How better distribution group segmentation improves employee communications
Ever feel like your internal email broadcasts are disappearing into a black hole? When employees receive message content that appears irrelevant to them, engagement drops. The secret to increased readership? Smarter targeting, email list segmentation, and finetuning your content distribution to those segments.
PoliteMail data from four billion emails sent to 15 million global employees proves that attention and readership decrease as distribution list size increases. The broader the audience, the less likely an employee is to feel the content is relevant to them–resulting in lower engagement with the message now and higher ignore rates in the future.
Let’s look at how to target audiences and boost results with strategic list segmentation strategies.
What is email list segmentation?
Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your all-employee email list into smaller target audiences based on specific criteria or characteristics. Organizations commonly segment lists based on organizational hierarchy (staff, management, and leadership), business units (divisions, departments, and brands), geographic location (region, country, city), plus categorically, like benefits enrollment (declined, not enrolled, enrolled, or experiencing a qualifying life event).
Organizations may also segment groups by lifestyle or workstyle, including behaviors, preferences, and digital habits. For example, an organization may identify work-from-home employees, hybrid and on-premise employees, union and non-union employees, preferences like desktop or mobile-first, or even employee-selected preferences about topics of interest.
When your email list segmentation data includes traditional criteria like organizational hierarchy alongside employee workstyle behaviors, you can establish more granular personas. Often, this data exists outside of your address book or directory. You must import it from an HR system extract.
Data can also be synchronized automatically via a tool like PoliteMail’s SyncronNym. This software service automates the maintenance and synchronization of employee data between systems like HR and identity and access management (IAM) services like Microsoft Entra ID. Communications users can create segments and target employee audiences using up to 32 attributes, applying Boolean logic operators (AND, OR, and NOT) to refine their selections.
Why segment your email distribution lists?
Surveys find that over half of employees feel overloaded with information. Most often, this is because they are sent too much content at a time, or it is irrelevant to them. Employees always want to receive need-to-know information in a concise format. They also appreciate nice-to-know information, but only when it’s relevant to them.
With segmentation, you can select or tune the content for the audience to more effectively get attention, build trust, and boost engagement. Quantitatively, this means higher readership and click-through rates. Ultimately, strategic email list segmentation helps form better connections with your people.
Creating lists based on employee personas, experiences, and journeys
Employee personas are profiles that describe groups of employees who share common characteristics, such as job function, location, tenure, or work style. They help internal communicators tailor content and messages to resonate with a specific audience.
For example, you could target employees who attend town halls in person separately from those who attend online. You could also target employees who joined a sponsored league or volunteered for a project.
First, you must collect data regarding these employee attributes to create the appropriate segmentation profiles. Often, internal comms teams must partner with HR and IT to request this data and make it readily available. It helps if you are handy with a spreadsheet and willing and able to collect exports, combine files, and create filters to get the attributes and address lists you want.
A word of caution: Do not create too many personas or journey steps or make them overly detailed. Keep them broad while identifying meaningful differences. Limit these segments to the key groupings that align with specific communication challenges or business objectives.
Using audience segmentation to boost engagement
Instead of sending blanket, all-employee communications that risk being ignored or buried in the inbox, internal comms teams who create more targeted lists and content will achieve better results.
Learn more about your employee population, gather data attributes, create meaningful segments, and tailor your content for specific audiences. Creating content based on each group’s interests and priorities is a win-win: your messages get read, and your employees become meaningfully engaged.
