Seagate: How to Optimize Internal Communications by Using Metrics and Tracking Email Analytics

Challenge

• The Internal Communications team determined through surveying that email remained a popular communication channel for Seagate’s professional/knowledge workers

“We were trying to increase our understanding of our internal employee audience’s online engagement and behaviors.  Our audience is strictly employees, a unique demographic with unique interests and touchpoints.”

• It was key for Richard to prevent employees from unsubscribing to the internal communications. If employees opt out of internal emails, they can miss critical information. “We realized that we would be well-served to understand what the employee behavior was with our emails,” “We've been able to track intranet page views and other related metrics, time on page...[but] we didn't have visibility to what kind of traction our emails were getting.”
• With these expectations in mind, Richard and his team partnered with their IT team to find a software solution “We were trying to find something that would work internally.  Our audience is strictly employees.”

Solution

• ContactMonkey was among the list of software solutions Richard’s IT team presented to him. What stood out was that ContactMonkey had the advanced tracking options he needed to measure employee engagement, and prevented employees from opting out of receiving corporate emails. 

“That's why we were looking for tools like this. Can we gauge some kind of engagement with our audience? I guess hand-in-hand with tracking is preventing users from opting out.”

• Although their initial reason for choosing ContactMonkey was for our email-tracking, the Seagate team learned how useful our email template builder can be for creating branded internal communications from our Customer Success team. “Optimizing layout and refining the branding was not even a consideration at the time,” Richard remembers. “Once we were on board and Cathal [ContactMonkey’s Customer Success Manager] became our account manager, he actually regularly championed the benefits using responsive HTML email templates.”

How ContactMonkey’s Internal Email Tracking Solution Helped Seagate 

With ContactMonkey’s email analytics, Richard and his team were able to:

• Understand readership trends for “self-contained” email content; an email that didn’t require clicking on a link to access the information. They no longer had to depend on link clicks to track engagement, and enjoy using ContactMonkey to “amplify” their email content.
• Build HTML email templates that work well on desktop and mobile devices, across all email clients.
• Add a variety of engaging content to and create email newsletters in the drag-and-drop email template builder.

“That's been primarily one of my main goals just because my nature is marketing pretty much, and I know the benefits of having a clear, crisp experience from an end-user standpoint, whether it's on mobile or desktop.”   - Christine Robertson, Senior Internal Communications Administrator at Seagate.

Key Results

• The internal communications team was able to get a clearer picture of how Seagate employees engage with their communications.
• They could easily track self-contained internal email communications , without the need to use click-through links.

“What metric tracking has really helped solidify the fact that the approach we're taking in terms of the “self-contained” model of content is working, and that and that employees are getting the information within the emails we send.” - Katherine Chow, Senior Internal Communications Administrator at Seagate

• ContactMonkey’s email template builder helped to create branded content and improve user experience.
• Email-tracking analytics helped Richard and his team chart engagement trends for their emails.

 “As far as the metrics, it's really cool. I share the metrics all the time”  - Christine Robertson, Senior Internal Communications Administrator at Seagate

• ContactMonkey’s Customer Success team played a big part in Seagate’s adoption of email templates. On previously encountering an error when sending emails, Tom Newsom, Staff Program Manager, remembers, “we had encountered an idiosyncratic error, this intermittent thing that would happen where an email wouldn’t send. It would give us this, “Your email surpassed this 4 megabyte attachment,” issue.”. Cathal was quick to diagnose the problem.

“Cathal said, “If you move to the templates, that won’t happen.” He all along was very good at hand-holding and guiding us in this direction. Once we adopted the templates, that intermittent issue disappeared.”