PoliteMail for Outlook

Companies of all sizes need to engage and communicate with their workforce in masse. Internal email broadcast communications are standard practice and, when done properly, are the ideal way to keep employees interested, engaged and on the same page. According to Gartner, 70 percent of business leaders agree that employee engagement is critical to achieving business results. So, how do internal communications teams know if employees are engaged with their communication programs? How do they even know if employees are reading the email broadcasts they send? In a word, measurement.

As email is the number one channel for enterprise employee communications, then the measurement of those internal email broadcasts is the key to understanding and improving how engaged employees are. The good news is that it’s possible for enterprises to gain more insight and control over their internal email communications, without making any major changes to their email systems or email processes.

According to research from the Radicati Group, Microsoft Outlook and Office 365 is the leading enterprise messaging platform used by nearly 80 percent of enterprises with over 1,000 employees. PoliteMail for Outlook is software specialized for internal communications, adding functionality that works inside existing Outlook/Office365/ Exchange environment.

With PoliteMail, enterprise communicators can create, send, and measure internal broadcasts to employees, right from Outlook. Corporate communications teams utilize their everyday email process they already know, rather than learning an entirely new program. With a few extra clicks create responsive pages, measure campaigns, report results, and learn how to improve those results to engage employees better. Whether sending company newsletters, leadership communications, or HR information, PoliteMail provides the capabilities to improve communications results.

While Outlook isn’t known for its design abilities, PoliteMail adds tools to create, branded, standardized templates that can be shared with the team, enabling more impressive and response email communications that read well on mobile devices.

Email is the true workhorse of internal communications

PoliteMail also offers simple survey and employee feedback components, which can be incorporated into any communication. PoliteMail’s analytics are known for their high degree of accuracy, measuring individual behaviors, and compiling results into more meaningful metrics, not just aggregate responses by device. Beyond open and click rates, PoliteMail measures attention rate, readership and read times, engagement and effective rates.

While PoliteMail will automate segment reports by distribution group, list accuracy is often a problem at large companies; employees come and go. PoliteMail offers list management extensions, which puts targeting tools into the hands of communicators, without the delay of IT or HR requests, so they can select audiences by clicking attributes like department, division, location, or by manager or executive. PoliteMail’s innovative features such as appointment tracking, with real-time measurement of meeting accepts and declines is valuable for corporate events and meeting attendance planning. The Time Zone Sending feature recognizes the recipient’s time zone and working hours, and auto-schedules broadcast deliveries at the recipient’s time, not the sender’s time. PoliteMail complies with all the requirements of the recent EU privacy legislation, GDPR, and currently complies with both the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Standard Contractual Model Clauses.

Employees often complain about email overload, and communications teams can utilize data to overcome this feeling and maintain email effectiveness. Insights gleaned from PoliteMail measurement data persuaded one of its large enterprise customers, Microsoft, to do away with a monthly consolidated newsletter that wasn’t getting the results they wanted. Using data and recipient feedback, they put more resources into more frequent ‘popcorn email’ that employees more easily consume. Microsoft learned staffers were overwhelmed by too much information to process in one message, and instead discovered higher engagement with email, which was short, crisp, and visually oriented. The team saw a 34 percent increase in readership and a 54 percent increase in engagement to 98 percent.

Future enhancements of PoliteMail, an Office365- compatible, web-enabled version of its product, an executive communications dashboard, machine-learning AI to elevate insights and recommendations from automated analysis of the data. PoliteMail clients are companies with a workforce of at least 1,000 and upwards of 10,000+ employees.