From Inbox to Impact: How to Succeed With Data-Driven Employee Email

Emma Fischer: Hi, everybody, and welcome to “From Inbox to Impact: How to Succeed with Data-Driven Employee Email.” I’m Emma Fischer, and I’m the Content Marketing Manager here at Staffbase. And I’m joined by three exciting guests today. So I have Avalon Taylor and Amy Dietz from Cognizant, and Jeff Corbin, the Principal Strategy Advisor at Staffbase. So Amy and Avalon, you guys are both experts in internal communication. at one of the world’s largest IT service providers. And if anyone is not familiar with Cognizant, they’re pretty impressive—a global IT service provider with over 300,000 employees and $19.7 billion in revenue over the past year. So before we jump in today, I would love for both of you to just share your titles with us and how it connects to internal communication.

Amy Dietz: Sure. Thank you so much for having us. It’s really a pleasure. Staffbase has been such a great partner to Cognizant. It’s really helping us change our ecosystem as it relates to communications. My name is Amy Dietz, as you mentioned. I lead People Communications. So People Communications at Cognizant is everything as it relates to both internal as well as externally, how we position our talent. We’re in a people business. So, you know, what we say to investors and to analysts, how we market to potential talent that all sits within our team. 

Avalon Taylor: And I’m Avalon Taylor. I work for Amy—whatever she asks me to do. My sweet spot is working on our employee reach and channel strategy for our internal communications. So making sure that we are reaching our 385,000 contractors and associates, globally. They sit, some in their homes, some in Cognizant sites, some in client sites. Some have access only to client emails during the day. And so reaching everyone is certainly a challenge depending on the audience. And then managing our channels to figure out how to best reach each audience.

Emma Fischer: And we are going to get into all of this today, but we’re going to start off first with something a bit strong. And that is the statement: Email is dying. So, Amy, I know you have strong feelings about this. What do you think about this statement? 

Amy Dietz: “Lol”, is my reaction to that statement. If email’s dying, it’s alive and well at Cognizant. Truly, it’s like the center of our communications strategy, whether we like it or not. I really think, though, before we dive into Cognizant specifics, that statement really depends on the company and the type of industry that you’re in. So for us in IT services and the dynamics that Avalon described about our workforce being, you know, some are in front of a Cognizant laptop, but many aren’t.

Many are operating off of client devices or in locked-down ecosystems where they’re serving some of the biggest name brands in the world. Asking them to go and access something separate outside of their daily workflow, you know, when we have them, in a moment, they’re going to their inbox, they’re going to their timesheet. They don’t have time to go anywhere else because they’re focused on their clients.

So we are really dependent on email here. Other companies might not be the same, but for IT services and the client-facing nature of our business, it really works for us. Our survey results, Avalon will tell you more about those a little bit later in the conversation, but we run an internal communication survey every year.

Our associates reinforce that with us. We thought it was true. We surveyed with them and they said, “yes, absolutely. I count on email to be my source of truth.” If it comes through any other channel, I have questions about it. But email, I know, you know, we like to say at Cognizant, “If it didn’t happen by email, it didn’t happen at all.”

But because we’re so heavily reliant on it, we’ve been really trying hard to take efforts, especially over this last year, to up our standards for email, consolidate where we can, make sure they’re visual, change the format, the length, everything that we possibly can do so that even though we’re heavily reliant on that channel, it’s coming through in the most effective way for our population.

Emma Fischer: I think that’s fantastic. And now we’re going to hear from Jeff, who is somebody that once wanted email to die. So after we heard everything from Amy and from your experience in the last years, what do you think now about that statement? 

Jeff Corbin: Yeah. So when I was starting the employee app company, which was before I joined Staffbase four and a half years ago, I was of the mind that—a little self-serving, a little selfish, I guess—that employee apps should take over the world and there would be no need for any other form of communication, especially email.

I was proven very wrong very quickly. And as I started to work with more and more larger organizations and even smaller organizations realized that a huge percentage of these companies have Microsoft. And who was I to think that I could put Microsoft out of business? That was kind of foolish. So, yeah. 

You know, now looking at, what’s going on, you know, email is strong. At Staffbase we have our Staffbase Email solution. We recognize the fact that it’s not going away, that it can actually coexist with other channels, whether it be a company’s intranet or with mobile employee app or any other form of, method of communication. So I was proved wrong. I’m willing to do a mea culpa and I’m a big supporter of email now, and especially having the opportunity to work with Amy and Avalon at Cognizant. It’s been great to see how they’re taking advantage of it.

Emma Fischer: Well, there’s certainly nothing wrong with updating your opinion, so I think that’s great. Everyone’s on the same page for this one. 

Jeff Corbin: And you could always learn and be better, right? 

Emma Fischer: But now, when it comes to email, I know it’s very successful, but Avalon, I would love to hear, what were the initial challenges or misconceptions about employee email at Cognizant, because I know you have some stats on this one.

Avalon Taylor: Well, like Jeff, we were also proven wrong on a variety of factors. We thought that there were different types of employees who wanted to receive their information from the company in different ways. So we published the same information in all of our channels because we thought that was how you do employee reach. But it turns out that’s really annoying because it turns out there’s one type of employee, the email type.

And so if they’ve already seen it in email, once they get their ping on Teams and their alert from Engage and their intranet pop up on their automatic default browser home page, they have already heard about that and do not want to see it. 

So we got this great feedback from the survey that we did that Amy mentioned. 97% of our associates reported receiving information and updates about the company via email.

And then we asked them, but how would you prefer? Like, we get it, you get it on email, but how would you like to receive your communications from the company? We asked them to bring their top three. The top two are still email. The top one is a longer email with all the information contained within, because they don’t want to click out. We thought we’d give them a snippet, we give them a link and then they go read on the intranet if they’re interested. No, they don’t want to have to go anywhere else. The second most popular by half as much is a shorter email with the links. And then number three is Teams, like you can just have my manager tell me via chat.

So we thought multi-channel meant that you send these little snippets on everything and then direct to another channel. And now that we know that email is number one, we can use our other channels in much more strategic ways, which has really transformed our communications ecosystem. 

Emma Fischer: That gives me some restored faith because I read something on LinkedIn that people tune out after, I’m not sure, 67 words on LinkedIn. So, I have a lot of faith now that employees actually want long-form content. I think that’s a really great point to bring up. 

Avalon Taylor: Or at least they don’t want to click anywhere to go anywhere else and wait for the page to load. 

Emma Fischer: That’s definitely important—zero-click content. But when it comes to measuring success, what you mentioned—97 %—that is massive. Was there any other metrics that you have used, Amy, to see how effective email is? 

Amy Dietz: Yeah, absolutely. Again, I think Staffbase has been a game changer for us here because we can look at every single email and understand individual performance. And depending on the email, too, we look at different metrics. Like if we’re emailing people managers, we might be looking at one set of metrics over another, depending on how we want them to interact. I mean, I think that looking at email metrics at this point for me, because of Staffbase, is like a top three hobby. But what I would say is, we look at standard metrics, so we look at open rate, of course, we look at clicks, we look at read time. Again, we have to contextualize that for the audience.

Maybe we don’t want them to actually click through in a certain email. Maybe the click-through is only if you have more questions that weren’t answered in this email. Go get more information. So you kind of have to look at things individually in that way. But we also look at some of the less popular metrics. 

One of my personal favorites is repeat rate. If people are coming back to an email, that means they found it useful. Like it’s hard enough to get them to read it one time. If we can get them to read it two or more times, oh my goodness, we’ve hit the target. We’ve nailed it. So that’s one of my favorites as well. And then off of Staffbase, one of the things we’re tracking and unfortunately it’s manual, is how many emails we’ve eliminated through things like newsletters or through just coaching and counsel on our internal communication strategy.

Emma Fischer: I think that really would help them with information overload because I know if you’re constantly getting an email, it’s much easier to ignore it than if you have this one, juicy, perfect update email. So, Jeff, is there anything you could add to this topic, or would you want to challenge anything you heard? 

Jeff Corbin: Not so much to challenge. Maybe just to add on, you know, having worked with a lot of companies and thinking about metrics, thinking about analytics, one of the things I always realize or said to my teams that I worked with was that if we knew, you know, where employees were going, what they were engaging with, what content was resonating, what content wasn’t resonating, that that could be game-changing for us in our work. It could save us so much time. And I think that that’s what I hear from Amy. You know, if we know that our content is working, then we should just do more of it, right? Like, if it’s not broken, let’s not try and fix it, but let’s figure out what is broken. And that’s where the value of having a platform, having analytics to study it so you have the time to study. And it seems, Amy and Avalon, you make the time because you realize that that little bit of time spent today is going to save you a lot of time in the future and also allow you to be more successful in your work. Kudos to you for that. 

Amy Dietz: Yeah, absolutely. I have one another point, too, is, you know, so often we’re focused on the quantitative and we don’t really think about the qualitative. In internal comms, typically the qualitative feedback that we get on a town hall or on an intranet article is in the form of a comment. In email, traditional email, we don’t have the ability to comment unless you’re replying to the general inbox. 

One of the things that we’ve done through Staffbase on our newsletters, our newsletters that go globally to all associates and globally to people managers every week, is added a thumbs up, thumbs down button at the bottom to get real in-time feedback on, was this useful? I think the simple question is, was this useful content for you? And so people can hit the thumbs up, thumbs down, and then it spits them out to a form that says, do you have anything to add? 

The qualitative commentary that we get both on thumbs up and on thumbs down—again, it’s my favorite hobby reading them every week because it helps us just get a pulse check on how things are going. Are we giving people the right content? Are they the right length? We also get comments on the content itself, whether they thought it was clear or it wasn’t. We get any derivative of feedback through that mechanism. And that’s really opened the door for us to more real, in-time pulse checks and qualitative feedback from our people as they’re engaging with email.

Emma Fischer: I’m curious, how do you respond to the feedback? Do you kind of make updates to the next emails, or do you ever just address things directly? 

Amy Dietz: Yeah. People have the ability to remain anonymous or put their email associated with their comment. If there is a question and a person has identified themselves, we will reply to them one-on-one and say, I’m sorry that that was confusing or the link didn’t work for you, here is the response.

So we do targeted feedback that way, but generally speaking, we’re just looking at that week by week to adjust our approach. If people said, this wasn’t interesting for me this week based on XYZ, we’ll look at that content and say, okay, we need to do less of that. If people are like, this was immensely valuable. Thank you so much. You know, depending on the type of content, I’ll share an example. Our leader newsletters can be very short. We intend for them to be very short, but sometimes they’re a little bit longer. Like, we’ll make them a little bit longer to save them reading three separate emails. 

And last week, we sent one really short. In fact, the subject line was short and sweet, and we got so much positive commentary on like, this was exactly the right message for me. It was simple. It was straightforward. I love the subject line and it enticed me to click in. So we’re just doing in-time adjustments, I would say. 

Emma Fischer: I think this is really good pointers because I have one of the external newsletters at Staffbase, so I’m like the thumbs up, thumbs down sounds amazing. I would love to get more feedback, see what I can improve, see what I should continue. So I think this is a really fabulous idea. 

Jeff Corbin: And I have a thought and a question. At Staffbase, we use our own platform. We’ve been putting together our teams, we’ve been putting together emails that synthesize a lot of these different stories that come out over the course of like a month or so.

And I find them personally to be really useful because maybe I saw something and it just kind of acts as a consolidation way for me to just refresh my memory as to what content was put out by the organization over a period of time. But my question that I was just thinking as you both were talking is: I’ve always heard about email overload, like people say, they’re bombarded with so much email. I’m just curious, to the extent that email is a primary channel for you all at Cognizant, how do you address that issue? I guess you’re coming out from the corporate standpoints, you’re communicating on behalf of the enterprise, right? But like, how do you deal with getting through the clutter of what everyone else is sending out across the organization?

Avalon Taylor: I can share that we’re working towards a one-stream experience where all the emails that are going to go to all the company or any group over 40,000 go through Staffbase, which means that when someone comes to us and says, “I really want to send an email. I think it’s really important and special.” We can say, “Is it special enough to go to everyone in our most read, most opened email that we have?” Because that’s the weekly newsletter. I would love to include a blurb on what you want to talk about in there because you’re going to get more eyeballs than if you send a one-off. And we have the stats on that from Staffbase to support that strategy, which means we’ve been able to cut one-off emails. Amy, was it like 70 so far?

Amy Dietz: I think we’ve cut about 70 in 4 or 5 months. 

Avalon Taylor: Yeah, in a 4 or 5-month period, 70 emails that are missing from your box means you value the one newsletter that comes through weekly more because it’s got all the good stuff. The number one piece of writing feedback from our associate survey, beg us to send them less emails. There was three times as many write-in responses as the next most common response, which was can you shorten all the emails, so how do you commun—and we also got that the employees want to hear from us weekly or more often, which was a little confusing because we thought they wanted less, but they still want weekly and prefer Mondays or Fridays. So how do you communicate weekly, but also less? You combine and putting everything in the newsletter. But keeping it short enough, we have found to be really successful. 

And another good misconception is, we thought that you had to put the most important links at the top for people to click on, but when we looked through our Staffbase data on what people are clicking on, it’s whatever people are interested in. So it could be something in the middle that gets the highest clicks, something towards the end. People really are scrolling through to find the thing that they want to hear more about and clicking on that. So the newsletter approach is working to cut down emails. 

Amy Dietz: Yeah, it’s a great point. I have to say, when we pitched the idea of newsletters to our boss, CCO Jeff DeMarrais, he looked at me and kind of raised his eyebrows and was like, “Newsletters? What are we—1992, are you kidding?” 

But again, it’s less about being the most modern, communication channel in this environment and more about creating a way to reduce—well, two things. Reduce the number of emails in people’s inbox. Everybody needs a standalone if they don’t have a place to put it. So the newsletter gets them a place to put it.

And also, summarizing and consolidating the most important things for people to know in a single place every week. It’s the reliability, the predictability that people are looking forward to. So they’re working, even if they are an archaic type of model. 

The other thing I would add to what Avalon says is, we’re retraining people’s minds around email at Cognizant. If we looked even just two years ago, I think you would see even members of our own communications team and probably to an extent ourselves as well, just sending emails because there was a box to check or a leader who was asking for it. We have data and insight now that tells us, there are better ways of doing that. So, you know, in addition to creating the newsletters and ensuring that we have the highest standards for the emails that we do send, we’re retraining our global comms team on what’s an effective email, what deserves a standalone, and what might be able to just go on our intranet or our Viva Engage platform or somewhere else? Not everything needs an email.

We’ve also, Avalon kind of alluded to this earlier, with some of our tangential communications teams, you know, say, for example, the benefits organization within HR, they send out newsletters about employee benefits, which are deeply important. They were sending those out through Outlook. They had no metrics in terms of what people were clicking on. We’ve moved them on to Staffbase so that now they can be smarter about the emails they send, too.

So the email overload is real. It’s real here. It’s real at most organizations, I think, but it’s a necessary evil. So it’s all about making them the . . .  if you’re going to be so heavily reliant on email, making email the best that you possibly can, to make the most of people’s time. 

Jeff Corbin: It seems to me that you all, you know, the communications function in general, you have obviously gone out of just the communications office. You’re working with leadership, you’re working with other functional areas, human resources. And that’s like, if you can do that and get everyone aligned on the same page in terms of how we’re getting information. Everyone at the end of the day is really in communications, right? We’re all communicating with somebody. So, I think it’s great to see that an organization like Cognizant has been able to bring that sort of structure to how you use the tool like Staffbase Email.

Emma Fischer: 300,000 people—that is a lot. 

Jeff Corbin: It’s a lot of emails. 

Amy Dietz: Yeah, it is. And so we do have to kind of be realistic with ourselves. No. Occasionally. Excuse me. I log into Staffbase and I see the numbers of emails that went out to our organization in a quarter. I looked at Q4 the other day and it was 300 emails in total, and I was like, oh my gosh, that’s way too many. We’ve got to take draconian measures to slow that down. But that can be an email to an audience of ten. It could be an email to an audience of 100,000. It could be an email to a specific country that’s really important. It’s just such a vast organization that we have to keep, I think, that context in our minds, when we look at the data.

Emma Fischer: I love the inside scoop about how much thought is put into everything that as employees, I don’t often think, oh, who thought out when to send this email. But there’s just so much to balance right now with people wanting to hear from their organizations and expecting updates. But then, as Jeff mentioned, the email fatigue. So I think this is really great how carefully you’re considering every aspect of this. 

Jeff Corbin: Something, Amy, that you mentioned, just the personalization of emails, segmentation. That’s something that I spent a lot of time thinking about because we kind of know from the work, whether it’s email, whether it’s employee app, whether it’s intranet—being more personalized, tailored in the communications does help with engagement. How are you all thinking about with—300,000 people, how do you think about segmentation and how do you use Staffbase, which allows for that to take place? How is that helping you? 

Amy Dietz: I’m going to pitch that question to you. Take us back to five years ago and the distribution list nightmares that we had and where we are today. 

Avalon Taylor: I can take us back even further. I joined Cognizant about nine years ago. At that time, we did not have any email moderation for distribution lists, which meant that you got emails, multiple emails daily of people who were looking for new roles, who were sending their resumes out to the whole company, to ask, “Do you have any work for me?” We also got emails of people who are very proud of the lunch that they had made and wanted to share pictures of the sandwich. 

So that had to stop. That was the impetus for us creating an internal comms function, which at the time prioritized locking down distribution lists in partnership with IT. So our system that we have now, the Azure world of emails, allows for locking down who can send from a email box. And then also there’s a trap where all the emails that come through get trapped by the internal comms approver box. And we at one point had a team of five people who were reviewing emails coming through that box in numbers of like 80 to 120 a day. I feel my blood pressure rising as I’m telling this story because this was so terrible for our team and for the company. Just to put in perspective what a big change Staffbase has been for us. That’s where we were five years ago. 

Two years ago, it was still pretty bad. And now that we have Staffbase on this more centralized route to be able to, one have a control group of senders, to not have a trap of anyone who has to approve anything, get up in the middle of the night, go look at an email and click the right box to allow it to send out to everyone. Or to have all the team members in all the time zones on this box all the time. Now that we have the ability with the dynamic list building in Staffbase, where you can choose the countries and don’t have to work with HRIS our HR information system, to ask them to manually pull our lists of people into different countries. We have people who manually update those lists for the company on a two-week rotating basis, so we don’t even have automatic updates in our Outlook distribution lists for who should be in each list. That’s a manual update every two weeks. 

So in Staffbase, it all just flows, all the data flows and we can be pretty certain that we have the right lists of people. And being able to also do cross sections of people by level or by whether they work for different business units, if they’re corporate or if they are service line members who are serving clients. That for us has been huge to bypass the IT system that was set up without a communications function in mind. Is that fair, Amy? 

Amy Dietz: Yeah, absolutely. Again, it’s empowering the people who understand audience strategy, know when communications need to go out, have the appropriate approvals with the ability to create their own distribution list, whether through a dynamic directory or through updating a CSV or uploading a CSV file that’s been, you know, a level of empowerment that we frankly needed and has enabled us to operate a lot more efficiently as a team.

But the targeting question, to me, that’s the biggest challenge and also the greatest benefit of email, if you get it right. And we work almost constantly to coach our stakeholders on, “Do you really need to send that to all 50,000 people leaders or is it really just a subset?” So again, when they say, “You know what? It really is just a subset.” We say, “That’s great! Go get us a CSV file and we’ll send a targeted email for you.” But it takes a lot of one-on-one coaching. 

Avalon Taylor: Which is again retraining the minds of the people who want to send the communication. Jeff, you said it, we’re all communicators. We do get these communication requests from all over the company, from people who are not trained in communications but know that they need to communicate.

And so this coaching that we do to help them figure out who their audience actually is, is so much more powerful when we can segment. 

Emma Fischer: I think that’s awesome. That definitely, I think, answered Jeff’s question. So now I would love to hear about, let’s see, the values campaign. I think that’s something you could talk about, Amy?

Amy Dietz: Sure, absolutely. One of a great proof point for us in the power of email was last year, late last year in September. Cognizant launched a new set of values. They were born through associate feedback. We felt that they were really powerful. But you never really know until you launch these things to an organization.

So what we did, in addition to kind of a global launch, was a ten week campaign. We have five values. Every two weeks. We would focus on one value. And for that two-week period, it would kick off with an email. The email was kind of the signal of, okay, this week we’re going to focus on work as one. Here’s the executive talking about what this means, the training content, ways that you can recognize your team around this. But it was almost like a toolkit type of email that kicked off this two-week period. And we were watching the data as it came in, I think, across the five different values, the ten-week campaign, there were millions of impressions just from the email alone, you know, people opening or engaging with the content.

But on the tail end of that values campaign, we conducted testing with a third-party research firm on how did the values resonate with the organization? Are people internalizing them? Are they believing them? Like where we really wanted some answers in addition to the communication metrics that we had. And people said, “Yes, absolutely. I understand them. I believe them. I think they’re authentic to my experience. They make me think more positive about the company.” 

And we also asked a question of, when you think about the values, where do you recall learning about them or seeing them? And email was number one by a long shot. The questions reveal that not only did people most recall the values from the emails they received, but it was also the most effective tool in terms of internalizing and really applying the values. People understood the values better because of the emails that we were sending out. So that was a great example. 

We see communications metrics every day, but we don’t always get to see impact. A lot of times, communications impact is further down the line and it’s hard to measure. This was like a direct one-to-one correlation between the emails we were sending and how people remembered and resonated with the values. So that was cool to see. 

Emma Fischer: I think now we have a really convincing case why you should use email, and now we have also some helpful tips for metric measuring. But I think another great question would be, I’m watching this and I want to make my email, let’s say. Avalon, how can I start an internal comms newsletter that people want to read? What are your best tips? 

Avalon Taylor: I think you just have to give the people what they want, which speaks to what Amy shared about the thumbs up, thumbs down survey at the bottom. You have to take the feedback that they give you and implement it immediately. Fix whatever they’re saying they don’t like. You can assume, even if it’s one voice that says this is unclear, at least 10 or 20 more people had that thought and didn’t take the time to write it down for you.

And I think you have to also use all the tools available. So Staffbase had a really nice newsletter webinar a couple of weeks ago, maybe in January. We all talked about how you should have more whitespace on the sides and have the good content in the middle. So it feels kind of like a mobile scroll, even if you’re not on mobile because our brains feel happy about that. Especially, when we’re at work and wish we were playing on our phones. That’s a great advice. We started implementing that on our leader newsletter, and it is so clean and bright and easy and fast to get through. You end up being at the end of the email before you know it. 

I think for us, we started with our survey, so we had a lot of information about what people wanted from the beginning. I think even if you’re not going to do a company-wide survey, where you’re asking everybody, have some little thought circles where you ask some people whose value you appreciate, whose input you appreciate, ask them, what do we need to do? What do you want to hear about? What’s going to be the highest value? What’s going to make you open this email? And then use your stats to figure out when to send it, when people are going to open it. And what subjects are going to help people come back. I think the cadence also is really important in that retraining everyone to understand what we’re doing here, same time, same day, every week.

Emma Fischer: Consistency. I think that is really good. I guess if you miss a week, everyone’s like, what happened this week? Why is there no update? And if it’s Tuesday or it’s Wednesday, it’s something that you should expect and rely on. I like that a lot. 

Avalon Taylor: Would you add anything, Amy, as the newsletter chief? 

Amy Dietz: No. Oh, the newsletter chief. That’s a new title for me. No, I think you summarized it well. I like the point about give the people what they want is so well taken. 

At a previous organization, when I was a consultant, I remember we tried to kill off a local email that was taking a lot of the internal comms team’s time, and the team didn’t feel it was valuable. It certainly didn’t feel like a valuable use of time from a corporate internal communications perspective. And killing it off, there was such a revolt internally in the first week. I mean, this thing had like recipes and all the types of things that would make an internal communicator kind of shudder. But the feedback from associates was so negative that we had to stand it back up, like within the span of a two-week period of killing it off. And the woman I was working with at the time said, “You know what? If we’re going to have a newsletter, I’m going to make it the best damn newsletter anybody has ever seen.” And I’ve seen that become true at so many other organizations I worked with including comms, that these are necessary and desired components of the employee experience.

So stop trying to run away from email. Instead, focus on making it better. And really giving the people what they want. Avalon, that point I really like. 

Emma Fischer: Do guys also have external email at the company, because you’ve definitely sold me on this email. I want to check it out. So as we start to wrap up, I think that we should look ahead to the future. And first, I’d love to hear from Jeff, what innovations or strategies do you think are shaping the future when we talk about communication and we look at email? 

Jeff Corbin: Yeah, I mean, it all comes back to . . . when I just gave a talk on artificial intelligence and, you know, which is the collection of data and using data. And I think there’s so much information, so much learning that exists. The question is how do you use it? And the future, I think is going to be in . . . right now, it’s we need to a certain extent manually take the analytics and learn from what’s going on and how our newsletters, how our content is performing. 

But over time, there’s going to be tools that are going to evolve, that currently exist in the Staffbase platform and are continuing to be developed with regard to things like sentiment analysis and heatmaps, so that the work that communications professionals do can become somewhat automated because the intelligence is going to help us to put that data to use. So I mean, that to me is the future, we’re right in the middle of this AI thing, right? In my talk the other day, you know, the 2000s was the internet, the 2010s was social media. The 2020s was mobile technology. We’re now in the 2020s and it’s AI. And to think that it’s gonna be any different this time around is, I think we’re kidding ourselves. So we should embrace it. And I think it’s something at Staffbase that we are working on and we’re very aware of it and excited about it at the same time because it’s going to be really, really helpful to the communications profession. 

Emma Fischer: I’d love to hear building off that. What’s your take on this, Amy?

Amy Dietz: So my dream is that as internal communicators and in the broad field of internal communications, that we really start to think more like marketers. And from an email perspective, embrace the principles of external email marketing, digital marketing for our own people. 

We kind of, for decades, internal communications is kind of operated in this alternate universe where on the outside I’m getting emails from every brand I’ve ever interacted with that are tailored to me, delivered when I want to interact with them. They’re probably A/B-testing on me. They’re not sending eight-paragraph long text-based emails, like I would never read it. But on the inside of these companies, we’re doing things that are completely opposite. 

And I know, some of that is necessary. Right? People need to hear from leaders. If your reader isn’t open to video or if you don’t have a strong video solution, it’s not always easy to deliver content like you experience in the outside world, but I don’t think we’re doing enough as an internal communications field generally to target and tailor content to think about time of day that we send to really craft killer subject lines instead of the corporate lingo subject line. We love to use emojis, through Staffbase because that’s what people are getting in their Gmail inbox or anywhere else. Again, I would love to kill the text-based email. We still send a lot of those. But you just don’t see it in the outside world. I’d like to make things more visual. I would like to do more A/B-testing and really focus on engagement and interactivity of emails. More than getting the message out. Of course, AI can help. And Jeff,  I’m totally aligned with you on the AI point. I think you made all of the points there that I would want to make.

But I just think email is not dead. Like to close out the conversation and revisit the first question. Email is absolutely not dead. But we have to do better internally and as internal communicators. And there’s a model to learn from. 

My husband works in digital marketing, and he challenges me all the time. Why are you doing things that way? Why, when the world is operating this way, is internal communications operating in a completely different world? So I always try to apply that lens to everything I do. I think our tools have to support us in getting there. But that would be my dream, is that we start to embrace more principles of external marketing for our own people.

Emma Fischer: I love this, I think that was a perfect 360 wrap-up. Thank you all so much for joining us today for the You’ve Got Comms podcast. And I really appreciate this conversation. I think there are so many points to take away.