The Email Digest: The Key to Making Your Company Smarter Having an effective daily email digest will help you and your colleagues stay informed in this fast-moving world, while also saving your inboxes.
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How'd you find this article?
Some people may have discovered in search. Others may have seen it floating around social media. But what about through an email message from a friend, family member or coworker? While this channel is often overlooked, it is surprisingly still a common resource for sharing.
And probably more so for work functions. At most mid- or large-scale companies, email is used to deliver newsletters, listservs and ad-hoc emails ("thought you would find this interesting.").
Related: The 8-Second Challenge: Email Marketing for Our Shrinking Attention Span
Indeed most office workers spend more than two hours a day just reading and responding to emails and an additional 1.5 hours a day searching for information, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute study. That's almost half of an eight-hour workday. How much of that time could be cut out by simply making email more effective at delivering information? A lot.
Enter the internal newsletter. Having access to high-quality information pertaining to your job, industry and company in real-time on email --the platform where everyone spends most of their day -- puts each person on your team in the best possible position to execute. You need your salespeople to be tuned in to what your customers are up to. You need your product and creative teams to be reading up on best practices in design and engineering. You need your executives to have a real-time awareness of the competitive landscape in order to make the best possible decisions.
Here's three tips on how to best execute your internal newsletter to help drive better information and save time.
Designate a curator: The content universe is massive and is growing all the time. Relevant news sites pop up from nowhere and keeping up with talented but sporadic bloggers is next to impossible. Putting someone in charge of curating industry news and sharing it with colleagues. Find the news junkie on your team, and give them the responsibility of tracking what you need to be paying attention to each day in a daily newsletter: your competitors, major industry players and sector news, as well as perspectives from experts focused on relevant job functions.
Related: Creating Brand Love Through Your Email Newsletter
Make it actionable. A new piece of information is rarely just an FYI. It is almost always directly useful to someone on your team. Could that be a salesperson? Someone in strategy? Who could have a good perspective on what's being discussed? Make sure they're called out in the newsletter or cc'd directly.
Pay attention to who's reading the newsletter. You wouldn't send emails to your customers without any sense of who is opening them and engaging with them, so why do so internally? Use a simple tool like MailChimp to track engagement with your newsletter and see who's using it most regularly. You'll quickly find that the people paying close attention to what's happening in your industry are the ones most passionate about your business.
Staying informed as a firm will be a competitive advantage for your company. And doing so effectively in the first place will save your employees from having to spend huge chunks of their day dealing with information overload -- especially in a world where our ability to process information and make decisions quickly is what separates those who make it from those who don't.
