1. Use color?
2. Have a consistent structure?
3. Make the Call-to-Action Clear?

One of the suggestions I made in a recent article published by CW Bulletin (IABC) on Ways to use Visuals in Everyday Communications was: use Layout, Color and Icons to provide visual cues and make it easier for readers to absorb their information and take action.

That’s what the SnapComms messaging tools (which we offer) do.

A basic visual example. Which of these would you rather read? Which is easier for you to read? Which is more likely to drive action, do you think?

                     

A recent article on Ragan.com about “Why Employees Don’t Read Your Emails – and What to Do About it” was very enlightening, not for its familiar recommendations, but for the reader comments: 

Several corporate communicators wrote in with stories about how they were blamed by Management for a lack of employee response, despite sending several quality emails out on a particular subject.  Employees didn’t show up to an event or complained they were ‘never told’ about key changes, despite the efforts of Communications teams.  Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Have you ever found regular corporate emails had little or no impact?

Everyone is so info overloaded today that it’s getting harder and harder to cut through the noise with email.  And if you can’t get employees’ attention, good luck ever getting to the very basic stage of ‘informing’, OR to the point of changing behavior or getting some sort of action. The impact on an organization overall is huge – it takes longer for change to happen.

Here are some ideas on how to change this: 

FIXING YOUR CONTENT

1. Set up common tags (Action, FYI, Urgent, Request) in the Subject line to cue readers. If you want a response or action, you’d better say so right off the bat. 

2. Standard email message structure across the organization: I like this recommendation from the IABC Research Report, “Preparing Messages for Information Overload Environments”.  They give examples from Proctor and Gamble and Microsoft, who have standard proposal structures (i.e. Idea, Background, How it Works, Benefits, Next Steps) which are consistent across the organization and help them improve communications effectiveness and efficiency.  This idea can be adopted to email for corporate announcements. Here’s one possible structure for broadcast emails:

a. Summary (two lines explaining what the email is about)

b. Call to Action (what action the reader needs to take – learn this, complete this, attend this, etc)

c. Deadline/Timeframe (deadline for action or expiry of relevance)

d. Details (additional key details written out in the email itself)

e. Additional Information (hyperlinks to the intranet, attachments, Q&As, etc.)

CONSOLIDATION

3. Consolidate – reduce email broadcasts by setting up a daily or weekly news bulletin, and have depts and employees feed their announcements into this. This means fewer individual interruptions for staff and makes the few remaining critical/urgent announcements that do get sent separately stand out. 

(I wish I could find some decent statistics on the number of businesses doing this – we’ve seen these kinds of bulletins become more and more prevalent, but they are still not ubiquitous, especially in medium and small enterprises.)

CHANGING THE GAME

4. Create and enforce  Broadcast Communications Guidelines. Rather than approaching each email or project separately, take a company-wide view of broadcast communications. Manage it to protect employees from too much noise and to make sure the critical 5% can be heard.

Establish (through two-way interaction, of course!) company-wide guidelines/criteria. Train all dept/managers who broadcast to use them and hold them to account.  This reduces noise, improves message quality, and ultimately helps staff be more productive by making it easier and faster for them to process and absorb key information.

Are there any people out there who’ve actually taken their company’s broadcast communications in hand?  Have you done an audit, established criteria for what’s worthy of broadcasting, defined which channels are appropriate for which messages?  I’d love to know how far people have gone with this.

At the IABC World Conference in San Francisco, a communicator from Johnson & Johnson mentioned that they’d done a lot of work and had internal broadcast email under control – anyone else?  Other communicators I met in Employee Comms sessions or in the halls agreed that email overload was a real problem in their company, to varying degrees.

Find out easily if your message hit the mark or not

Snap Comms just rolled out a new Report which is worth its weight in gold for communicators.

Now Admins can find out in 4 clicks whether their scrolling news ticker, alert, desktop poll or quiz was delivered, displayed, opened, and acted upon.  They can even drill down to individual employees and see who’s ignoring actionable items.

Measuring the basics like message delivery and subsequent employee action in response to corporate annoucements/updates has been rather difficult for most internal communicators. I hope our tools make it significantly easier to figure out if messages reach their target.

(Available to all our hosted customers NOW – check your Content Manager.)

This puts us even further ahead of email as a channel, don’t you think?  I wonder what it would take to regularly measure the following for every email:

Yesterday we gave a free, 30- minute webinar aimed at helping you communicate out to dispersed salesforces. Here’s a condensed summary of what was said.

Take a good, thorough look at what you’re ‘pushing’ out.  By evaluating and honing not only your message but HOW and WHEN you send it and what you actually want readers to do with it, you can drive down sales cycles, improve take up of promotions, and also engage employees more deeply.

The 5 aspects to consider:

1. MEASURE – measure and benchmark readership, click-throughs, surveys responses, and other activity resulting from your push communications. Figure out what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ response rate.

2. CONTEXT – investigate what else is being pushed to your salesforce: by whom, how often, at what times. Profile your audience and communicate in ways they prefer. Evaluate your supporting resources (is the intranet rather crappy, so you need to send pdfs with details? Or should you simply hyperlink to the resources). 

3. MESSAGE – there are great resources out there to help you craft great content and maximize your chances of it being read and absorbed. See the IABC Report: Preparing messages for Information Overload Environments for six key recommendations; a great starting point. (Available free to IABC members, non-member click here.)

4. CHANNEL – while most push communications still go out in good-ol email, there are many, many ways to deliver your message. Consider using a combination of several messages and evaluate for 5 criteria.

5. INVITE INTERACTION – ‘push’ communications has changed: nowadays it needs to include an invitation to participate/communicate back.  More than ever we expect and enjoy contributing our comments to articles, posting our thoughts on Twitter/Facebook, and being acknowledged for it.  Align with this changing landscape to meet employees’ expectations but also to gain valuable insight and knowledge that often can be applied to the business in valuable ways.  Send your broadcast communications’ to knock over the first domino in a chain rather than to sledgehammer your audience with your info.

With that in mind, we invite you to have a look through the slides and contribute your thoughts on whether they make sense, if we’ve missed anything, or another aspect of the topic. Thanks!

As an Employee Communicator, responsible for getting important company info out to staff, what can you do to reduce email overload?

HOW TO REDUCE EMAIL OVERLOAD INTERNALLY:

1. Control the distribution lists.

If your company has more than 100 staff, it’s time to limit access to distribution lists. Making it harder to email the entire dept/company/division is a good thing: when it’s easy, everyone does it without thinking very much, and it’s harder to get critical stuff noticed after a while, more and more gets sent as a result… voila, email overload.

Having a gatekeeper for email distribution lists gives you the opportunity to:

• Green light/Red light. Determine if the message is important enough to merit its own individual email or if it should be published in another channel (i.e. in the weekly news bulletin, on the intranet homepage, etc.).
• Sanity check the actual content. Review and revise the message content  if needed, to make it clear, concise, and relevant to the audience.
• Schedule. Send the message at an appropriate time, being aware of any other emails set to hit employees’ inboxes. 

2. Consolidate company news and announcements.

More and more companies are summing up company news and announcements in a single daily or weekly electronic bulletin. This cuts down on interruptions, takes less time, and (if done right) helps employees absorb the information.

Keep these points in mind:

• Create decent Headlines. If you use a generic headline like “Daily Digest for March 27th”, expect a drop off in readership by about the third issue.  Instead, list the top 3 items in your headline: “DD: new CFO announced, is
  

  Visually-rich bulletins are easier to read

  your bonus safe, new Fortune 100 signed on”. You’ve a much better chance of attracting attention.

• Use HTML – make it visual, please! Bold and spacing will only take you so far. Include thumbnail images, decent visual formatting to cue the eye, and lots of hyperlinks to more detail.
• Keep items short – hyperlink to full articles on the intranet if you have to.
• Measure – find out which items employees read and which ones they like. Track click-throughs and let them rate articles.

3. Establish consistent guidelines and practices for senders.

Quite a few corporate-level communicators have told me that they only look after corporate emails and have little idea what emails are sent by departments, divisions, and local offices. If you have Communicators or Coordinators looking after email broadcasts for a portion of staff, TRAIN THEM, TOO. 

Provide email guidelines that include considerations/best practice for content, structure, frequency. If your company is Web 2.0 enabled, establish a Comms forum for them, where they post examples, questions, problems, suggestions.

4. Convert information to “PULL”. 

For the 80% of information that is not time critical or applicable to all staff, put it on the intranet and let employees subscribe to subject matter updates or use RSS to pull what interests them as it becomes available.   Read more on this here.  As it becomes possible for employees to ‘pull’ more of what they need to do their jobs (and less gets blanket-emailed), the remaining information that needs to be ’pushed’ out will have  a bit less competition .

5. Give employees a better outlet for ‘broadcast’ messages

We’ve rationalized official corporate emails; now it’s time to tackle another big offender: employee’s broadcasts. These email blasts concerning girl scout cookie sales, sponsorship for a charity fun run, and company softball team, bypass distribution lists – employees simply add the names of the 50+ colleagues they can think of at the time. Set up another channel and get these out of email altogether.

• Set up an electronic bulletin board, an internal craigslist, or even a shared email folder where these types of announcements get posted.
• Gently establish that it’s no longer OK to email these kind of announcements farther than your immediate team (and explain why).

What do you think? Anything I’ve missed?