5 Ways to Ensure Your Employee Communication Emails Aren't Ignored

Emails. Whether you love them or hate them it seems the trusty form of communication is here to stay. 

When done well, emails offer a fantastic opportunity to communicate in a personalized, highly relevant, informative, timely, and engaging way. 

Utilize targeting, split-testing, and measurement insight functionality too and you have a powerful communication channel that can only keep on getting better with age.

But how do you overcome the hurdle of getting your audience to open the messages you send and stand out in their crowded inbox space?

Here are five tips to help ensure your emails are the ones that do get read.

1. Have clarity of purpose. Before crafting any email, or form of communication for that matter, always begin with the end in mind.  What is that you need your reader to know, feel, think or do from reading your content.  Being clear on your purpose and looking at it from the audience’s perspective is the key step to having clarity before writing any words. This approach will help shape your content and define any calls to action, making it purpose-driven to send and purposeful to read.

2. Hook them with the subject line.  People skim read through their inbox to decide what to open, so your email title needs to grab their attention.  Think about your own inbox - what headlines grab your attention and get you to open them (even if you know they’re not a priority!)? 

That’s the kind of line we’re looking for.  It’s best to craft your subject line once your content is written to ensure it’s relevant to your content while also enticing them in to read further. ‘This Month’s Newsletter’, while true to the content, sounds dull and corporate, and doesn’t give anything away, so instead call something out from the content that’s going to intrigue or interest them to find out more.

3. Simplicity wins.  There’s nothing worse than opening an email from an overwhelming inbox only to be overwhelmed further by its content.  It’s a surefire way to put anyone off from reading your emails in future.  When someone opens an email they want and need it to be as quick and easy as possible to read and digest.  So use simple language, shorter sentences, and signposting with headers, bullets or bold font to convey key messages and calls to action clearly, while also making it skimmable to read.

4. Be consistent.  Consistency is a great way to build trust, and trust is an underlying factor that influences people to open and read your emails.  Start with getting clear on  what you want to be known for.  Do you want to build a reputation for keeping your people up-to-date with timely communications?  Or perhaps sharing content and writing in a style that is relevant and appealing to your audiences?  Being the curator of messaging that’s easy to understand and engaging to digest?  Get clear and stay consistently aligned with these reputational elements to become the communicator that people know, like and trust and therefore, actively want to open your emails.

5. Personalize.  The days of one-size-fits-all-communications are long gone as previously explained in this Poppulo Guide. However, when your organization is complex or your communication resources are already stretched, it's understandably more difficult to tailor your email communications to everyone.

That said, some forethought and detective work ahead of crafting your comms will pay dividends in terms of open rates and engagement in the longer-term.  Actively listen to what your employees want to hear about and look at the data you have to see what content they’re consuming. 

Also, using an SPF record checker can enhance email security and boost the effectiveness of your efforts in reaching and engaging with your audience.

This allows you, if not to personalize on an individual level, to, at least, tailor your email content to specific groups of people. 

Knowing what they want and need to hear about allows you to send targeted emails and/or create tailor-made sections in your emails driving up the trust factor as well as open and engagement rates.