Cures for the Common Employee Newsletter

Speaker A: I think you can share.

Speaker B: Hi everyone, welcome to the Cures for the Common Employee Newsletter webinar. So we're just going to give it a few minutes for people to join. But in the meantime, feel free to share where you're joining from in the chat box because we know everyone's joining from all kinds of time zones all over the world. I can see people joining in. New York, Scotland, lots of New York.

Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of East Coast.

Speaker B: Yeah, I guess this time of year is best for East Coast.

Speaker C: Vancouver, I was just there. What a great city.

Speaker B: Isn't it? Yes.

Speaker C: I loved it. My first time, I really loved it. I'm gonna be back. Denver's a great place too. Not, not that I don't love New York. I just haven't been to Kansas either.

Speaker A: Yeah, come on.

Speaker C: Or Charlotte, actually, for that matter.

Speaker B: What about Scotland?

Speaker C: No, someday. I do love New York City. It's also the first place that I ever got shoved in a public setting. So A very authentic New York experience.

Speaker B: Exactly. Okay, I think we can start now. So once again, thanks everyone for joining the webinar and I will just quickly introduce myself. So you can move on to the next slide. Yeah, I'm Maithili Jam, a Growth Marketing Manager at ContactMonkey. I've been with ContactMonkey for a little over 2 years and I kind of work on all different kinds of channels. And I've been hosting the webinars for the last 2 years as well. So those of you who aren't familiar with ContactMonkey, we are an internal email and SMS solution. So our email solution actually integrates with your Outlook or Gmail server, so you don't really have to leave your inbox. And with that, you can create your emails really fast and quick with our drag-and-drop email builder. We also have a whole bunch of employee feedback tools from pulse surveys to eNPS and emoji reactions. And then you can send the emails through Outlook and Gmail itself. And then we provide really comprehensive email analytics covering all the basics like open rates, click rates, read time, and then different ones that are catered specifically toward internal communications KPIs. And then I think we're just ready to dive in. So we have Becky and Gabriel from Brilliant Inc., and they have identified some extremely relatable employee newsletter challenges that we all probably face, and they've also provided really valuable, quick, effective takeaways that you can implement right away. So I'll let you take it away, Becky.

Speaker A: Awesome, thank you. And hi everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. It looks like we have folks from all over, which is great. So I'm Becky Sennett. I'm a research lead and senior strategist at Brilliant Inc., and I'm joined by my colleague Gabriel Galdamez. He'll introduce himself in a minute. We're really excited to be here with you today to talk about one of our favorite subjects, which is employee newsletters. So we're going to give you tips and tricks that you can start putting to use today. But first, we want to share just a little bit about who we are, why we're here, and why we have such a passion for newsletters. So as you can see, I'm a trendsetter. I'm kidding. I'm excited about this topic for 2 reasons. First, I helped manage a client's biweekly newsletter. And I have to say newsletters are a lot of work. Some of you out there might agree with me. I wish I had these best practices to get the most mileage out of the work that we poured into that newsletter and to make our lives a little bit easier when it came to content development. The second reason is as part of the research team at Brilliant Inc., I look at a lot of newsletter analytics. So what we're sharing today are the best practices of newsletters that we see perform really well.

Speaker C: And hi everyone, my name is Gabriel Galdames and I'm an influencer, and I'm not kidding. I'm a marketing lead and senior strategist with Brilliant Inc. and my background is in marketing and communications. And I'll be honest with you all, coming from a nonprofit background, I didn't really understand internal comms, what that even meant, until I heard it described as the intersection of HR and marketing, and that made my ears perk up. Coming to internal comms from a marketing background, I was surprised at how shy communicators can be measurement and experimentation, because I mean, damn, your work is so meaningful and so good. Why aren't you showing off more? In marketing, it's our job to constantly experiment, iterate, report on our progress when it comes to the email marketing that we're doing. And as someone that was doing it for e-commerce, it was extremely important too. Um, so I come to you all eager today to dig into a topic that's very closely related to marketing, and I hope to equip you with best practices and tips to help elevate your content and show off how damn good your work really is. And hey, maybe win a few more marketers over to the light side.

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: And as Mytheli noted, we're with Brilliant Inc. We're an internal communications agency, 100% focused on designing meaningful employee experiences that translate to business results. The way we approach our work is by, one, serving as an extension of your team when you need an extra set of arms to take things off your plate. Also, as strategic consultation. We have a brilliant team of senior-level strategists when you need a thought partner or a gut check. Also with research and data storytelling. brilliant people like Becky that you get to work with, from employee surveys to digging into your channels and telling you how to precisely use your data. We're your resident data geeks and nerds. And design— we get it, you have a hideous PowerPoint and you need someone to help you make it look pretty and to really sell the value of what you're doing. And of course, we have a team of project managers who keep all the balls in the air and make sure everything keeps chugging along. So with that, I want to say You're all doing amazing work. I have so much respect for internal communicators. I love this field that I kind of fell into. And what I want to offer you all today are small tweaks for big impact. So today we have 3 symptoms for the common newsletter, and we're going to dig into each symptom momentarily and then get into the fun part, the cures. So first up, we have information overload, also known as fatigue. And some of the questions that, you know, you may be asking yourself if you have this symptom are, are you leading with the right information? Do you know what the right information is? Next up, we have data dumps, also known as poop. Do you know how to move the needle on newsletter metrics that matter? And lastly, it's just ugly. Is your newsletter hard to read, boring to look at, full of stock photos? If so, perhaps you have a case of the uglies.

Speaker A: Yeah, so very curious if any of these sound familiar to anyone. Let us know in the chat if any of these resonate with you a little bit. I know for me, when I was working on my client's newsletter, Many of our articles were a little long and we were definitely guilty of using stock photos at times. So let's start digging in and we're going to start with information overload. So another question for you, have any of you heard any of these comments from your audiences? We get too many emails. The newsletter is just fluff. I can't find anything related to XYZ topic. What happened to XYZ topic? The list goes on. All right, so let's imagine Marcus. He's an employee at your company and he's working away. He's in the zone and then ding, an email notification pops up. And when he opens his inbox, it might feel something like this. Where should he focus? What does he need to do? Was that email or newsletter really necessary? I think we can all agree we don't want our employees to be asking these questions, right? And this feeling of overload, it could be the result of a lot of things— overflowing inboxes and emails that are coming from every direction. There's so many places to look for information. The list goes on. As internal communicators, we want to limit that feeling for people of being overloaded with information. So whether it's a newsletter, an email, an intranet article, whatever it might be, because that ding that distracted Marcus On top of making him feel overloaded, when he stopped to check that notification, it takes him up to 16 minutes to get fully back to whatever he was working on. That's nuts, right? So we want to make sure our content is worth the interruption. So part of ensuring that our content is worth the interruption is understanding what types of content are important to our people. And the best way to find out is to ask them. So we partner with our clients all the time to create custom internal communications preferences surveys, and one of the most important areas of the survey is asking employees to identify what topics are important to them. So let's say we're partnering with you to develop a survey for your company. Our first step is to lay out your topics. So together we would take a look through previous issues of your newsletter, we'd look through a bunch of intranet articles, We review topics that are covered in town halls. Basically, we think about all the different topics you and your team communicate about, or that your people might be interested in getting information about. You can see here, that might be things like company performance updates, HR information, product news, sales wins, information about the upcoming IT software update that everyone might be avoiding. And we'll also think about requests that you get from other functions and departments. Maybe they want you to include something in the newsletter or to send out an email, and you have a sneaking suspicion that information isn't particularly important to people, or it's not breaking news, but you don't have the data to support pushing back. So this is the list we want to ask your employees about. All right, so we have our list of topics. So in the survey, we'll ask your people to rate their level of agreement with this magic statement. Information on this topic is important to me. And for each topic, they'll go down the line and select somewhere between strongly agree to strongly disagree. And these questions are super quick, really easy for people to fill out, and they give you really valuable data. Alright, so let's say we sent out the survey, we got our data back, and we're ready to see what the results look like. So the best way to visualize this data is a scatter plot. Who doesn't love a good scatter plot? I know Gabriel loves a good scatter plot.

Speaker C: I love me a scatter plot, y'all.

Speaker B: Love it.

Speaker A: So this type of visualization makes it really easy to see the spread of responses and what people find important. So you can see here, clearly topics A and D are very important. Topic B, eh, so-so. And topic C is not at all important. So we can start to see where topics fall. And what's important, no pun intended, to keep in mind here is that these sentiments around the importance of topics may vary based on your employee audiences. So how do we determine that? So in that survey we worked on together, we asked a few upfront demographic questions of your people. We asked them to self-identify their function, their location, their tenure, maybe whether or not they're people managers, and so on. And what we can see here is, yep, indeed, the level of importance does vary among different employee audiences. So, for example, all audiences seem to view topic A as really important. When we look at topic B, that one's a little bit split. Sales might think it's really important while engineering sees it as less important, for example. And I'm using function and department examples there, but based on those upfront demographic questions we asked, we could look at this through the lens of location or tenure, people manager status, And you can have a lot of fun and glean a lot of insights by slicing and dicing. And one last thing, what's really cool is ContactMonkey has targeted sends. So to take things even a step further, you could target audiences based on topics that they find important. All right. So let's keep it simple for right now. We have our topics mapped out, but there's something we can do to make this chart even more user-friendly. Let's use language that actually conveys what we're trying to determine. So instead of strongly agree down to strongly disagree, let's call it what it is: highly important, gray area, less important. Let's add some nice color coding, and now we're ready to do something with this data.

Speaker C: So when it comes to highly important topics, keep on sending them. People want to hear them. Give the people what they want. Also consider sourcing additional topics on this content, or even consider how you can get more mileage out of that same content create by packaging it up in different ways for your intranet versus your newsletter versus your mobile app. And if something is super important to your people, then explore supplemental channels, specifically push channels, to share this critical information throughout our comms landscape. And when I'm talking about push channels, what I mean are platforms like your email, SMS, which is a feature that ContactMonkey offers, or even a mobile app that has push notifications enabled. So you can literally push this information to your people. This should be reserved for topics that are of the utmost importance. So of course, use it strategically and sparingly. Now, what about things that people rated as less important? Really consider limiting the frequency. And here's where you want to explore alternate channels for sharing this information and topic and focus on pull channels. What do I mean by pull? I mean, make it available on a place like the intranet, the wiki, somewhere that's a little bit more passive that people can just choose to pull it when they want to find it or when they need it. And lastly, you're going your gray area. Really take time to evaluate the frequency of the communications on these topics. Take a look at your newsletters. How much air coverage are we giving these gray area topics that certain audience members may be tuning out? Offer or create targeted sends. So take advantage of the segmentation opportunities that Contact Monkey offers. My favorite example of probably the most frequent offender many of us have seen is receiving the headquarters lunch menu when you're not based in headquarters. This should be targeted. And of course, explore complementary channels. Really weigh your pool versus your push carefully. Begin to wean off some of those topics that you may decide are better served in a pull channel off of your newsletter and push channels and put them elsewhere so people can find them. And, you know, we know this is complex, but we do help our clients create multichannel communication strategies all the time. It can be tricky to balance newsletters, all-team intranet, and beyond. And we love to partner with them to create solutions that work for them and work for their people. So long story, not that short, people rarely drown from too much important information. But don't rely only on your newsletter. Stay current on what matters to your people and cater your messages accordingly. So when it comes to information overload, our cure is to stay focused on what matters.

Speaker A: Amen to that. So on to our next symptom, something we like to call the data dumps. And just curious, how many presentations have you been in that use the poop icon? Moving on. All right, our clients ask us these questions a lot. What kind of open rate is considered good? Why does my click rate vary so much? And what even are the KPIs or key performance indicators that I should pay attention to? And our answers in most cases is it depends. So to start, let's talk about what some of the behaviors around a newsletter mean. So we have a couple different lenses we'd like to look at email opens and clicks through. So starting with email opens. Let's say I'm, I'm an employee at your company and I've opened your email today. So what does that mean? I'm super interested in what you send. I'm familiar with it, or maybe you just caught me at the right time. Now let's say I opened your last several emails. That means something a little different. It means I rely on this email. I trust the information in here. It might help me do my job. And maybe it's information I can pass along to my clients or my team. A real-life example for me is something called the Switchboard newsletter. So a person named Julia Levy interviews people who work in internal comms. She asks really good interview questions. It has super useful insights and gems. I love it. So whenever that newsletter hits my inbox, you better believe I'm opening it. Does anyone out there have a newsletter like that that they turn to again and again? Throw it in the chat. All right. So that's email opens.

Speaker B: I see the Inkwell.

Speaker A: Shout out. That's email opens. Clicks are a different story. So your click rate is the percentage of people who click on specific links in your email or newsletter out of the people who received it. So if I'm clicking through your newsletter, there's 2 different things I might be doing. I'm taking an action that you want me to take. I'm doing what you want me to do, which might be something like taking a survey, signing up for open enrollment, registering for a webinar, etc. Or I'm clicking through because I want to know more about what you shared. You gave me a teaser about an employee profile, and I need to know the advice that changed Sally Smith's career. Maybe you shared a few stats from the company's annual report, and I want to spend some time digging into it. The net-net is there's a good and interesting story or information there, and I want to click through and learn more about it. All right. So what about read time? Or the average time someone spends reading your email or newsletter, to be the formal definition. So what's cool is ContactMonkey shows your read time in a few different ways. How many people read your email, skimmed it, and glanced at it. So for the sake of our presentation today, we're going to focus on overall read time. Read time is near and dear to our hearts. We'll dig into what it means in context In a moment.

Speaker C: So what we recommend is really prioritizing your newsletter design with your end goal in mind based on the metrics that you're trying to drive. How do we do that? How do we start? We don't know if we're looking at the read time, the open time, the click rate. We start by asking ourselves this very simple question: do I want my audience to know something or do something? And you're going to have to prioritize one over the other. It doesn't mean it's black or white. It just means you need to prioritize accordingly. So topics we usually want people to know something about include company news and updates, messages from company leadership, employee spotlights, new hire and promotion announcements. These are all topics that are generally one-way communication. They don't require a response or an immediate action from broad employee audiences. Now, what about do-something content? Topics we usually need people to do something with can be surveys, benefits and open enrollment, compliance and safety, that IT software update that everyone is still avoiding, event registration signups or RSVPs. These are all topics that are generally time-sensitive, so they require some sort of action or response from your employees.

Speaker A: Okay, so let's look at a few examples. Let's say your CEO sent out a company-wide email and it's about a paragraph or 2 of information and nowhere to click. So in this case, when we think about that desired behavior, we want them to know something. And when we want them to know something, the metrics we want to pay attention to are open rate, Spoiler alert, you always have to pay attention to open rate. Nothing happens without it. And we also want to pay attention to read time. Are people giving your content a cursory glance or are they really taking the time to read it? For something like this, we want a high read time. All the information is right there and you don't need to click through. So let's look at another example. Let's say you send out your company newsletter and you have an article blurb with a link for people to click. So in this case, we want them to do something. We want them to click on that link to learn more or take action on something. So the email metrics that we care about in this instance are open rate. Again, this has to be the KPI that you pay attention to. And click rate, with of course click rate being our priority KPI or key performance indicator. There's a clear call to action here and we want people to click through. So your read time should be short if they're doing what we want them to do. Alrighty, so let's talk a minute— for a minute about the classic newsletter digest format that lots of people send out. There's a bunch of different articles and a bunch of like links and buttons to click on. So do we want them to know something or do something? Do we want them to read all 15 content features? Or do we want them to click on any of the million links that we included? So it's newsletters like these that are a leading cause of the data dumps. It's asking a lot of our readers to do all the things. And it's also not fair to you to judge yourself on read time or click-through rate when it's not clear what the reader is supposed to prioritize. So let's think back to what we covered in the information overload section. We have a big opportunity to reprioritize the information we're sending out to make sure it's focused on what's super important to our people. And we have an opportunity to rethink how the information is presented within the newsletter to help improve performance. And we'll talk more about that in a minute.

Speaker C: All right, so when it comes to curing the data dumps, my friends, we're going to clear up the confusion by deciding if we want our reader to know something or do something and optimize accordingly. And that will give you the power to be able to see what you're trying to drive and what you're trying to do and how you're measuring against yourself. Now, last but not least, let's move on to a fun or maybe not so fun symptom, the uglies. Now, of course, ContactMonkey has a beautiful and easy-to-use email builder. It has drag-and-drop capabilities, really pretty templates that you can choose from. I'm not referring to that. I'm referring to the ball that's in our court, my friends. This applies to both the visual and written aspects of your newsletter. So let's take a step back and first think about the journey that we would ideally want our readers to go on for our newsletters. They'd open it, they'd read it, and finally click through to wherever we're trying to direct them. There are opportunities at each of these moments in the email journey to cure the uglies, whether it's the text or the visuals. First, let's start with focusing in on the opportunities we have within the open. So remember our friend Marcus? Good old Marcus. He opens up his email and he's skimming through looking for something to catch his eye. And oh boy. These are the headlines and subject lines in his inbox. Let's see what we have. Customer service improvements, litigation meeting, that's an urgent one, capital expenditure requests. Riveting, right? Somewhere within there, we also see your company news, week of June 13th. Now we could do that or we could try something different. What if we tried to answer our employees, what's in it for me? What if you mix it up and make it different each time? What if we try to meet our people where they are?

Speaker A: And we'll get to some examples of effective subject lines in a minute, but let's talk about the data behind the why. So in Brilliant Ink's newsletter audits and studies that we do, we've seen anywhere from a 20 to 35% increase in open rates when the subject line includes features or highlights that a reader can look forward to within the newsletter versus just including the date and the newsletter name.

Speaker C: Now, when it comes to read, hopefully they open it and they're actually going to read the email. So when it— there's lots of opportunities to spruce things up throughout the reading experience. We're going to focus on 3 little areas that have big impact. First, your little article headlines for a digest email like this. Also optimizing your article preview text and then the visuals. So here are some examples of some real headlines that we've seen. Names removed from the people to protect the not so innocent. August 22, all hands recap. Q3 earnings are now live. New privacy policy, please read. For the sake of this exercise, we're going to focus on Q3 earnings. Now, This is something that's very relevant with Q2. That's where we are in the world. Yes, coming to a close. So what if we try to use stats? What if we were more descriptive? Be intriguing but not cryptic. What if we also took advantage to try to include some personality? Each of our organizations has a unique personality. Your newsletter should reflect it. So we're going to focus on Q3 earnings, as I said. And how about this? 12 stats to sum up Q3 earnings. Q3 earnings in 3 minutes or less. These 2 regions crushed it in Q3. This is sort of a spectrum. The very first one is very BuzzFeed-y, listicle. People love that. They know exactly what they're in for. I personally love the middle one the most, you know, just knowing, okay, it's gonna take 3 minutes of my time. I have 3 minutes for that. And then of course, if your organization is a little bit more competitive or a little bit, you know, more fun in that way with competition, you know, hey, why not throw something in like this? These 2 regions crushed it in Q3. So moving on to preview text. This is one of the biggest symptoms when your newsletter has a case of the uglies. And here's my case in point. It's text. Walls and walls of text. However, did you know that people only read 20% of text on a digital content page? So while this is a good example of a nice headline, the content is a good example of what not to do. Once people see this boring block of text, they're going to move on to the next thing. So how do we solve this? We chunk our content, and here's how we can do that. The first option is to parse your content into short, concise paragraphs that focus on a single message or point. A stat I've actually seen, and I wish I remembered from where, is to limit paragraphs on digital pages to no more than 3 lines per paragraph. Subheads can also be helpful in any type of communication, but especially so for an event or meeting recap, interview or profile, or something like this where you have, you you know, a couple of big bullet points you want to hit because they allow your readers to quickly and easily find the content that's most interesting, relevant, or important to them. Lists and bullets are also great for summarizing key points at the start of an article or catching a skimmer's eye. And of course, we could take that a step further. And here's a nice option that combines what we've seen into short and condensed bullets. Now, moving into visuals. Much like with content, your visuals should be intriguing but not cryptic and should reinforce your message. Let's dig into some examples. of some of our favorite offenses that we've all committed before. First off, we have— ah, yes, hands pointing at the chart, because everybody does this in their conference rooms, right? Also, can I get 6 feet of distance, please? Also, here's another favorite, Scrabble tiles results. Here's a personal favorite, The Conjurer, you know, very Matrix futuristic innovation. This technology doesn't exist. So as long as it doesn't exist, I don't want to see this until I can actually do this. Please don't put this in a newsletter because I'll be like, oh, are we releasing this? No, we're not. Oh, okay. And, you know, who doesn't love using a magnifying glass to get a glimpse of your microscopic coworkers? It can be great for other materials, not necessarily a newsletter. And lastly, your CEO looking very male, very serious. When in doubt, Put a leader in there. Or what if we tried something different? Here's something we do for our clients all the time. What if we try incorporating some of the content itself into an enticing visual? Since this is a Q3 earnings makeover, there are of course going to be a ton of numbers to choose from here. So pick one, stick it in a shape in PowerPoint, and voilà, you have a bespoke visual that's going to actually mean something to people.

Speaker A: Hmm.

Speaker C: And no, my fingertip does not actually generate light. That would be really useful because I lose my phone all the time. And look at that. We drop it into the presentation, I mean into our newsletter, and look how beautiful that looks. Now we have something custom. We have something that's eye-catching and we can really draw the reader's eye between our title, our visual, and our nice bullet points. Now we made it. The click. How do we drive clicks and cure those uglies? This means, of course, that we need to focus in on our call to action. Let's say that this newsletter is on a mobile device. If we're relying on in-text links like what you see here, we might be in real trouble because— oops— if you have fingers like I do and they're not particularly tiny, I might scroll up or down accidentally, I might be zooming in, I might be clicking the wrong link. Now, of course, we could put it on its own line and make that the call to action. However, it would be even better if we used a real button for optimal finger friendliness. And of course, with our call to action, we also want to worry about our text. And I want you to think of read more as the equivalent— and also learn more, actually, for that matter— think of read more and learn more as the equivalent of the white unmarked vans of calls to action. Just don't get in. Just don't do it. So why not be more specific? We know we want our readers to— we know we want them to read more, but let's tell them where they're going and what they're doing when they click. And of course, the big question is, If we're trying to get them to ultimately click on something, why would we have so much preview text in the first place? The really smart thing to do would be to add in a little caption to accompany our visual and not waste any time confusing them about what we want them to do. We know we want them to check out the Q3 earnings, so go on over there, just get over there, read the other 11. So to cure the uglies, we're going to design with intended outcomes in mind and make sure that we take advantage of those 3 opportunities. The title, the preview text, and the visuals to bring it all together.

Speaker B: I love it.

Speaker A: All right. So let's recap what we've covered using that Q3 earnings example. So as you're thinking about the layout and the hierarchy of content in your newsletter, think back to the topics that are most important to your people. So let's say earnings was one of the topics that was most important to folks, which truthfully is usually the case. So you have this Q3 earnings update. So that's the highly important information that belongs towards the top. And that gray area content and below, we can consider that nice-to-know information. So in this newsletter example, with our Q3 earnings update, we're clearly prioritizing this content and we clearly want our readers to do something. So that means we care about our open rate as always. And we care about click-through rate. Read time might be low, and that's okay. So knowing we're prioritizing this piece of content, we're giving it the star treatment. There's a big bold image, a clear call to action, and just enough preview language to entice them to want to learn more. Lovely. All right, we made it. Let's talk about some next steps. So today we wanted to equip you with small tweaks and data tips that can help you move the needle and make an even bigger impact with your newsletters. We know our people are moving quickly, excuse me, quickly, that they're skimming communications. So our mission as internal communicators is to direct their attention to what matters most.

Speaker C: And, you know, these are all practices that we put into practice ourselves. It's not about boiling the ocean. We know you may be very, very excited with all these different things that you could do with your newsletters. However, if you change everything right away, how will you know what actually had an impact? What it comes down to is walk, don't run. Focus on one variable at a time. Let's say you want to focus on your subject lines and first start with the open part of the email journey. Do a few tests, change it a couple times, and then from there move on to the next thing. If you do one variable at a time, you'll be able to measure over time what's having the biggest impact. And then when you go back and see all the different tests you ran, You can see where you started and where you've ended up and benchmark against yourself. And we'd love to thank ContactMonkey for their time. If you wanna keep in touch with us, we would love for you to keep an eye on our blog. We share the latest in internal comms, employee experience, diversity, equity, inclusion, as well as the future of work. And of course, our favorite monthly newsletter, The Inkwell, my personal favorite, not because I curated or anything, is The Inkwell. It's monthly, it's just once a month, that's it, we promise, but it's our favorite thought leadership from the industry and our team, and it packages it up all beautifully you so that you can quickly get the latest and greatest in the industry. Now, if you're eager to get curing those newsletter symptoms, we do encourage you to check out our newsletters toolkit so you can have all the tips that we shared in today's presentation and then some at the ready. And of course, Becky has one more that she wants to share.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And if you want to fully nerd out to data, which I strongly encourage, we put together a resource with 10 different tips and tools for measuring for making business cases and keeping tabs on your internal communications. And if you want to really nerd out, ContactMonkey has a bunch of benchmark data that you can utilize as well. And I'll pass it to them to talk a little bit more about that.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we all know the importance of looking at the open rate and click rate, but sometimes as internal communicators, we don't really know how to set targets or how to benchmark our performance. So we built out this internal email benchmark report where we analyzed over 43,000 email campaigns across many industries. So in this you can find internal communications benchmarks for different email metrics and we've also done it across 18 different industries and it also includes a lot of tips and best practices to kind of add on to what we learned today. And if any of you are curious, on the next slide is our drag-and-drop email builder. So this is makes it very easy for you to tackle a lot of the challenges we discussed today. It has a fully responsive design for email and mobile. You can add in custom branding. You have access to a template library. So on the next slide is a link to the free trial of our email builder. So you get a 14-day free trial just to test it out. And if you want to take it one step further, on the next slide is the link to our internal comms demo. So with this demo, you get access to the email builder and you can also start sending emails through Outlook and Gmail with Contact Monkey. We will include these slides in the follow-up email along with the recording so you have access to all of these resources. And I think that ends— yeah, okay. All right, so that's it for the slides. Sorry, I don't have access to them, but now we have some time for Q&A. So feel free to start popping your questions into the Q&A box, but I see we have some already. The first one is updating a newsletter involves some level of change management and may require difficult conversations with internal stakeholders who may feel that the current layout is fine or unhappy with their content being removed. Any tips for navigating these conversations?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. I can jump in on that first if you want, Gabriel. That's a really good question and it's so true. I would say approaching it as Or recommending that you just test some new formats to see if you can improve performance, all in the spirit of wanting their content to get more visibility or to resonate the way that they want to. So it's, it's really coming at it from kind of a partnership perspective, doing some testing so that you have some of that data and can help build the case a bit more.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I also think your, your internal comms preferences survey makes a big difference if you run that in field, because then you'll have actual data from people where you could say, Hey, a lot of, you know, we have 30 different topics in the newsletter, but people really only care about these 5. And our metrics have been suffering over the last couple of months. We'd like to experiment by doing this. And I think that's the other magic word is to use the word experiment and use the word pilot. We say that a lot in marketing and not as much in internal comms, but there's like a, it's like a password where you're no longer worried about failing. It's more about, we're going to try it and it may not work, but we hope it will. And I think that does give you a little bit more freedom and latitude too.

Speaker B: I love that. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, even if you have different roles, everyone's kind of working toward the same goal. So it's just about using the right language and you can also honestly use this webinar to build that case. Next question is, is there a way to create pretty graphics and numbers or text within ContactMonkey or would you need to create these on our own? So with the email builder, you can use a lot of its features. So we do have different text options where you can play around with size, color. We also have icons which you could add in. to use as stats, but you can also definitely create your own images and add in an image through the multimedia option. So there's many ways in which you can kind of customize the newsletter and add those stats.

Speaker A: And I would add that kind of big graphic that Gabriel showed. I think he mentioned this, but we created that in PowerPoint really easily, really quickly. So you can also kind of export that and then load it into ContactMonkey. Yeah.

Speaker B: And next one is, what was the link for the newsletter toolkit? So we will share the links and this recording as well as the presentation deck by tomorrow. So you should have access to all of it, but maybe if we could drop it into the chat, that's also one way to access it. And then wondering if you can address tactics, steps to transition a newsletter from showing a full article or content to a preview. Right now our newsletter is mostly for people to read, know versus to do, versus to do, but it's running quite long. Thinking we could host content on our SharePoint instead and link to it.

Speaker A: Yeah, really good question, Karen. I were— it's, it's funny you asked that. We are in that internal comms preferences survey that we talked about. We actually include questions that get to exactly your question of digging into the format that people prefer. Just, you know, in terms of how they prefer to consume information, do they want kind of that daily skim format where they can read the whole article within the email and they don't need to click through? Or are they good with just the preview and they'll click through if they want to learn more? So that could be an opportunity to ask your people and figure out what works best for them.

Speaker B: Then somebody said, this is great information for the email newsletter. However, how do you get your newsletter to reach frontline employees? You can't track whether they're reading articles and it gets pricey to print copies for them. So we do get a lot of these questions even at ContactMonkey and some, for some people who have deskless workers who aren't really accessing their email and won't have like quick, won't be reading it in a timely manner, we have introduced an SMS solution. So that's a great way to kind of make sure that those who don't have access to email or if you want to get some communication out that needs to be seen urgently and quickly, you can use SMS from within the same platform. But do you guys have any other comments as well?

Speaker A: I would say also tap into managers. I think especially with frontline, managers play such a huge role as a communications channel in cascading important news and information. So making sure that they're passing along pertinent information that's in that newsletter, um, so that it gets to those folks who don't necessarily, you know, sit at a desk.

Speaker C: Another opportunity too that we could really take advantage of nowadays is that QR code readers are built into everything. If you remember maybe 15 years ago, I'm sure Mithili remembers this especially, QR codes were everywhere for marketing, but nobody really had a QR code reader. So if you are trying to drive a do-something action, including a QR code, if you're having a printed newsletter, Or even doing just branded links. So tools like Rebrandly, Bitly, where you can then go back and see the clicks. It's not super specific, but it does give you a little bit more insight than, well, we printed 50 copies and 40 were taken. So those little things can make a difference too. It's giving you more than you had.

Speaker B: No, that's for sure. And then do we have template resources for doing A/B testing to test some of these tips on audience segmentation for those of us without a marketing background? So it's more about A/B testing and just, yeah, basically probably having an opportunity to test without implementing something full-on right away. Um, do you guys have anything?

Speaker C: Yeah, generally speaking, with A/B testing, um, if your company's on the, on the relatively smaller side, it is a little bit harder to make it super scientific. Um, but typically what you'd want is an audience size of at least 5,000. So companies that are that size or larger. Even then, if you're working with a smaller employee group, having 1,000, the big thing is what I said, shared a little bit briefly earlier, is focus on one variable at a time. So if you're sending the same exact email but the subject lines are different to 2 1,000-group employees, and let's say you have 5,000 total, you see which, which one wins within, you know, 24-48 hours. And then from there, you implement that change into the rest of them. Um, I hope that's helpful. Um, does ContactMonkey have resources on A/B testing?

Speaker B: Yeah, so not specifically, but basically with ContactMonkey, of course, you're again working with different sizes of organizations. And as Gabriel mentioned, you need a large sample size for a successful A/B test. But a good way is definitely to test a change that you're making and maybe having— maybe even sending it to the same audience, but like using different content, using different subject lines, and then tracking your email analytics, getting employee feedback on each of those newsletters will kind of help you inform how to move your strategy going forward. That's another way to test. back of it as well.

Speaker C: There are some questions too in the chat that I'm seeing, Mythili, if it's okay. I can read one of them. So Wendy Liu, we did an internal survey recently to learn what employees want to know, hear about, and the response rate was very low. Any suggestions? This is right up your alley, Becky, from the research team.

Speaker A: Yes, I love this question so much. So I would suggest using an incentive always works. So if you wanted to kind of deploy it again and offer an incentive for folks who complete the survey. So whether it's to be entered into a raffle for swag or gift card, we've seen that work really well. It might also be an opportunity to do maybe some employee focus groups. So hopping on the phone with groups of employees for a little bit and asking them some of the questions live. You know, just ensuring that you have kind of a representative mix of employees based upon the employee audiences that make up your organization.

Speaker C: And one of my favorite, personal favorite things to do is if you have an all-team meeting coming up, try really work with your leadership team. That's where you need strong partnership to get, you know, 10-15 minutes at the end where you announce like, hey, we have a survey, it's going out in field, and guess what? The meeting is ending early so that you all have 10-15 minutes to start taking your survey. This of course requires a little bit more planning, a little bit more lead time, but having a captive group that kind of just do it then and there can make a difference as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's so good.

Speaker B: Yeah, also not sure if that question was open-ended about what employees want to learn more about, but maybe even asking some multiple choice options would kind of help them answer much more easily. That could also be a way to get more responses.

Speaker A: 100%.

Speaker C: And thinking through all the 25 topics that they care about.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Although that will tell you something too, which ones that they actually your recall.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And I saw another one too from Caleb Orr. It says, do you have suggestions for font size style too for presenting the most amount of information in a limited space without it feeling too micro? I appreciate larger fonts can be easier to read, but our newsletter is getting pretty long. Hoping to find happy medium, tighten the gaps.

Speaker A: It's a really good question.

Speaker C: I would personally say shorten it, which is not a great answer. Something that can really help though is using— I mean, if you Font size, I usually try to aim for 12 to 13. I think that's sort of like the sweet spot. 11, I know it's very like design trendy to use like smaller fonts because it looks cleaner or minimal, but it can get hard to read. And you also want to think about how broad your employee audiences may be. Some people may struggle to read those smaller font sizes, and yes, they can increase it, but why not just make it easier for them? So I would say using your white space and your visuals can help besides just the font size, really breaking up and creating those reliefs so that even if you are scrolling for a while, you're not noticing it. Another great tip is to think about the Z format, which basically means, you know, if you have a graphic on the right, add the text to the left, and then the very next content block would have the graphic on the opposite side and then the text on the left, because our eyes are naturally scanning in the Z format. So if you're creating that natural break for the eye, it's going to be a lot more friendly to their eyes. How many times can I say eye in a sentence?

Speaker A: Hashtag eyes. No, I agree. I totally agree with that, Gabriel. And I think like In this case, accessibility wins. I wouldn't go smaller just to make it shorter knowing folks just might have issues like Gabriel said with reading something a bit smaller. I think using some of the tips that Gabriel walked through of breaking up the content, you know, using the bullets, the chunk content could be worth trying.

Speaker B: Yeah. And as a marketer, we've also kind of been looking at how do we make our emails more effective and shortening it is really, really important. So Try to do this exercise which we've done, which is write out your email, look at it 3, 4 times, and just challenge yourself to cut it down at least 30%. And you'll be surprised how much information you're able to retain while still removing a whole bunch of text. Yeah. So definitely try that out. Yeah.

Speaker C: It also helps to just look at your favorite newsletters and see what they do and ask yourself, why do I like this one? Like, what about this? Okay, I like how clean this is. Oh, I like how minimal this is. I love their use of graphics. I love their personality. They have really fun call to actions and then figure out what you can implement into your own newsletter.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's really good. I think like reading newsletters that do a good job of being concise and kind of getting in that headspace and being inspired by that. I love that idea.

Speaker C: Oh, this is a question for you, Mithili, from Janet Laurie. Can you talk a little bit more about the ContactMonkey SMS function?

Speaker B: Yeah. So this kind of was developed when we realized that there are a lot of who have employees who aren't really accessing their email or don't have access to a desk for most of the day. And especially when so many things have been going on around the world and there's been a very high demand for crisis communications, you really want to make sure you're getting your messages out to employees in a really timely manner. So SMS was kind of developed as a way to complement email. So we do have an SMS feature that's within the same dashboard. So you don't really have to use different solutions or use different platforms for email and SMS. It makes it pretty easy because similar to using ContactMonkey's email builder, you can just upload your employee list, a CSV list, so that you can build out your email on the dashboard— sorry, build out your SMS or email on a dashboard, upload that list, have it sent, and then you will get basic analytics around how many people saw your email. It'll also help you identify what is the best time to reach your employee on SMS as well. So I can— I'll be happy to share a link to our SMS solution as well in the follow-up email if you're interested to learn more.

Speaker C: And I love send time optimization. I mean, take the guesswork out for me. Yes, of course. One less variable for me to worry about.

Speaker B: For sure. Any other questions that I've missed?

Speaker A: These are really good questions. Yeah, yeah, I like this.

Speaker B: Looks like we've covered it all though. Yeah. Perfect. So thanks everybody for joining us today, and as mentioned, you will receive the recording and it'll also be up on our website on demand, so you can access it anytime then, and we'll make sure to include a link to the presentation deck as well as all the resources we have mentioned. So, and thanks so much, Gabriel and Becky. This was awesome content. I know we all had a lot to take away from it, including me. So loved it, and everybody have a great day.

Speaker C: Thank you. Have a great day, everyone.

Speaker A: Bye.