Introducing Firstup Email: Goodbye unread messages, hello engaged employees

The challenge with emails today  

Organizations have become increasingly more complex, not only in the makeup of their workforces but also in the tools they use to reach employees. As we’ve shifted to a world of modern intranets, collaboration tools, and mobile-first solutions, one fact may surprise you: 95% of office employees still claim email is their main channel of communication. 

Email is an undeniable force in the enterprise, but what’s also clear is that we receive too many emails, at inopportune times, and often with irrelevant information. In fact, workers claim to receive up to 121 emails per day, leading to drained productivity.  

Some organizations believe that the key to reducing email noise is email newsletters. Newsletters can aggregate different messages into one bigger send and therefore reduce the number of overall emails. But what happens if that email gets lost or sent at the wrong time with irrelevant content? Newsletters are just one part of an internal email strategy. We can now go beyond simple newsletters and use automation and intelligence to improve how email gets delivered in the first place.

The problem lies not with email as a channel itself, but rather our approach in curating, designing and sending emails across the enterprise. 

“Despite the longevity of the medium, the approach to creating email marketing content hasn’t changed that much.  It continues to be difficult and frustrating to design, personalizing content is tricky, and measuring success with embedded analytics remains limited, however, it doesn’t have to be like that.”

— Jed Brown, Chief Product Officer, Firstup

Too much noise, not enough insight

There are several reasons why emails have proven difficult for enterprises. Most importantly is the concept of too much noise. Between email, chat pings, text messages and notifications from every system, employees are drowning in noise that’s not coordinated. With all of these chaotic messages, your email is nothing more than static, competing with the endless amounts of alerts and notifications received every day. 

Ready to start engaging with your employees, rather than just filling up their inboxes? We’ve compiled 7 tips to help you build better email.

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Now let’s look a little deeper into email itself and what might be contributing to all of the unread messages. At first glance, it’s clear a lot of companies aren’t using designers to spruce up their emails. Colors are off, images don’t fit and layouts are confusing. Readers scan content first with their eyes looking for visual cues of what’s important, then decide whether to read or delete your email. If you don’t make a good impression quickly, then the likelihood of employees reading your content drops dramatically.

Another trouble spot for email is the widespread use of distribution lists. Outlook and Gmail distribution lists are notoriously out of date and managed under lock and key by “someone in IT”. As a result, employees are missed when organizational change happens, and targeting a specific, granular audience is impossible without an IT service ticket.

Finally, while email marketers get access to a wide array of metrics to track customer engagement, internal communicators are often left with nothing and a lot of “spraying and praying.” Understanding who is engaging with content and taking action, where and when it happens, how it ties back to key business initiatives, and double-clicking into specific segments is how organizations get smarter with internal comms and deliver better results.

Say goodbye to the way you think about email  

So, what’s the answer to a smarter email solution? Is it a better way to design? What about better targeting for your newsletters? While these are a good start, there’s a step beyond just beautiful emails and employee groups. It’s about optimization and automation that lets you focus on your message and strategy, instead of worrying about mechanics. 

Say goodbye to wondering what time your employees in North America will receive an email vs. those abroad. Say goodbye to having to manually track whether your employee groups have competing communications at the same time as your email. 

Say hello to an employee email platform that automatically optimizes the delivery for every employee. Say hello to a true digital employee experience. Say hello to Firstup Email. 

Say hello to email your employees actually want to read

Firstup Email helps you say goodbye to antiquated methods of email creation and hello to: 

Orchestrating email delivery to reach employees at the optimal time. Internal communicators can’t be expected to coordinate communications worldwide or guarantee that every worker responds. Our intelligent orchestration engine takes care of that, with personalized delivery based on the user behaviors and preferences of employees and the priority of the message. 

“It used to take our teams 10 hours just to create one newsletter…now we’re down to 45 minutes or less.” 

— Melissa Tizon, AVP National Communication, Providence 

Automated campaign templates with designs and branding, plus appropriate employee groups and campaign settings ready to go. We provide a number of helpful use cases and give you the control to create personal, public, or targeted templates, so everyone sending emails in your organization is set up for success.

High-impact, drag-and-drop designs that empower you to create rich, consumer-style content without a designer. FirstUp Email makes it incredibly simple for anyone to create stunning, brand-approved content that pops.

Targeting the right people every time with easy to set up audiences that always stay up to date without IT support. Firstup Email continually pulls in data and attributes from multiple systems, like your HRIS, learning platform, CRM and more for always-accurate, granular targeting — even down to the individual employee. Go beyond traditional distribution lists with an on-the-fly audience builder that you control.

Analyzing and tracking granular metrics and filtering by audiences, insights, and business initiatives so you can understand what works and what doesn’t. Understand which key company initiatives are resonating with your workforce, view engagement by department and location to see which groups need more support, and Improve future communications by analyzing which specific areas of your email or newsletter are being engaged with the most.

Get all this, plus access to our best-in-class support teams, the same expert communicators that have launched Fortune 100 companies like Amazon, Ford and Providence.

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Email isn’t going away, but you can be smarter in your approach and help create a better digital experience for employees. With Firstup, we take care of the coordination of your email, allowing communicators to focus on the content, while employees get less noise and can focus on the most important information first. 

Ready to get started? Reach out here to see a personalized overview, tailored to your organization’s needs, and see how you can take your email strategy to the next level. 

Say goodbye to hundreds of emails per day, at the wrong time, to the wrong person.