How do you choose the right tool for internal communication?
Considering a new internal email broadcast platform? Since it’s a significant decision with long-term implications, assessing your organizational needs and avoiding common pitfalls is important. Here’s a step-by-step process to help you select the right solution.
1. Document your organization’s needs.
- Switching platforms or starting from nothing? Start by summarizing your top 3 objectives and non-negotiable related requirements, then expand that into 10 to 20 have-to-haves and nice-to-haves. Are you aiming to gain measurement capabilities? Is integration with your Microsoft or Gmail platform critical? Do you need distribution list automation? How much or little do you want your IT team involved?
- Identify pros and cons, likes, and dislikes. If you’re switching from an existing platform, why? Sometimes, it’s budgetary, or a vendor steers you into a more expensive platform suite. It might be a switch from an external email marketing tool to a more specialized tool for internal email. Or it could be due to a deficiency or issue with your current software. It makes sense to start by listing what you like and don’t like about your existing platform, what features you can’t live without, what you want but don’t have, and what you want to change, replace, or avoid.
- Research competitive offerings and make a shortlist. Most email broadcast platforms will send and measure email to some degree and provide templates and design tools, but how they do it is not commoditized nor equivalent. Consider that even basic email opens are not measured or calculated the same across platforms, which is very important to understand. You can perform an initial assessment by reviewing vendor websites and sales materials. Knowing marketing’s role is to position the software in the most favorable light, you’ll often find the truth in the software’s details. Remain skeptical when a vendor invests in marketing or advertising to denigrate or criticize another vendor, as that tactic may reveal a weakness in their software more than a truth about the other vendor.
2. Assess the risk and costs of switching.
Moving to a new internal email broadcast solution has risks, including the potential for data loss, process disruption, increased costs, etc. Evaluate the possible impact and costs of switching. Beyond the subscription fees, consider the costs of change management, implementation, and training. Can you retain your current data? Does that matter? How much change do you require for end users, and how quickly can users be trained and up to speed?
3. Ask questions internally.
Before engaging different vendors, ensure your internal team is on the same page regarding key questions.
- “What are our primary needs and goals for switching to a new solution?” Ensure everyone is on the same page about step one: understanding your organization’s needs.
- “What critical features and functionalities do we require from the new email solution?” Solidify what you want in response to your needs and goals.
- “If we select a new email solution, what metrics will define our success?” Is your organization more concerned with improving click-through rates, boosting your employee net promoter score (eNPS), or another metric?
- “What is our plan for migration and user adoption?” A new solution is only helpful if it’s embraced. How will you transition to the new solution?
- “Who will own the platform?” Before you invest, get clear on who will manage day-to-day operations and strategic use—especially if you gain new features or analytics that someone needs to manage to maximize.
4. Ask vendors detailed questions and day-in-the-life examples.
Once you have a short list, it’s best to get multiple, detailed demonstrations of products in action, ideally within a short time frame to allow you to remember and compare. Ask detailed questions about how the product works, how they measure results accurately, and what the user experience is like day-to-day versus a brief demo.
Expect vendors to provide a polished demo highlighting their system’s key features, benefits, and differences, but don’t stop there. Even if it requires scheduling a second demo, you can discover a lot by getting the demo to go off-script. Bring an example email and ask them to build it in their tool on the fly.
Take note of some common scenarios at your organization and play them out during the demo. Here are some examples:
- You are asked to insert a new story element or remove another from your email at the last minute. How can you do this quickly and easily?
- You need to address a particular audience or remove parts of an audience from a distribution. How does this work?
- You must send a message from an executive or an email address you don’t typically have access to. How is that done?
- A message must reach all your global employees at 9 a.m. in their respective time zones. How can you do this?
- You want to compare results over time. How can you accomplish this?
- You want to share metrics with leadership. What metrics can you track? Are they meaningful?
5. Avoid common pitfalls.
- Talking with vendor sales reps ahead of your RFP process. If your company has an RFP purchasing process, a clever vendor may try to stack the deck by influencing you to include features specific to their solution as a requirement in the RFP. Picking a favorite is fine as long as the RFP process gives participants a fair evaluation, which may result in your team learning something new or gaining a new perspective by broadening your viewpoint.
- Waiting until the last minute. Sometimes, leaders want results on a specific upcoming campaign, which means getting a solution fast, and sometimes, your team waits until the renewal reminder to realize your frustration with your current solution, which means it’s time to replace it rather than live with it for another year. Rushing a decision may not give you enough time to evaluate your options, so keep these fast decision contracts to no longer than one year and isolate them to specific groups versus enterprise-wide. There is also no reason you can’t run two systems side-by-side—or for two different communications groups—either on a pilot project basis or with pre-planned contract overlap.
- Ignoring longer-term needs. While it’s important to consider your immediate objectives and pain points, take time to anticipate your future needs and potential changes within your organization. How might things evolve in the future? Which systems integrations are important now, and which will be part of your organization’s IT roadmap?
- Deprioritizing change management. Your success depends on communicator utilization. Whether coming from another system or nothing, your team must change what they do and how they do it to adopt a new program or platform effectively. Vendors typically provide training on the software and tools, but you need to consider how the latest tools fit into the roles holistically. Other processes may need to change, be removed, or be added to better support the communicators using them.
Internal communication tools improve employee engagement.
A thoughtfully chosen internal email broadcast solution can improve internal communications and provide analytics and statistics essential for communications insights and performance improvements. Conversely, investing in the wrong platform can introduce new problems. Before making a decision, assess and document your needs, evaluate the costs and risks, ask thoughtful, detailed questions of your internal comms teams and prospective vendors, and avoid common pitfalls. Get out there and choose an internal email broadcast solution that helps your team achieve your communication goals.