advantages of email are abundant: it’s popular, instantaneous, and accessible.
Email is the key to the success of your intranet. Focused email campaigns will drive traffic to your intranet and help familiarize employees with the benefits of your intranet.
Drive intranet traffic with email newsletters
As mentioned above, your employee newsletters can help direct employees toward your intranet. Rather than requiring your employees to access your intranet directly, try highlighting intranet content and features within your employee newsletter and providing a link back to your intranet.
Preview information on your intranet, and provide a link in your email newsletter so your employees can navigate to your intranet to read it in full. Over time, your employees will begin to familiarize themselves with your intranet and use it without being prompted via email.
The purpose of using email to drive intranet traffic is to demonstrate the value of your intranet to employees. But how can you be sure that your email efforts to drive intranet are working?
Measure intranet adoption among your employees
We mentioned how intranets provide you with engagement metrics you can use to see if your employees are using your intranet. You can check these metrics after you’ve sent your employee newsletter to see if your efforts increased traffic to your intranet.
This technique can be taken further to improve your intranet traffic. Using ContactMonkey’s email analytics and employee survey features, you can get a near exact image of how your internal emails drive intranet traffic.
Pro Tip: Start creating segmented lists based on employee characteristics and demographics with ContactMonkey’s list management tool.
First, you can check your employee newsletter’s open rate to see how many of your employees actually saw your promoted intranet content. If not enough of your employees are seeing your newsletter, you can increase open rates by adjusting your send times so your email hits your employees’ inboxes when they’re most likely to see them. You can also personalize your subject and email copy according to its recipient using ContactMonkey’s merge tags.
To contextualize your open rate, you can also measure click-through rate using ContactMonkey. See how many times each recipient opened your email and followed links to your intranet within your analytics dashboard:
Both open rate and click-through rate can be cross-referenced against your intranet traffic metrics. If you notice a spike in intranet traffic, your email metrics can show you what part of that traffic went through your emails. This small bit of contextual information can be a powerful resource for proving the value of your internal communications.
Finally, you can add employee surveys to your email newsletters using ContactMonkey’s drag-and-drop email template builder. Use different surveys to let your employees rate your intranet, and even collect anonymous comments from your employees.
Ask your employees about their intranet usage, and allow them to raise issues or problems they’re having. The better you address your employees’ concerns, the more comfortable they’ll be with using your intranet.
Take a Comprehensive Approach to Internal Communications
Ultimately, your intranet and the emails you use to drive traffic to it are two sides of the same coin: internal communications. The goal of both your emails and intranet is to keep your employees connected to your business and each other.
Keep this goal in mind when you’re creating your internal communications strategy. Understand how your email and intranet can work together in order to accomplish your business goals.
An all-in-one internal communications tool like ContactMonkey can improve overall communication at your business. Use it to both measure and increase the effectiveness of your other internal communication channels—like your intranet.
Learn how ContactMonkey can improve all your internal communication channels at your business by booking a free demo.
