Picked a weekly email newsletter over a flashy intranet portal for our internal launch

Our IT team wanted to build a custom intranet page for the new benefits rollout, but I pushed for a simple weekly email instead after looking at our open rates. We went with the email and saw a 72% open rate in the first two weeks, plus managers told me people actually read it during lunch. Has anyone else had to defend a 'boring' channel against a more expensive, shiny option?

3 comments

3 Comments

harper_smith23d ago

Did you track what kind of links or actions people actually took from the email versus what they clicked on the old intranet? That's the metric that would really sell this to the higher-ups who love flashy stuff. Makes me wonder if the "boring" channel actually drove better results where it counted (like enrollment forms or questions about coverage).

christopher95215d ago

But did anyone check if the email crowd was just more motivated to begin with? Like the people who actually open a plain text email about benefits might be the ones who already care about their coverage, while the intranet folks are just killing time between tasks. Hard to say if the channel matters as much as the person behind the click.

jason95821d ago

Ran into this exact thing at my last job. We had a plain text email that went out with links to the actual enrollment portal and a PDF of plan details. The email's click rate was lower than the fancy intranet page, but the conversion on those clicks was way higher. Like 40% of email clickers actually submitted the enrollment form versus maybe 12% from the intranet. Showed those numbers to the VP and she stopped caring about the shiny stuff pretty quick.