In today’s digital world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to control communication as an organization. Employees and customers are bombarded with literally thousands of messages daily from multiple channels.
Research has shown that only 70% of employees open up organizational emails, making this once-reliable method of communication less than ideal. Of the 70% who click on the email, only 30% actually read it. With organizational email numbers so low, is it any surprise that marketing emails that go out to customers have an open rate of less than 20%?
Why Is This Happening?
In today’s world of Tiktoks, memes, and tweets, the attention span of the average human when perusing communication is about 8 seconds. If it takes you more than that time to get your message across, then you very likely missed it. Not only that, we now live in a world of push notifications. Employees and customers are no longer interested in seeking out news and updates on portals or websites. If it is important, it will come to them.
Our internal solution was StemeXe. What started out as a directory of people for new and existing employees, soon turned into an announcement platform to get out the organizational message in a way that was swift, secure, and came to the employee on their phones no matter where they were.
We noticed the difference immediately – read rates for internal messages went up to 80%, half of those within 20 minutes of sending out the announcement. In addition to an increased read rate, interaction with internal messages increased. Where two years ago, very few people responded to emails from management. Today, we have employees liking and commenting on organizational announcements in a way that shows an actual conversation is being had.
It took us only a couple of months to realize that StemeXe had potential beyond internal announcements. Finally, we were able to get through to over 400 employees and 25 partners with information about our mission, vision, the changing scope of the company (we were transitioning from a services provider to a software company), and our products. How could we maximize this experience and take it to our customers?
External Awareness Through Sharing
We soon introduced ‘public announcements.’ By default, group announcements are private – meaning only the members of a particular group can see and interact with them. However, when making an announcement, we gave the option to create ‘public announcements.’ These were announcements that we wanted to circulate beyond the group. They included information about product enhancements, offers, company achievements, etc., and when the announcement is made, they include links for social media sharing.
The results were immediate – with a group of over 400 employees if only 10% of them share the announcement on social media (with the typical social media user averaging around 500 contacts- often more), our outreach was a staggering 20,000 ‘consumers.’ And these were actual people – potential customers and partners.
StemeXe has definitely been a game-changer in cutting through the noise.