Are you keeping up with internal communication trends?
Of course the basics of communications never changes, we seek to gain the attention of an audience with a relevant message they will engage with. However, just like any other industry, the technology and channels of communications changes over time, and it’s wise to stay current.
It is important to note that trendy doesn’t equal effective. This means that you need to stay up to date on what works and what doesn’t to maximize effective communication within your company. This also protects you from getting caught up in a “new is better” mindset, making common mistakes which expends budgets while actually decreasing employee engagement and productivity.
How many huge intranet budgets have been invested into producing a beautiful new site, only to discover just 10% of the company ever visits anything but the PTO availability page?
How much time and effort goes into implementing an expensive mobile communications platform, only to discover low adoption and high abandonment.
How much of a productivity decrease is there when real-time chat communication takes hold and people have to monitor multiple inboxes?
It’s not that intranets, mobile and social communication can’t work, but we know email does work.
Simply by implementing of these 2020 email communications trends you can stay current and remain effective. Specifically, you will be able to increase attention and engagement, while discovering the content employees respond to most.
Trend 1. AI is managing your inbox
Nearly 80% of companies monitor employee emails, intranets, phones, and other communication devices. The intent to to boost productivity, analyze behaviour and trends, and primary improve security.
Behind the scenes, more businesses are utilizing machine learning technology to block spam, prevent phishing attacks, stop malware, and provide data protection.
In your Outlook desktop, you have noticed a huge reduction in spam across the board, and with today’s modern Outlook, you even have a focused inbox and an other inbox. The machine behind the curtain is learning what messages you actually pay attention to, and puts those into focus, allowing you to automatically ignore the rest of the subscriptions you never read and people you never respond to get filed into other.
This is a productivity booster for employees, but not necessarily for communicators who need to broadcast communications. A slow decline in opens rates since the focused inbox feature was introduced indicates people have stopped paying attention.
This means communicators will have to work harder at their craft, and deploy tools which can help recapture that attention in order to engage their audiences.
Trend 2. Big data leads to insights
For too long internal communications has taken a backseat to marketing and finance when it comes to data and analytics, but no longer. Modern communications teams are using sophisticated measurement and analytics tool and have moved beyond the vanity metrics of opens and page views. That’s why 97.2% of businesses are investing in big data, and you should too.
Too many companies oversaturate email, and employees complain of email overload. This often results in attempts to abandon email, which more often than not fail. But why not learn how to send smarter? With big data, you can learn how to optimize email, how much to send, and when, to get read. This ends time-wasting efforts for both the communications teams and your busy employee audiences.
Data analytics tools and platforms and tools are capable of revealing the objective truth behind which communications campaigns and channels work, and which don’t. The process looks like this: You conduct business as usual, and the tool collects data. You review reports and analysts pull insights from the data over time. You make changes and what your metrics improve.
Trend 3. Personalization matters
70% of businesses don’t send personalized emails. Are you one of them? Personalized emails attract more attention and higher engagement.
You employee’s information is already in your HR and email systems, and smart companies are putting this to work.
Personalization is more than simply addressing employees by name, but certainly this is a step in the right direction.
Take, for instance, how users can easily personalize emails with our PoliteMail platform. Better still, as the data show email delivered first thing in the morning tends to perform best, you can use employee location data and working hours data together with time-zone sending features to reach employees at the optimal time – which is generally first thing during their work morning.
Taking this a step further, you can use location data (city or building) and management level data to target specific content related to that region or role. The data prove the more targeted your audience, the better your results.
HR and benefits messages can be optimized using participation data, to not only target specific information to specific groups, but to send more effective follow-up during campaigns to only the employees who need the nudge.
How will you stay on top of these trends?
We are here to help. If you want to win over the AI inbox manager, if you want to leverage big data, and want to utilize personalization to better engage employees, consider evaluating our tools.
Schedule a free PoliteMail demo to see how our Outlook email intelligence platform will help you improve your internal communications right away.
Title ideas:
- Discover the top 3 Internal Communications Trends for 2020
Meta description: Don’t miss out on these three top 2020 internal communication trends to improve your company’s internal email engagement and communications performance.
