When communicating with Masses of workers, email is the ideal tool for getting a message out. There’s no shortage of mass emailing tools that can allow employers to send personable messages to the right groups of people. However, with this power comes great responsibility. There is an etiquette to emailing, and this can often be neglected in a manager’s attempt to get a message out to many people as quickly as they can. The results can be unready emails, low engagement from staff, or worse; getting a reputation as a spammer.
So what are the best practices for sending mass mails to your staff?
Non-Spammy Subject Lines
It’s sometimes easy to regularly send mass emails to your teams without considering that your messages might be seen in the same was as an ad for Viagra or a get rich quick scheme from a Nigerian prince. You need to first consider how emails are viewed by the spam filters each time you send your communications.
“”IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ THIS EMAIL!!!!!”” might seem like a an ideal subject line for grabbing attention, but nobody is going to see it if it ends in everyone’s spam folder.
Avoid all caps. Be conscious of spammy phrases and words such as, urgent, free, sale, important. Don’t overuse punctuation – if you are asking a question, one ? is fine. ????????!!!!!!!!$$$$$$$$ is not fine.
Acceptable examples:
“”This weeks roster (WE 24/09/2017)””
“”Please send us your summer availability before this Friday””
“”Shifts available next week. Log in to confirm your availability work.””
Personalize Your Content
Some spam filters may also monitor generic spammy content so personalisation is also important to bypass their restrictions. Even if you have a clean subject line and your content makes it through the robot spam filter, you need to consider the recipient’s human spam filter which has been honed after years of reading generic boring company newsletters that they signed up for back when they had a hotmail account.
Personalising your email instantly makes it obvious to the recipient that this is not a standard update that they can ignore. Use your personal company email as the sender address and user your first name as the Sender Name. We all become conditioned to see through company names in the noise of our inbox – emails from people are highlighted. Also, utilise your mass emailing tool’s merge tagging features to insert the recipient’s personal info into each message. Response rates increase dramatically with the simple inclusion of “”Hi John,”” to the top of your email.
Target Your Recipients Strategically
When sending emails, please be sure that all recipient are relevant to the message being sent. Don’t get into the habit of messaging your entire mailing list if you are sending a message that is only relevant to only certain members of your workforce. Segment your list as much as you can so you can strategically target each message to the relevant staff member.
By including your entire mailing list in each mail shot, the likelihood of each person getting ’email blindness’ to your emails increases. ‘Email blindness’ is when a recipient becomes blind to a frequent sender that appears in their inbox. The first time they see a message from the sender, they think ‘Great! I wonder what useful info Steve just sent’. After Steve sends about half a dozen irrelevant messages, they think ‘Blegh! Steve. Not reading that’.
Keep Clean Mailing Lists
This last point runs parallel to the previous one. You need to be sure that the recipient wants to receive each message. The outcome of sending too many messages to unwilling, or uninterested recipients is the increasing likelihood that people will tattle to their mail clients that you are a spammer which will impact the deliverability of all future emails.
Whatever mass emailing tool you use, be sure to include unsubscribe options where available. Also, make a habit of removing any former staff from your mailing list. Whatever the circumstances of their departure, they will click ‘Report Spam’ button as soon as they hear from you again.
