A new year brings new internal communication challenges. From personalizing employee communications to measuring email metrics, set yourself up for success with our internal communication strategy checklist.
Every year, countless articles about the “top internal communications trends” for the coming year are published. It can get overwhelming keeping up with every new innovation in internal communications, and even more so when thinking about implementing them into your own strategic internal communications.
Below you’ll find our top internal communication strategy checklist. Using our most indispensable internal communication strategies and internal communication tactics, you can meet and exceed all your internal communications goals for 2024.
1. Use a Modern IC Technology to Upgrade Your IC Strategy
An internal communications software gives you the ability to take control of all of your business communications. This is why this point tops our internal communication strategy checklist: an effective internal email tool allows you to implement a modern internal communication strategy and action plan akin to what industry leaders have in place.
How ContactMonkey can help
A lot of time and work goes into your internal communications. That’s why an all-in-one internal communications tool like ContactMonkey is so crucial: you can centralize all your internal communication tasks into a single software. Not only will you create better internal communications, but you’ll save tons of time doing it; Mettler Toledo saved 25 days a year by switching to ContactMonkey.
2. Boost Employee Engagement With Multiple IC Channels
Email newsletters are the most popular internal communication channel—with 45% of internal communicators relying on them the most for their business communications, according to our Global State of Internal Communications survey. Despite this, your business will rely on multiple channels to connect with your employees.
Ensure that your internal communications channel strategy addresses every channel through which you communicate with your employees. By knowing your internal communications infrastructure, you’ll be able to coordinate your various internal communications to maximize their effectiveness.
How ContactMonkey can help
No matter where your employees prefer to get their communications, you can reach them with ContactMonkey. Reduce the number of obstacles your employees face to get the information they need by pushing your internal communications to multiple channels like email, SMS, Google Teams, and more.
3. Plan Your Success With an Internal Communications Roadmap
Timing is crucial for successful internal communications. Creating an internal communications roadmap for the coming year will help you in several important ways:
- Plan and coordinate future campaigns, events, newsletters, surveys, and more.
- Designate stakeholders for future internal communications to minimize confusion.
- Map how you plan to send future internal communications, properly allocate your internal channels.
- Create an effective cadence for your internal communications—helping you avoid overwhelming your employees.
Even if you don’t know the specifics of your strategic internal communications, you can still allocate future days or time slots for them. This will help ensure you’ll be able to reach your employees when you need to without inundating them with communications
How ContactMonkey can help
Ensure your communications reach your employees when they’re most likely to read them by scheduling your emails ahead of time using ContactMonkey’s scheduled sending. And to help create an effective internal communications cadence, use our Internal Communications Planning Calendar to map out your planned campaigns for the coming year.
4. Perfect Your IC Strategy with Effective KPIs
Email metrics give you a quantitative measure of your internal communication performance. With these metrics, you can develop solid key performance indicators (KPIs) for your internal communications so you can carefully measure the impacts of your strategy.
For example, by measuring the open rates and read times of your monthly employee newsletters, you can assess your current engagement levels and set goals for future campaigns. You’ll also be able to prove the value of your internal communications by having hard numbers you can point to as evidence of your strategic internal communications’ success.
How ContactMonkey can help
KPIs are a crucial part of our internal communication strategy checklist. With effective and thoughtful KPIs, you can optimize and improve your internal communications performance over time. Drive more engagement and zero in your internal communication strategy by consulting ContactMonkey’s Internal Email Benchmark Report to help you develop truly effective KPIs.
5. Improve Your Internal Communications Performance by Tracking Email Metrics
Before you try any new internal communication tip or tactic, it’s crucial you establish how you plan to measure your success. Otherwise, you’ll be unable to pinpoint what actually made the positive difference for your internal communications.
How ContactMonkey can help
Not only does email tracking improve your internal communication performance, but it also allows you to quantify the impact of your efforts using hard data. Imagine having real numbers to back up your internal communication decisions or show the success of your latest employee engagement campaign. With ContactMonkey’s email analytics dashboard, you’ll get in-depth insights into both your employee engagement and internal communications landscape:
6. Increase Engagement With Personalized Internal Communications
No one likes receiving an email that was obviously sent to thousands of other recipients. This is part of the reason why emails with the recipients’ name in the subject line can increase open rates up to 30%. Internal communication personalization is an integral part of any employee communication, which is why it gets its own entry on our internal communication strategy checklist.
How ContactMonkey can help
Using ContactMonkey’s merge tags feature, you can personalize the subject line and body of your emails according to the recipient. This is a simple and easy way to boost engagement on your employee emails.
You can also use ContactMonkey’s List Management feature to create custom employee email lists without having to wait on IT to create it for you. Custom email lists help you reduce the amount of irrelevant emails your employees receive, which helps reduce email burnout and increase open rates on your emails.
7. Sync Your IC Strategy With Software Integrations
Companies rarely rely on a single software for their day-to-day operations. The challenge is to integrate these different softwares into a single workflow to reduce wasted time trying to sync them up manually.
When drafting your IC strategy, take an inventory of all the software your business uses. Then map out how those softwares can/will interact with your internal communications. Often, business softwares can integrate with each other, sharing and updating information automatically.
How ContactMonkey can help
Integrate your existing business software with ContactMonkey for a seamless internal communication process. For example, you can integrate ContactMonkey with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so your custom lists can update automatically as employees join and leave your organization.
8. Refine Your IC Strategy With Regular Audits
An internal communications audit is the practice of evaluating the effectiveness of your internal communications. An IC audit differs from your KPIs in its scope: an audit will assess all aspects of your internal communications, whereas KPIs will only reflect certain aspects of your internal comms strategy.
The point of internal communications audit is to help you understand what parts of your employee communications strategy work and which don’t. Are there certain channels that don’t elicit much engagement? Is there a particular kind of content that your employees like more than others? Your audit will seek to answer these questions.
How ContactMonkey can help
Performing consistent, comprehensive audits of your internal communications strategy will lead to better internal communication performance and increased employee engagement. With ContactMonkey tracking and employee feedback features, you’ll have the tools you need to conduct effective audits of your internal communications strategy.
9. Be Prepared to Overcome New Internal Communications Challenges
It’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest internal communication tips, tools, and best practices. There are countless new innovations and internal communication trends every year, and it’s in your interest to understand how these changes will shape the IC space and which of them would be beneficial for your business.
For example, we are in the midst of a rise in AI-generated content. As an internal communicator, it’s important for you to understand how and which AI tools could potentially fit into your IC strategy. These assessments can often be done in conjunction with your audits: if you detect a gap or weak point in your internal comms strategy, try to find out if there is a contemporary solution you could adopt.
How ContactMonkey can help
Each year, we publish our Internal Communications Global Survey, which summarizes past, present, and future challenges internal communicators face. The findings in our survey will often inform what updates we make to our internal communications software, and we encourage our customers to take advantage of this information as well.
Achieve All Your Internal Communication Goals in 2024
Fortify your internal communication strategy by rolling out our internal communication strategy checklist items. Many of these tips and tactics start with the right internal communications software.
Meet and exceed your goals with ContactMonkey, an all-in-one internal communications tool with which you can try out all these strategies and more. See why ContactMonkey is a top internal communications alternative to Mailchimp and Staffbase.
See for yourself! Try ContactMonkey for free, today! Upgrade your IC game with a free 14-day trial.
