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Tips for encouraging employees to read emails

by | Mar 23, 2022 | Public Relations

Business owners that believe their employees are reading every single internal email they receive should think twice. Many workers tend to get dozens of emails on a daily basis, and everyone that’s sending out those emails is trying to grab the time and attention of those employees.

Between sharing new corporate strategies and policy information, and simply trying to connect with remote teams, there are plenty of important messages that businesses send out to their employees every day.

The biggest issue with this is all the noise because all those emails end up competing with each other for workers’ attention. Instead of simply filling up the inbox folders of employees, companies should start engaging with them through email communications, so that they’ll actually respond.

Greetings

Most people tend to open and respond to the dozens of one-on-one emails that they receive because they tend to be relevant to their jobs. However, in terms of internal communications, emails that are sent out from head offices or HR tend to be left unread unless they’re marked as very important. Companies that are looking to improve their open and read rates for those types of company-wide emails should first take their time to target the message to the audience. That means sending out the emails only to the people that should see it—by department, role, location, and more, to ensure that the message is relevant to its recipients.

Keeping messages short

When it comes to finding the perfect length of an email, internal communications are similar to marketing messages, and according to research from marketers, the ideal marketing emails are between 75 to 100 words. Companies don’t have to explain every single detail inside of their internal emails because they should only be looking to transmit key pieces of information to their employees. The same rule applies to email subject lines, which are also important for improving engagement rates. Employees should understand what an email is about as soon as they spot it in their inbox folder, and simply get more information from the body of the email.

Email platforms

Visual highlights can easily grab the attention of an email reader. Even the simplest additions to internal communications, such as a photo or a funny image, can improve engagement and read rates with employees. The best way to include more visual assets inside emails is to use internal email platforms that provide businesses with different email templates and other graphic features.

Interactive emails

Similar to social media platforms, successful internal communications are the ones that deliver some form of interactivity. This can mean asking the employees to share their comments on a topic or getting them to watch a video or review an infographic. Even polls or surveys can work in making emails more interactive for employees, which leads to more productivity and more success in the workplace.

Mike Paffmann
Mike Paffmann is CEO of Virgo-PR.

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