Wish you could better understand what internal content is resonating with employees? Boost employee engagement by choosing the best internal communications software to give your employees what they want to see!
When it comes to improving internal communications, plenty of workplaces and professionals admit to huge gaps in their processes. Examples of these can be:
- Sending too many emails to employees and having some ignored
- Being overly transparent by sending unnecessary communications
- Not making the intentions of internal communications clear
- Creating good internal publicity for the organization without presenting solutions or solving issues
The right software can help optimize your internal communications strategy, saving you time and increasing employee engagement.
ContactMonkey is an all-in-one internal communications software that makes creating, sending, and tracking beautiful HTML emails easier than ever.
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What is Internal Communications Software?
Internal communications email software helps businesses operate more efficiently by optimizing communication channels. This can include helping employees better communicate with one another, or helping management effectively communicate through leadership messages to employees.
If you’re currently operating without the best internal communication software for your business, a lot of things may be slipping through the cracks. For example, you likely have no idea whether or not employees are opening the emails you’re sending out.
Internal communications tools aren’t just limited to internal emails or employee newsletters. There are a lot of others on the market, such as:
- Intranet (like Jostle)
- Podcasts (like Storyboard)
- Video conferencing (like Zoom.us)
- Chat services and forums (like Slack)
- Video communications (like Vidyard)
- Collaboration tools (like Trello or alternatives)
- Mass employee text messaging systems (ContactMonkey)
Although we love a lot of the other internal corporate communication options, and use some of them ourselves, we feel that we’re best suited to the email space.
That’s why we created an internal communications software that lets you create, send, and track beautiful responsive HTML and personalized messages to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of employees using Outlook Distribution Lists, Google Groups, or CSVs, straight from your inbox:
Why Use Internal Communication Software: 3 Important Benefits
Employee newsletters are written by employees, for employees. As an internal communicator at your organization, you are crucial to bridging the gap between leader and individual contributors.
Employees want to feel in the loop, and receive information that is relevant to them. Treat the internal newsletter like a mirror; find a way to have employees see themselves in the content you create with them in mind.
Internal Communications Software Use Cases
Your internal communications are a powerful channel through which you can inform, engage, and motivate employees. Far beyond emails, internal communications software can make a huge difference at your business. These are just some of the many ways you to use ContactMonkey:
- Streamline your event management with easy-to-embed RSVPs, anonymous employee comments, and email metrics to see increase engagement at your next event.
- Create two-way conversations with employee feedback options on your internal communications.
- Measure how likely your emplyoees are to recommend your product or service to their friends and family using the Employee Net Promoter Score survey features.
- Segmented reporting allows you to measure email metrics across different parts of your company.
- Improve your onboarding and offboarding processes by using premade internal communications templates.
- Alert your employees to IT security threats and promote email phishing awareness.
These are just a few of countless uses for internal communications software. By leveraging the many features of this software, you can realize three direct benefits for your business when you use the best email management software for internal communications:
Be sure to check out our internal communications case studies to see how other companies use ContactMonkey to improve employee engagement and productivity.
1. Internal communications powers employees to talk about relevant internal topics
In a study by SHRM, it’s noted that Fortune 500 companies are losing $31.5 billion annually by not sharing purposeful knowledge. Transparency and sharing knowledge with employees works wonders for ROI (return on investment) figures, and they go hand-in-hand with employee engagement ROI and retention.
The larger an organization becomes, the harder it can be for leadership to keep up with communications. People want to hear from the people they work for, as it builds trust.
According to Ragan, 57% of employees stay at jobs where leadership communicates with the team directly and transparently. In a nutshell, internal communications need to be a priority, even if it has to be done at scale.
2. Internal communications help remote employees feel more included
Remote work is growing in popularity and seems to be a large part of the future of work. One of our customers, Exemplis, uses ContactMonkey to meet the challenge of having a team in multiple locations and an entirely remote sales team.
The reality that is remote work is a result of globalization, as teams are not only in a number of different countries but also time zones. To move with the times, organizations are more apt to allow employees significant flexibility, such as work from home days.
Not only are organizations opening themselves to a larger talent pool, but there is an opportunity to experiment with different collaboration styles via hybrid workplaces and remote team communications tools.
3. Internal communications improve morale through employee recognition
When employee morale decreases, the team is less productive and finds it taxing to perform at their best. When low morale is felt throughout the organization, people are more likely to leave in order to escape the stressful atmosphere.
Boosting morale can be as easy as sharing a kind word. Make a point of letting workers know that they’re valued and that their hard work has positively impacted the business.
How ContactMonkey’s Internal Communications Software Integrates with Your Email Client
ContactMonkey’s internal email tracking tool lives in your Outlook or Gmail inbox as a sidebar, providing you the ability to build and send emails without ever having you leave your inbox.
From an efficiency standpoint, this is a better option, rather than relying on third-party software such as Mailchimp for internal communications. Don’t get us wrong; Mailchimp is still an excellent tool. However, it’s better suited to external marketers who are focused on sending content to external audiences. Overall, it’s best use tools that are tailored to an internal marketing strategy.
Our employee engagement tool is available for Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, Office 365 and Gmail, and lives as an Outlook add-in or Chrome extension for Gmail.
With our internal communication software you’ll easily be able to build and send responsive employee newsletters, collect employee feedback and track both individual (right down to each individual employee) and overall aggregate campaign engagement. This is the power of an interoffice communication system.
How to Create and Send Responsive Employee Newsletters in ContactMonkey
1. Choose your newsletter template
Choose from dozens of pre-designed internal email templates—or upload your own existing email designs to ContactMonkey:
As long as they exist within the tool, the email templates will be responsive on both desktop and mobile. Ensure your emails look perfect with internal communication software for your business.
2. Add custom design elements to your email template
Our easy-to-use email template builder is a great way to give your internal newsletter creative, personal touches without sacrificing brand consistency.
Customize your email template design to match your company’s brand colours, messaging, and imagery style:
3. Create a mobile-responsive design
Before you press send on your internal email system, preview your email designs on both desktop and mobile to make sure your messages are responsive and look just the way you intended.
Attention to detail will only build appreciation and credibility among your fellow employees.
4. Add event invitations
Easily create and embed event invitations within your emails with ContactMonkey. The event invitations feature allows you to create events, send invites, and track RSVPs from within your dashboard:
5. Send and track your employee newsletter
Once everything looks how you want it to, you’re ready to send and track your beautifully designed HTML employee newsletter.
ContactMonkey is an internal communication software that saves you the pain of having to build a new recipient list. With a couple of clicks, you can queue up your internal email to send to existing Outlook distribution lists or Google Groups in your Outlook or Gmail inbox.
How to Gather Employee Feedback with Internal Communications Software
Asking for feedback from employees is an excellent way to get a handle on how the organization functions as a result of company culture. The results you gather may even identify trends around issues that are beginning to surface.
With ContactMonkey, you can gather employee feedback in real-time without a great deal of effort. With our drag and drop email template builder you can add emoji reactions, employee opinion surveys, employee pulse surveys, comment boxes, and a dichotomous scales in the form of a thumbs up vs. thumbs down.
To input these elements into your internal newsletter, you just need to drag and drop the block into your HTML email template. All of these are contained within our easy-to-use email template builder.
Emoji reactions
These give your employees the ability to love, like, and laugh at the content you send them via email. With emoji reactions, your internal communications team can seamlessly gather feedback rooted in employee emotions.
The results provide internal communicators with meaningful, quantitative data. For example, if you ask your team how they feel about the monthly All Hands meeting, and you find that more employees are leaning towards a sad face, you can send out a follow-up survey to better understand what they’re not enjoying about the meeting.
Personalization
With ContactMonkey, you can easily personalize email subject lines for each employee on your distribution list, dynamic distribution groups in your inbox, or you can upload a CSV file.
Pulse surveys
With pulse surveys, you’ll also get actionable data on your email communications. You’ll be able to see all of the responses live in real time on your ContactMonkey dashboard.
Usually, pulse surveys don’t go past 10 questions but sometimes, all you need is one. For example, you can ask something like: “On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you to be working here?”
Once you collect the responses, you can identify trends and come up with an action plan.
‘Like’ buttons
Your employees are already liking content on all the social media platforms they use on their own time. By adding like buttons to your own internal emails, you’ll be able to engage your employees with your content and actually learn what they like.
If you’re bringing in new snacks to the office, you can ask people how they feel about the selection. If you’re seeing more dislikes than likes, it might be a good time to poll people about what they’d like to see offered instead.
eNPS
Employee engagement is reflected in how enthusiastic your employees are to recommend your product to others, or your business to prospective hires. Employees Net Promoter Score, or eNPS, lets you know how your employees feel about your business. That’s why conducting these types of surveys is one of the key best practices to improve employee engagement.
ContactMonkey’s email template builder has eNPS functionality built-in. Simply drag the eNPS tile onto your email template, and enter the question you’d like your employees to answer:
Employee comments
Receive employee comments on any office communications newsletter you send from Outlook or Gmail. All you have to do is enable “Comments” through the email template builder. All comments or answers to questions will be funneled into the dashboard.
How to Use Internal Communications Software Metrics for Measuring Employee Engagement
Curious about some of the most common metrics used to determine the success of internal emails once your internal newsletter software has been implemented?
Although they are all effective, it may make more sense to pick and choose which metrics to pay attention based on what you are trying to understand about your employees:
Open rates
Open rates provide insight into whether people are being informed about key company news. If you’re finding your open rates are low, you can try testing different send times or subject lines. Our customer, Cimpress, uses ContactMonkey as an interoffice communication software to better understand which subject lines are resonating with employees.
Read time
Read time metrics can help contextualize your open rates and link clicks. You can use read time to learn how long your employees viewed your internal communications to see who meaningfully engaged with your emails.
Click maps
Click maps help you understand exactly what parts of your internal communications are grabbing your employees’ attention:
This information can help you refine your email design to ensure your employees are seeing the information you need them to.
Link clicks
A high click-through rate tells you that the content you’re sending out is relevant. If you find that the majority of people aren’t getting past the first link in your internal email, you can play around with link placement and length of email body copy.
Segmented email stats
When you track emails individually, you can organize your results using segmented emails stats. Analyze your email metrics in-depth and conduct an internal communications audit to see your most engaged employees and departments:
Campaign comparison
When you want to see how different email campaigns stack up against each other, use the Campaign Comparison feature in ContactMonkey. Select multiple campaigns to compare and the stats will be visualized immediately:
Location
Being able to tell where employees are opening their emails can be helpful for big companies. For instance, if employees are not opening internal communications at work, this can lead to a decision to alter the send time to either before or after the work day.
If your organization has internal or external regulations around email privacy, you can use ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking to gather email metrics while maintaining your employees’ privacy.
Employee engagement surveys
More often than not, internal communicators are sending out yearly surveys that fail to accurately measure employee concerns and satisfaction. Thanks to pulse surveys, this situation can be avoided and data can be collected more frequently.
ContactMonkey’s best practices for internal communications recommend conducting regular employee engagement surveys. This way, you can measure the effectiveness of your internal communications initiatives over time.
Build Better Communications with ContactMonkey
You should now have a better understanding of how internal corporate communications software can benefit your organization—especially when it comes to employee newsletters, the sorts of metrics you can pay attention to, and how all of this plays into improving employee engagement.
Approaching your internal communications from a data-based perspective can help you focus in on your most effective content and save time in your design process. Use this data to inform your content planning process and develop innovative internal communication tactics. This way, you can be confident you’re sending your employees the right information at the right time.
With ContactMonkey, creating internal emails and newsletter while simultaneously gathering employee feedback has never been easier. Want to better understand how our tool can fit into your day to day? Schedule a personalized demo today to see firsthand why ContactMonkey is a top Mailchimp alternative and Poppulo competitor:
