Employee Comms 101: Did You Get My Email? Tech Adoption & the Influence on Your Internal Comms

Speaker A: The next session is a lightning talk, or like I say, a bite-sized session. So I'm pleased to welcome Tyler Petty Place, Communications Consultant at Contact Monkey. He has some insights to share about tech adoption and the influence on your internal comms. I love the question, did you get my email? This is literally what I was asking Mariah before. I was like, did you get my email?

Speaker B: Well, yeah, thanks. As you mentioned, I only have 5 minutes or so, so thanks for having me quick. Appreciate you recognizing that captive subject line, did you get my email? I find myself asking it all the time as well, and it really notes me to this presentation. Hopefully it resonates with a lot of you communicators that are out listening today. So just quickly, 'cause we don't have much time, embarrassingly enough, I noticed I'm wearing the same shirt as this headshot here, but my name's Ty. I've been doing communications for several years now, helping employees and communicators track their engagement and increase the internal engagement throughout their employee base. So what we're gonna be going through just quickly today is, you know, we have our internal email benchmark report. It's our biggest report ever, and it analyzes nearly 200,000 internal email campaigns. Of course, these are all anonymized. But one interesting thing it gives us is a lot of data information on benchmarks on open rates, click rates, read times throughout many different industries as well. So for example, airlines, automotive, banking, construction, education. The cool part being I can get you a copy of this report after. And not only do we have benchmarks with overall open rates or click rates, but you can actually look at the benchmarks for open clicks, you name it, for your specific sector, which should give you a good guideline moving forward with your internal comms. So looking at some findings from this report, no surprise, email is still the number one channel, which we're all aware of. You know, even though it's a bit of an older communication tool, it's here to stay. Multi-pronged approach is important, you know, with Slack, Teams, intranets, etc. But email, 91% of internal communicators reported relying more on email as a communication channel compared to previous years. So we're seeing that number increase and there's lots of good information that can be sent through email as well as feedback received. Now, one thing to touch on here is your internal emails should outperform your external emails. So, you know, external emails sent via Mailchimp, for example, the average open rate is around that 35% mark, whereas with internal emails sent via ContactMonkey, for an example tool, The average open rate is nearly double at 68%. And that's because you have a much more captive audience. When you look at the average click rate externally, it's at 2.62%. But when you look at it internally, it's almost triple, I guess that is, or triple, 8%. And looking at unsubscribes as well, when you cannot unsubscribe from ContactMonkey emails. So this gives you some great data that, you know, internal employees, they should be engaged. They should be a captive audience for you because they have buy-in, whereas external people aren't necessarily ready to listen until you've marketed to them and got them totally bought in. But as a communicator, you could often still find yourself saying, you know, did you get my email? With the right internal email software, you should show and be able to grow your employee engagement. That way, you're no longer second-guessing if someone got the email. You're able to see not just who got it, who opened it, how many times they clicked on it, read it, on what device they were, where in the world they were. Et cetera. So if you want to have more powerful analytics, let's talk about a few ways here. You know, through these 195,000 anonymized campaigns, we saw that 35% of employees glanced at an email, and glance we're calling 1 to 3 seconds. 40% actually read it. So 40 and 35 combined is 75%. We can take a kind of realization there that 25% of your employees are not really engaging with your employees at all. So how can we get them engaged? Well, one way is through personalization. So the personalized content to appeal to different employees. I'm sure many of you, if you're communicators, you're aware of merge tags and making an email come across like you're communicating directly to said person rather than a blanketed BCC email. And as much as merge tags are great, they are a thing of the past, and we have even more intriguing ways that you can get people involved. For example, dynamic content. Let's say that I have employees in the US, in the UK, and Australia, and your benefits programs are different for all different countries, obviously different benefit providers. But I want to send one blanket email to my employee database. With dynamic content, you're able to just hit send once, but you're able to sub out portions of said email to be different for the UK employees, the Australian employees, and the US employees. And, you know, just the ease for communicators to make one email only and just swap about dynamic content, whether that's for different regions of the world, different departments in your workforce. It really gives you a great way to speed up your process and be a more efficient communicator. Another way is to ask for feedback to boost interaction, right? So 15% is the average overall click-to-open rate. But when we start asking for feedback, we've seen that number jump up to 17%. So feedback can be emoji reactions, it can be star ratings on 1 to 5 stars, it could be adding in elements like a pulse survey and asking your workforce, what did you think of this newsletter? What did you think of the CEO update? Collecting that data and taking the two-way feedback so that you can improve your comms moving forward, maybe improve the content within and how your employees are reading it. And another big piece, I'm sure everyone saw the word AI a lot in 2024. I think you're going to see it a lot in 2025 as well. You can enhance your emails with AI assistance. So what that means is, you know, we're all using ChatGPT. We're familiar with that. But with a tool like ContactMonkey, AI is integrated directly into it so that you can tell the tool, hey, read this email and tell me what are 5 strong subject lines that would captivate my audience, or what is something that I can put in this section of the email? Um, obviously more and more people are using AI. We don't want you to get left behind with it as this number continues to grow. So taking this stat from Forbes, 47% of marketers said they use AI when creating emails. And we're going to continue to watch that number grow. More and more people are going to let the robots do the work for them and spend more of their time coming up with the creativity or working on other projects. Now, once again, I know I was only allowed to give you a quick 5 minutes here, so I'm going to wrap up with this slide. From did you get my email to emails that engage all of your employees, we have all the data for you in our internal benchmark report with nearly 200,000 pieces of data. I'll leave my email up on the screen there for a few seconds. I do believe Reagan will be sending this out. to everyone within the next 10 to 14 days. So you'll get it that way. But if you either can't wait or you have questions about my presentation or you just want to get in touch, please send me an email. It's an easy ty@contactmonkey.com and we can get you that benchmark report and chat a lot more about your internal comms. Thanks, everyone.

Speaker A: Thanks.