Category: Organizational Engagement/Strategy

When you’ve got news to share with your employees, team, or executives, an internal company newsletter can be the most effective way of reaching everyone. An internal newsletter could contain an update about the upcoming holiday party for the entire organization or information around the company’s quarterly results for the executive team exclusively.

And, you could have both! There are many different ways to use internal company newsletters, and you can have more than one for different teams, offices, or departments. The approach you take depends on the objectives of your marketing strategy.

We’ll explore internal newsletter examples a bit further down, but before we dive into the concept of internal company newsletters, let’s briefly answer the following question: What is a newsletter?

What Is a Newsletter?

To put it simply: A newsletter is either an electronic or printed report covering various activities of a company or business. It is sent to its customers, community members, or other subscribers and consists of interesting content, promotions, announcements. A newsletter helps to increase traffic and serves as an information source.

What Is an Internal Newsletter?

Just like a normal newsletter, an internal newsletter is an electronic or printed report sent out on a regular basis to update subscribers. For internal newsletters these subscribers are internal stakeholders such as employees, shareholders, the board, management, different departments, etc.

Oftentimes, organizations have an external-facing newsletter but lack any type of internal company newsletters. And that’s the problem we are trying to solve with this blog (and our newsletter management platform). One reason why organizations forgo putting together these weekly, monthly, or quarterly email updates is that there’s a myth that they aren’t read by employees, however, the data shows otherwise.

What Is the Purpose of an Internal Company Newsletter?

Besides being a way to inform employees about the latest company updates, an employee newsletter can also be a fun way of sharing, explaining, and reinforcing your company culture.

At first, a company newsletter may seem insignificant in the day-to-day operations of a company, but it does play a role in shaping the workplace environment.

Some argue internal company newsletters are time-consuming and don’t offer enough ROI. Well, we have some stats that say differently. According to Retrospectively, Inc., employee productivity increases anywhere from 20-25% when employees feel connected to the company.

However, only 13% of employees reported participating in their intranet daily—31% said they never do.

So, although most PR & Communication teams are focused on getting the word out there, it’s just as important for these teams to spread the word internally — often they also involve the HR department to provide additional internal newsletter ideas. A company newsletter (corporate newsletter) is a critical part of your email marketing strategy that can help keep employee engagement and communication levels high.

When embarking on an employee newsletter strategy, remember that the values you want your company to reflect should be the values underlying your internal newsletter content. In this blog, we will cover internal newsletter ideas, internal newsletter names, company newsletter examples, and templates to use for your internal employee newsletter, so when you’re done reading, you’ll be a pro.

14 Internal Newsletter Ideas

1. Share Your Company’s Successes: Make sure everyone knows what the PR and marketing teams are up to. In your internal company newsletter, you want to share your wins, notify people about your latest content, and get everyone in sync on your company’s top messages so that they can communicate and increase your reach.Want to make things easy? Our internal newsletter template which is part of our media intelligence suite will allow you to curate a hand-selected feed of articles to be shared via a branded email newsletter.
2. Promote Social Advocacy: You spend a lot of time on creating social media content—but chances are your co-workers and employees aren’t all following your branded social media profiles. An internal company newsletter can help spread your social message and make sure everyone is aware and motivated to help communicate and promote it. Plus, if you run out of ideas of what to include in a company newsletter, add a few examples of people mentioning you on social media, it may incentivize others to start creating similar UGC. Let them be your brand’s #1 fans.
3. Share What’s Going on in the Competitive Landscape: Use an employee newsletter as an opportunity to cover industry news, trends, and insights. No matter how innovative a company is, competitors are a healthy part of any industry. That’s why highlighting the achievements, as well as the missteps of close competitors, can give colleagues insight into how to do their jobs. Using a media monitoring solution, you can benchmark how well you’re doing in comparison to your top competitors. By sharing these metrics, news alerts, or industry updates, you’re giving colleagues insights that can inform future campaigns or sales pitches.
4. Boost Your Branding: A company newsletter can help you reinforce brand voice, style, imagery, and personality. Are you seeing fellow employees misrepresenting the brand? Quick do’s and don’ts can go a long way in keeping employees on their toes. Plus, linking out to your style guide and templates.
5. Highlight Evergreen Content: The internal comms and content marketing team are creating great content. And your sales team could use the blogs, webinars, or case stories as a great excuse for touching base with key prospects…if only they knew about it. Use your corporate newsletter to encourage them to communicate about the thought leadership you’ve worked so hard on.
6. Bring in the Voice of Your Customers: Highlight customer case studies and bring in suggestions for new ones. Case studies are a great sales tool, and an internal company newsletter can highlight new and relevant clients that are using your product or services. You could also include any comments or reviews left by customers that you think your employees should know about. There’s no better advocate for the brand than happy customers!
7. Complement Existing Company Collateral and Resources: Your email employee newsletter can be a weekly, monthly, or quarterly examination of what the company finds important. It can be a platform to welcome new employees, announce new product versions, highlight relevant assets, and ask for input on a rebranding. In this way, it reinforces the messages and information in all the other content that your company produces. Use it to collect feedback and insights.
8. Employee Engagement and Advocacy: Communication is key. Turn a colleague into a hero. Calling out successful collaboration helps those involved feel appreciated and encourages more sharing of ideas and resources, which boosts employee engagement.
9. Reinforce Transparency As a Mindset: Having a company newsletter opens up a line of communication that doesn’t clog up the email inbox. As comms pros, we know that the best way to start a conversation is to provide the subject and the platform. At the very least, this newsletter can be the jumping-off point to discuss company values and employee culture.
10. Share News Updates:  If you introduce a newsletter right with a predictable cadence, it can be an invaluable mouthpiece for stakeholders throughout the organization. The resulting content can be a 360-degree view of what is going on in an organization. The material can be as diverse as a recap of the CEO’s recent “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session; the sales team’s exceeding their monthly sales quotas; issues with a recent product launch, communication from a Vice-President, or highlights from the social media team.
11. Provide the Data Analytics Behind the Successes of Your Efforts: Data is how a segment of your colleagues track success, so in addition to sharing media coverage, you can share easy to read graphs and charts that track monthly media coverage, social media mentions, sentiment, competitive benchmarks, etc…. It’s an easy way to benchmark the work you do for those more interested in volume than they are the engagement aspect of KPIs.
12. Earned Media Coverage: If you receive hard-earned coverage in a media outlet, whether it’s the Washington Post or a niche publication that’s important to your industry, wouldn’t you want to shout it from the mountaintop? Well, here’s the perfect venue for doing just that. Tag the story in your media monitoring platform and create a company newsletter using the built-in functionality, don’t forget to include additional insight. Your brand mentions mean as much to your colleagues as they do to you, so share that article that has a link to your product, quotes your CEO about the state of your industry, or shows how your company is making strides with its offerings. Your colleagues want to know how the rest of the world perceives the company. And as a bonus, summarize your coverage analytics to show how your reach and share of voice have grown, so they can take pride in the momentum you’ve built.
13. Include Industry News, Trends, and Insights: No matter how innovative a company is, competitors are a healthy part of any industry. That’s why highlighting the achievements, as well as the missteps of close competitors in the form of an internal company newsletter, can give employees insight into how to do their jobs. With a media monitoring solution in place, a company can monitor their own, as well as competitors’ keywords to see how well their social media accounts are leading to engagement. From this info, they can perform a competitive analysis to share with the entire organization.
14. Highlight Key Partners and Customers: Use the employee newsletter as an opportunity to highlight key partners and customers and what their public media coverage is. The newsletter can show how your key partners and customers are using your products and services in interesting ways. This can be useful for sales, biz dev, and customer service teams as they reach out to new partners or assist existing partners and clients. It can also help UX/CX and engineering teams as they understand how products and services are actually used by partners and clients.

Best Internal Company Newsletters [Examples]

Now that we know what to put in a company newsletter, let’s take a look at an example for some inspiration. We took an informative and concept-driven approach and mocked it up below. This internal newsletter comes directly from the marketing team to highlight their accomplishments, upcoming events, resources, and more.

But what is the best format for a newsletter?

An internal company newsletter truly is just another email in our inbox, right? So the design element is crucial to whether your readers are encouraged to click through or not. And today, you can use our internal newsletter template or customize your own using a service like Meltwater.

Here are some more internal newsletter templates and concrete internal newsletter examples we think are k-i-l-l-i-n-g it that are worth checking out.

Internal Newsletter Example #1:

Meltwater’s newsletters & website newsfeeds allow you to easily share media coverage in a customized fashion, that way, you can:

• Share results & inform stakeholders—The employee newsletter will allow you to curate a hand-selected feed of articles to be shared via a branded email newsletter & the newsfeed product allows you to showcase positive news or social media content on your website, adding third-party validation to your own content.
• Promote your hard work—Use the company newsletters to share company mentions, provide commentary on important stories, and compile market and competitor briefs.
• Showcase news and social mentions—Promote relevant news and any social media mentions. The newsfeed allows you to stream customer testimonials and feature industry insights.

Meltwater newsletter options

Meltwater offers a couple of ways to build newsletters. Your team can either cherry-pick the content featured, or you can lean on Meltwater’s analyst team to do so on your behalf.

Not sure which option to go for? If newsletters are new to your organization and you don’t receive a huge amount of media coverage, we’d recommend having your team curate the content in the first instance. If you work for a large brand, the process of finding and sharing business-critical media can take up a lot of your internal time and resources and so Meltwater’s Curated Media Briefings may be a better option since our team of analysts do the heavy lifting for you.

Benefits of Meltwater’s Curated Media Briefings:

1. We make sure that the dedicated Meltwater analyst we assign to your company understands your industry and competitive landscape so they can proactively monitor trends, market disruptions and new competitive threats, and alert you to the conversations you need to
   be aware of.
2. Analysts help eliminate irrelevant mentions by manually reviewing all content and selecting critical business insights based on your brief.
3. Briefings are highly customizable. We understand that different recipient groups are interested in different topics, such as sales, product reviews, negative news, mergers and acquisitions etc. If your priorities change, we’ll pivot with you and update all searches, while offering agility and flexibility to adjust scope.
4. Meltwater analysts enrich curated briefings, transforming them into insights that are quick to read and easy to understand. We include publication, headline, date, content link, and options for an executive summary and/or customised article summaries highlighting key takeaways. That way, you can stay informed, gain a 360-view of your business, and educate your colleagues on the industry trends they need to know about.

Internal Newsletter Example #2: Themezy

Themezy employee internal newsletter templates are great because they are optimized across devices to ensure everyone can easily read the newsletter. What’s even better is they offer sixteen free company newsletter templates and you don’t have to submit your email address to get started.

Internal Newsletter Example #3: TemplateMonster

If you have some budget to spend, look to TemplateMonster. They have a variety of internal newsletter templates that are user-friendly, customizable, and compatible. You can even do a live demo to see if it fits your needs. Below is their Panda employee newsletter template, built specifically for a creative agency.

Internal Newsletter Example #4: HubSpot Template Marketplace

With a large collection of email company newsletter templates, HubSpot offers free and paid versions, some as low as $1 and can be used immediately. Below are all examples of newsletter templates from their marketplace.

Internal Newsletter Names: How to Choose The Best Option

Brainstorming names can be tricky, right? And there are so many options of possible internal newsletter names. As marketers, we know It’s one of the first things your employees will read next to the subject line, so it’s important to be thoughtful. And you want to make sure it stands out and grabs the reader’s attention. So where do you start?

First, take into consideration what type of content is included. Is its purpose informative, frequency-driven, goal-driven, or employee-driven? Is it based on a concept or your brand’s name?

Maybe it’s a mix? Second, make sure the employee newsletter name reflects your company’s brand voice and adheres to any internal guidelines. You can reference your company’s brand guidelines as a good place to start. And third, keep it short, simple, and direct.

Here are some examples of internal newsletter names based on the intention or theme of your internal newsletter.

Informative

• The Insider
• [Company Name] Digest
• Just the Facts

Frequency-driven

• The Monthly Review
• The [Company Name] Weekly Bulletin
• The Month Ahead

Employee-driven

• The People’s News
• Our Voices
• All Hands Information

 Concept-driven

• Marketing Insider
• Media Talk
• Marketing Thoughts

Brand-driven

Consider how you can use your brand in the publication name. It could be the title of your blog, tied to your brand colors, or an alliteration based on your company’s name.

Improve Internal Communications with Employee Engagement!

Employee advocacy is key in building and protecting brand reputation, so it makes sense to cultivate a strong employee culture. And an internal newsletter is a key component of a strong employee brand ambassador program and improving internal communications. Now that newsletters are easier than ever to produce, “why not start a company newsletter today?“