Are email newsletters still relevant in the modern workplace? They sure are. Despite the growth of other channels, email remains an essential part of any successful internal comms strategy. Follow these email newsletter best practices to ensure your internal newsletters inform and engage your entire workforce.
Are email newsletters effective in the modern workforce?
As our workplaces change, it’s tempting for HR and internal communicators to focus solely on the communication channels that are most popular right now. Because they’re so widely used for discussion and collaboration, mobile-friendly chat apps such as Teams and Slack seem like a sensible solution to the challenge of reaching and engaging employees.
And that’s true, but every channel has its place. It’s a mistake to forget about the power of email – and especially of email newsletters – as a key aspect of a successful multichannel strategy.
In fact, when Interact surveyed HR, employee experience, and internal communications professionals, 36% said email was their most important comms channel (intranet software was the most popular choice at 51%). Email is one of the most universal forms of workplace communication. Employees are comfortable using it, and, despite its challenges, it has staying power.
Best practices for internal email newsletters are very different from the guidelines recommended for marketing newsletters. For starters, employee audiences aren’t buying from you, so the focus of your content won’t be on sales but on culture and updates, although they can be useful for internal PR.
It’s also uniquely important to keep open rates up – employees who ignore email newsletters can end up missing updates on key events such as Open Enrollment or change communications, as well as suffer from a lack of connection and engagement.
In order to make your employee newsletters a success, you need to create something worth reading. We’ve outlined some email newsletter best practices to help ensure you have a newsletter people won’t automatically delete.
To learn more about the key elements of a successful newsletter, don’t miss our detailed guide on newsletter essentials!
Best practices for writing an employee email newsletter
Whether you’re starting from scratch or already have an employee email newsletter and are looking for ways to improve it, this list will ensure you’re checking all the right boxes.
Although these tips are designed for employee newsletters in the traditional sense – emails that share company-wide updates on a regular basis – they apply to other types of emails as well. Keep them in mind when you’re sending out other comms, including CEO announcements, benefits updates, event invitations, and more.
1. Decide on the newsletter’s goals
Before you really push into email creation mode, consider how the newsletter will fit in with your wider comms plan. Will it be used to recap updates that have already been posted elsewhere, or will it be the designated channel for revealing the latest news?
It’s important to determine your newsletter’s place within a comprehensive multichannel comms strategy. If you’re using a full-featured, centralized employee newsletter tool, it will be easy for authors to create content and push it out across multiple channels, including email. Use this to your advantage to expand your reach and effectiveness.
Consider which employees are most likely to see email as a primary channel. If your organization has a high percentage of frontline workers, for example, they may not have access to email during their shifts – or may not even have company email addresses. On the other hand, knowledge workers likely have regular access to their inboxes and check email frequently. Use the information you have to segment your audience and tailor your multichannel approach.
In addition to deciding how you’re going to use the newsletter (which will affect the content and design), it’s worth setting out its intended impact.
How will the newsletter boost your internal brand and contribute to company culture? Is the content shared solely for informational purposes, or will it include frequent calls to action? Will you provide links to intranet content to give readers more information on each topic? Even though every instance of the newsletter will have individual goals, the overall framework should be mapped out.
You may also want to think about how you will measure success. Common metrics include open rates, click-throughs, and email forwarding. Ensure your email newsletter platform has strong analytics capabilities so you can gauge your progress with each edition.
Tip: For in-depth planning, consider using a communication matrix to delve into the details.
2. Think about the mix of content
Content strategy is an important part of email planning. If you work in a large enterprise there will never be a shortage of content to share, but not all of it will be relevant to all audiences.
Break up the newsletter into the broad content areas you want to cover and then assign space for each. It may look something like this:
- 20% Senior leadership updates
- 20% Celebrations of success (new customers, personal wins, team awards)
- 10% Personal profiles (new hires or long-term staff)
- 10% Policy and procedure updates from HR or IT
- 20% Thematic content aligned with an internal communications calendar (e.g., Pride Month or Mental Health Awareness Week)
- 20% Roundup of recently posted intranet content
Crucially, email newsletter best practices indicate that your emails should offer a range of content for all your internal audiences. Don’t forget to rotate content from all locations, countries, and departments so it doesn’t get stale and so no one feels left out.
A centralized employee newsletter tool like Interact’s Email Newsletter will allow you to pull in dynamic content from your intranet to make compiling this information effortless. For instance, if you’d like to include upcoming company events in each newsletter, you can add a section that automatically brings a short list of events to be aware of right into the email.
In addition, the right email newsletter platform may also allow you to add content that’s specific to a certain group of people. If you find that managers always seem to need regular updates, you should be able to include a section in your newsletter that’s only visible to managers. This helps get information to the right people without bombarding the rest of the workplace with irrelevant information.
3. Tap into an editorial plan and enlist internal authors
A newsletter is a big undertaking, and you probably won’t be able to do it alone.
While you may be the person charged with coming up with a snappy email subject and writing summaries of the content, you still need material to promote in the first place. Touch base regularly with intranet authors and influencers in different business areas so you know what they’re working on and what they want to share.
The best internal comms content may come from employees themselves. Spend some time on your intranet to see what they’re talking about. Did people love the recent lunch and learn event the People team put on? Has an employee blog brought attention to a holiday or cause you weren’t aware of? Or maybe staff have been asking an unusual number of questions about a policy that needs clarification. These are all great inspiration for topics to touch on.
Tip: How do you identify and work with staff when developing content? We’ve got a whole article on helping subject-matter experts to become internal communicators.
4. Choose the right email platform
If your organization uses Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, you will already have a corporate email account, but are Outlook or Gmail the right places to create engaging email newsletters ? Most communicators agree that they aren’t fit for this purpose, but many have struggled to find a solution that does work.
Third-party email providers, which are typically used for external communications, have become popular, but they’re not a great fit either. They’re expensive, complicated, and tend to require a decent level of expertise in coding and design – something many communicators don’t have. That’s on top of permissions issues and the need for users to learn and navigate to yet another digital workplace platform.
The landscape changed when Interact announced the addition of Email Newsletter to its employee experience platform. This tool, specifically designed for internal communications, consolidates email newsletters with other internal channels on a single platform. The result is a fully integrated digital workplace and an intuitive, measurable, and cost-effective way to engage and inform every employee.
Email Newsletter allows any author with the right permissions to create engaging, visually appealing, and brand-aligned employee emails right from the intranet. It also offers automatic list building and segmentation to maximize reach, and advanced analytics to fine-tune performance. These features make the tool a game changer and a strong option for any comms team hoping to improve its email newsletters.
5. Design a template and tone of voice
Your email newsletter is an expression of your organization and an important way to engage employees. If it’s generic and boring, people won’t read it. That’s why it’s best practice for email newsletters to utilize templates that help keep content and visuals consistently engaging.
If you’re an Interact customer using the Email Newsletter tool, you have access to a library of branded internal communications email templates that are ready to use as-is or customize to your liking. If you don’t have these templates at your disposal, or would rather get creative and start from scratch, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind when creating templates.
The first step is to get inspired. Check out these impressive email newsletter design templates to see how you want yours to look, and make note of anything that stands out. Consider which design and content choices would resonate especially well with your audience.
When it comes to creating your own format, you should focus on having a blend of white space, concise copy, color, and a variety of content types. Images, banners, and links can all add some life to your messages.
Tone of voice is also an important factor. Whether you choose something chatty and informal or a more professional corporate voice, it needs to be consistent across the subject line, body content, and in every edition.
Keep in mind that your email newsletter copy serves as a gateway to other content, ideally linking to additional information elsewhere in the digital workplace. The copy needs to be engaging enough that people want to click through to your intranet or other resources to learn more or take an action. So, while the email newsletter copy should be catchy, it shouldn’t be radically different from the content it’s linking to.
Additional points to consider in your format:
- Structure: Don’t cram all the most important or interesting information into the first five lines. Space it out or people won’t read the whole thing. For example, if employees in your organization enjoy stories about recent promotions, save that till the end.
- Frequency: How often you send emails will be specific to your organization, but email newsletter best practices suggest that 61% of consumers want to receive a weekly email from their preferred brands.
- Length: Common advice on newsletter length is that it should be no longer than 20 lines (or 200 words), but that’s short and you may have a lot more to say. You can vary the length based on the frequency – if you’re only sending your newsletter once a month, you can afford to make it longer. In terms of visuals, evidence shows that email newsletters with three images or fewer get optimal clickthrough rates.
6. Pitch roll the newsletter to set expectations
Have you ever had a company slide into your DMs and tell you you’re now part of some email newsletter that you don’t remember subscribing to?
It’s jarring.
Again, internal email newsletters are different from marketing emails because your audience doesn’t go out of their way to subscribe, but that doesn’t mean it’s wise to simply drop everyone into a new newsletter with no warning.
If you want to maximize engagement and ensure that people are happy to receive your hard work, make sure they know it’s coming.
Use intranet content, town halls, manager communication cascade plans, and other company-wide comms to do a pre-launch campaign so everyone is aware of the newsletter’s:
- Name
- Goals
- Frequency
- Format
Don’t forget to let them know if you’re open to receiving employee contributions to newsletter content and if so, to provide contact details.
For additional tips on crafting impactful employee newsletters, explore our complete guide for free!
7. Gather content and establish a process
Deciding how stories will be sourced – and how often – is important when designing a new workflow.
Will you need to set aside eight hours a month to scour social media content and listen to senior leadership meetings, or will people send you their latest ideas for you to edit? You could even consider setting up an area in your sales and marketing portal for co-workers to post relevant news for each upcoming edition of the newsletter.
This is the difference between active and passive content searching, and it’s important to have a balance so you don’t end up putting in more work than you have time for.
A good mix would be 50% of each strategy, so you’ll still need to set up processes whereby people in other teams (especially HR, IT, Sales, and Marketing) send you important, shareable information about the company and its employees.
8. Subject lines matter
They really do! Email newsletter best practices for subject lines include:
- Keeping it short – Campaign Monitor suggests that a subject line be roughly 41 characters.
“Welcome to the newsiest newsletter ever”
You can probably do better, but you get the point.
- Don’t get caught in a spam trap – Marketing newsletter platforms have spam filters that reject suspicious words. Even though your audience is different, they still won’t be keen on ALL CAPS titles and lots of exclamation marks. Consult this list of 188 spam words to stay clear.
- Don’t fear the emoji – Assuming it doesn’t contradict your brand’s tone of voice, a carefully chosen emoji can add character. Just make sure it fits your newsletter’s theme and don’t overdo it – one emoji per subject line is all you need.
9. Decide on the call to action
The goal of your newsletter is to inform people about a variety of topics, but you also want them to engage and act, for example by clicking on links or completing a workflow on your intranet.
In marketing, having multiple calls to action is often considered bad practice because it can confuse people and cause them to take no action at all. But internal newsletters are likely to need multiple CTAs. So, how do you balance multiple links within an email?
One way is to design your links and CTAs so they aren’t equally prominent.
Decide in advance on the main action you want people to take from that week’s email. Give extra prominence to that action with a bright design or a colored surround. This makes it easy for the reader to see what you want them to do, whether it’s watching the CEO’s latest update or signing up for a company event.
10. Analyze results and solicit feedback
As with any comms campaign or employee initiative, it’s important to get a sense of how people respond to and engage with your email newsletter.
If you’re sending your newsletter through a designated email newsletter tool that’s part of your employee experience platform, you’re in luck. This means you’ll have access to robust analytics that show exactly how employees are engaging with your content. Open rates, click-throughs, and other engagement metrics will help you measure how your newsletters are doing and how you can improve them.
If you already have a designated employee comms or engagement survey, add questions about the newsletter and how valuable it is for your colleagues. If you don’t have a survey yet, use your email newsletter tool to launch one.
Tip: Read more about designing an employee engagement survey here.
11. Keep developing
Change has a constant presence in today’s workplaces as we grapple with factors like economic uncertainty, the demands of a multigenerational workforce, new ways of working, and the emergence of AI. Organizations, and the ways in which they communicate with their employees, need to be adaptable in the face of new developments and challenges.
Working collaboratively with HR and other teams will give you a sense of how the company is changing and how comms should change too. The best ways to engage your employees depend on who they are demographically, how they work, and what tools they have access to. Email newsletter best practices themselves may shift over time too, so make sure to stay up to date on the latest guidelines by reading articles like this one.
Development shouldn’t just be reactive, however. Keep looking for ways to use emerging technology to improve your communications. Your email newsletter tool should be keeping pace with the times, and your provider should keep you informed about the release of any new features that could boost your emails’ potential.
By embracing flexibility and paying attention, you can ensure your newsletter is set up for success no matter what the future has in store for your organization.
If you’re looking to dive deeper into newsletter essentials, be sure to check out our comprehensive guide on creating effective email newsletters!
