Why your internal communication newsletter has to be personal

Generic emails are the easiest to ignore because they are not about you, the reader, it’s about the sender. What’s more, it becomes easy to think that the sender isn’t talking to you. This is, at the end of the day, why every user needs to feel that the newsletter you’re sending them is personalized. It needs to provide the information that individual reader wants or needs. If the information is relevant to their role and interests, then there’s a much higher likelihood they will read it.

Personal is different than having the ability to segment your population. Newsletter companies have provided segmentation for a long time. The challenge with segmentation is that you necessarily need to bundle people and make assumptions about their preferences. For example, managers, factory workers or female employees are typical communication segments, but an important question is, do they all care about the same topics? The answer is a very clear no.

We are all used to a great level of personalization with communication in our personal lives, from our social media platforms (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook) to solutions such as Uber and Yoga Glow. Shouldn’t that be the same experience with their corporate counterparts?

I want my newsletter to be so personal that it feels like it was written for me. At Sparrow, we have designed our newsletter functionality to be personalized for everyone. We support segmentation but we take segmentation to the next level by allowing you to define topics and making it easy for your employees to subscribe to whichever topics they find relevant. This level of individualization comes with no extra effort for the communication professional something key in this world of doing more with less.

Let’s use an example to drive this home. Say you have five topics in your organization:

• CEO Updates (Mandatory for everyone)
• COVID-19 (Mandatory for everyone)
• Employee spotlight (optional)
• Financial update (optional)
• Regional updates (all optional)
  • Canada
  • US
  • Europe
  • South America

We will choose couple of random employees from this functional organization Tomas and Sandy. Tomas and Sandy are both managers, but they have different interests as indicated by their topic subscriptions:

This means that Tomas’ newsletter will only include articles with CEO Updates and COVID-19 (he didn’t have a choice on those), Employee Spotlight and Canada. His newsletter is different from Sandy since she is not interested in Canadian content or employee spotlight favouring instead financial updates and US content.

This allows for Tomas and Sandy to get ones that is more specific to each of them. At Sparrow, we actually take this a step further to only including in the newsletter what Tomas, or Sandy, haven’t already read across other channels, for example, the Intranet, Microsoft Teams, or our mobile app. This way the newsletter is truly specific to them and they know that if they are getting it, it means there’s something that they somehow missed. This also serves to bring users back to the more engaging platforms.

Best of all, this is handled automatically by our platform. You focus on your content; Sparrow focuses on delivering the right content to your workforce. This level of personalization comes at no extra work for you, the corporate communication professional and that we believe is a beautiful thing.

When it comes to communications platforms, the Sparrow teams aims to not only to deliver the best value product but to also be the partner that’s there for you. We work closely with our customers, sharing where we’re going, listening to what they would like to see in our platform, and always thinking about how we can make them even more successful with our platform. At Sparrow, we believe that corporate communications can be transformative. Sparrow – Built for Communicators. Book a conversation with us today.