Sending mass emails to all of your colleagues can feel like a daunting prospect. You want them to want to read the emails rather than feel that nagging tug of obligation. You want your carefully crafted email to POP and make your employees smile, turning that Monday frown upside down!
The great news is that you don’t have to write email newsletter that look and sound super corporate, impersonal, or dull in order to be professional. You can zhuzh things up, add a little sparkle, and inject some fun with the power of a thousand syringes just like what a referral program software does!
You also – and we can already hear your sigh of relief – don’t have to use Comic Sans. Take that in for a moment — no comic sans.
So let’s dive into our top tips for writing some dynamic internal emails so that you can go ahead and complete the things that are important to you at work.
1. Good subject lines
The first thing your employees will see is the subject line. This will dictate whether they open it straight away or ignore it for as long as humanly possible. You want your subject line to be short, interesting, and relevant. It should offer a clear indication of what the email is about without being overly descriptive. Something like “Five tips on small business management”, and not “our stock control system is malfunctioning and needs major attention from the IT department”
Conciseness and clarity are what you should aim for. Unless it’s an urgent email, avoid using the High Priority setting. Otherwise, you can end up wading into The Boy Who Cried Wolf territory.
2. Keep emails short
You may have heard that a CV should never be longer than a page – well, the same can be said about emails. Being able to see the entirety of the email without scrolling down all the time makes it feel bite-sized and digestible.
In order to keep interests piqued, try to keep your emails no longer than 300-500 words. This also saves time for your colleagues who might just want to get the information quickly without having to dedicate a chunk of their time to reading emails.
3. Include a contents list so people can skip to the relevant sections for them
If you’re covering multiple points within your email, like sections called “rollout process of our new business voicemail service?”, “new branding guidelines,” and “Taco Tuesdays”, you can briefly introduce the contents of your email at the start. Mention the number of the relevant paragraph so that people can skip forward to the parts that are of interest to them instead of sifting through irrelevant information (yep, straight down to Taco Tuesdays).
People are busy, and emails can take up a lot of their time as it is, so keeping your emails structured in this way can make everyone’s day a little bit easier.
4. Space it out for readability
Spacing out your email into smaller paragraphs as well as numbering the paragraphs (if this is relevant to your email) will make it much easier for folks to skim the text and head straight to “Dialpad alternatives” or “Wednesdays at Wendy’s”. It also makes it easier for dyslexic people to read your emails. Aim for each paragraph to be three to five lines long and for numbered paragraphs to include titles.
5. Keep the font simple and readable
There are so many amazing fonts out there, and we feel you – jazzing up your emails with some ‘70s calligraphy is super tempting. However, it can make it much harder to read if you’re dyslexic, and it can look a little messy if it’s not done right. You also want to stick to the basics when it comes to font colors for the same reasons as using a simple font style. This doesn’t mean your email needs to look drab. You can add fun in other ways…
6. Add some visual aids
While you might have to rein it in on the calligraphy font, you can make up for this loss with images! You could include a couple of pictures, memes, GIFs, or charts. If your email is about an event that happened recently, you can totally include pictures of the events with your smiling employees’ faces.
If your article is about how freelancers can achieve work-life balance, you can sprinkle in some funny Schitt’s Creek memes or GIFS to make people laugh. Just make sure to keep your visuals work-appropriate.
If you’re sharing data with your team, charts and graphs are great ways to make the information faster and easier to absorb and understand. It’s also easier to share visual data with others than to explain things with words alone, so this will help your colleagues if they want to forward or save the information for future use.
7. Know your audience
There’s no one-size-fits-all email structure that you can apply to any set of employees because every team has its own dynamic. Get to know your colleagues and keep a finger on the pulse in terms of what goes down well and what falls flat like a deflated soufflé. Maybe dad jokes are the social currency of your office. Maybe cute cat videos are more valuable for keeping employees engaged.
Are you the Michael Scott of your office? Do people expect a certain level of humor and joie de vivre from you? Or is your office more appreciative of tamer Pam puns or Angela cat videos?
8. Use corporate branding
Some light branding in your emails is a nice way to create a sense of continuity in internal communications, and including this helps with remote work readiness. With many people working from home, it’s easy to lose the company culture. Branding also adds a professional touch which gives you more leeway to make your emails fun! A tidy, corporate layout is a nice canvas on which to create masterful alliterations and awe-inspiring poems.
A blank slate creates
Space for literary clout
Emails can be art
9. Employ the use of layouts and templates
There’s no shame in sourcing and using some pre-existing layouts and templates. They offer a great way to give your email structure and make the content look really attractive without getting a degree in graphic design. They can save you a lot of time with editing, and you can find many free templates online.
10. Give people something to interact with
Image source: Accelerate Agency
Another way to get people engaging with your emails is to give them something to actually interact with. With boredom being such a big driver of staff turnover, there’s no reason not to make emails fun and engaging.
You could include a puzzle that they can work on individually or as a team, a link to an interesting Ted Talk to follow, maybe an animated video about why corporate culture matters. Some managers and CEOs like to create regular video updates that they send around their teams instead of, or alongside, email updates.
Videos are great because they give people a break from reading – they can just sit back and absorb information. If you’re a whiz with video editing and you feel comfortable in front of a camera, this might be a good idea for you.
A podcast-style communication choice is another option that allows people to change up how they absorb information, which is great if people are feeling at all overwhelmed and need to look away from the screen.
11. Keep the content relevant
The contents of your internal emails should be relevant to your employees. Don’t include information in a mass email that can be sent to just a couple of people individually. Too much information – particularly irrelevant information – is likely to just overwhelm your employees and turn them off your emails. So if info about outbound lead generation is only relevant to Dwayne in Marketing, keep that nugget just for him.
12. Make the emails regular
Having a regular emailing system, or even a professional email server, where you allocate a day every week to sending updates can help get people into the habit and rhythm of opening and engaging with those emails. It creates a little anticipation and inspires curiosity to boot. You can set a reminder in your calendar to send out weekly emails.
13. Include an email signature
Including an email signature – either your own or whoever the email is written on behalf of – gives much-needed context to fellow employees about the tone and context of the email. It also lets them know who to address any questions to.
To sum up…
Your internal emails should have structure, clarity, and a certain regularity to them and be relevant. Using pictures can help make your email pop, and keeping it short and spaced out makes it nice and easy to read. Offering some engaging elements like a video, game, puzzle, or interesting links to follow can make your emails more enjoyable and interactive for your colleagues.
With so many folks working remotely these days, you need good employee communication to keep everyone engaged and motivated. Maybe throw in the occasional pizza party or video conference games session in the mix to keep things a little more social!
