An internal newsletter is a chance to build morale and add value for employees, so you’ll want to get it right. But what does this involve? Our five top five tips for writing an employee newsletter include:
For more information on all the above, read on below.
Before you start, think about the purpose of your newsletter:
Common topics for internal newsletters to cover, meanwhile, include:
Focus on keeping the newsletter interesting for staff. The aim is to create an employee-focused newsletter that people will want to read.
If your company uses a style guide or an in-house style sheet, check this before you start creating your newsletter. Where possible, make sure you know the company guidelines on branding, including:
There may be room for variation here! A newsletter is usually less corporate in tone than a business report, for example, so you do not need to follow guidelines that are intended for formal writing. But it is important that your newsletter fits in with similar written content produced by your company.
Many workers feel overwhelmed by their emails. So, if you want people to read your newsletter, you need a strong subject line. This means it should:
You can even use A/B testing to see which subject lines work best.
As well as encouraging people to open your newsletter, you’ll want to make it engaging and easy to read with a conversational writing style. Key aspects of achieving this friendly but professional tone include:
Make sure to write for your readers, too! This means thinking about each topic you cover from the perspective of employees rather than the company. For instance, the following is company-focused:
Management requires staff with an outstanding annual leave balance to use it by the end of the financial year.
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But we could reframe it to focus on the employee:
Fancy a holiday? If you’ve got a lot of annual leave stored up, now is the time to think about how you’d like to use it.
This time, it feels less like a management directive and more like a friendly reminder, which is likely to be far more engaging for the reader.
The layout and design of your newsletter is also important. Try to:
These tips will help create a layout that’s easy to read, letting you communicate your message more effectively.
If you need to ask employees to do something, you can include a call to action (otherwise known as a CTA) in your newsletter. What the action is will depend on the situation. In all cases, though, a good CTA should:
For example, if we mentioned a staff party in a newsletter, we might include a CTA along the following lines:
Are you signed up for the staff party yet? Make sure to email marie@company.com before 5pm Thursday, 2 July to book your space!
Here, we have a simple message, a clear path of action (aided by making the email a link), and key information highlighted to make it hard to miss.
As with any business writing, errors in a newsletter will look unprofessional. And if it leads to a key message being miscommunicated, a typo could even lead to inefficiencies or extra costs. As such, proofreading is essential.
And if you’d like any help making sure your internal newsletters are clear, concise and error free, why not submit a sample document for free today and see what our business proofreading services involve?
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