Bella Manasan didn’t choose ContactMonkey. She inherited it, but it ended up being a platform that empowered her to be a better internal communicator.
Not every platform switch comes with a champion. Sometimes the decision is made a level or two above you, and you find out what you think of it later.
That was Bella Manasan’s experience. As Marketing & Communications Specialist at WF Group, she wasn’t part of the evaluation that moved the organization off Mailchimp.
“I was not involved in the selection process, but happy we made the switch.”
Which makes her a useful person to listen to. She has no stake in defending the decision, just an opinion formed by using the platform.
The two ceilings she had been working under
Ask Bella what wasn’t working before and you get a precise answer, and both halves of it are ceilings rather than outright failures.
“Layout design limits, not having individual analytics for our audiences.”
The first is the one every comms person who has used a marketing platform for employee email will recognize. Mailchimp is very good at what it was built for, which is getting a promotional message in front of a customer or prospect list. Internal comms ask for something different: more content blocks, more sections, more variation in a single send, and a layout that still holds together when it lands in Outlook. Push a marketing template far enough in that direction and it stops cooperating.
Then, there’s removing blind spots. Without analytics broken out by audience, every send returns one blended number for the whole organization. That average is close to useless if your people are split across functions, locations, or seniority, because it can’t tell you that the update landed with one group and missed another entirely.
What better design tools actually unlocked
The obvious outcome of removing a design ceiling is nicer newsletters. That happened.
“Since using ContactMonkey, we’ve been able to create more polished, visually engaging internal communications that better reflect our brand.”
The more interesting outcome is what her team started doing that they hadn’t been doing at all.
“In addition to our regular internal newsletters, we’ve used the platform to design digital holiday cards and branded invitations for company events, helping create a more engaging and consistent employee experience.”
Holiday cards and event invitations are the small, warm, culture-carrying communications that get skipped when the tooling makes them expensive to produce. Nobody puts “we couldn’t send a decent holiday card” on a list of business problems. It just doesn’t happen, and when small touches aren’t enabled across the organization, the employee experience is slightly flatter for it.
Give a comms team a builder that doesn’t fight them and the scope of what they send expands on its own.
Faster to build, and measured after it ships
The last part of Bella’s account connects the two halves of her original complaint.
“ContactMonkey has streamlined our email creation process, making it easy to build professional, visually appealing communications while tracking engagement to continuously improve our content.”
Note the order: build, then measure, then adjust. Design and analytics are usually discussed as separate features, and in practice they’re a single loop. You can only improve the thing you can see the results of, and you can only act on those results if changing the email is quick. Break either half and the loop stalls.
The takeaway for comms teams
If your internal comms live in a marketing platform, the cost usually shows up as what you’ve stopped attempting. The newsletter still goes out. The holiday card, the branded event invite, the format you sketched and abandoned because the builder wouldn’t do it: those just never appear on anyone’s list of challenges.
Bella wasn’t looking for any of that. She inherited a decision and found out what it was worth by using it.
Where do your employee experience initiatives stall? Book a demo to learn more about what a modern internal communications platform can do for you!
