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Measurement

How to analyze the effects of effective

communication
By Guest — October 4th, 2017

Building a solid communications strategy will require continuous analysis

and tweaking to ensure you are creating effective communications that
people respond to and take the required action. Here are some tips on how
to analyze the effects of your communications.

Communication is a two-way interaction: you speak, listen to and react to another

person. Critical to good communication is listening, which ensures you understand
what's being said and can react appropriately. When face-to-face, communication
is straightforward as you can read physical cues - body language and eye contact
- to determine if the person you're speaking with is listening to you and
understands what you're saying.

7 Steps For a Great Internal Communications Audit & How to Use

Download here
the Results

With digital communications (online, mobile, social media, etc) you will need a little
more help. This is where analytics come into play and give you the tools you need
to analyze the effects of effective communication.

Why is analytics so important?

If you don't measure the effects of your communications, you will have no idea
who has received your message, who has read it, what they thought about it or
how they reacted to it.

The analytics associated with your message allows you to listen to your audience
and understand them; their preferences, their engagement levels, their opinion of
the company. By understanding them, you can foster engagement.

Put simply, analytics show you what works and what doesn't work. Email
communications can be analyzed through click-through rates, and you can also
quickly see which content is proving most effective, what time is the best time to
send critical messages and what channel is reaching the most employees. This is
incredibly valuable information that will allow you to develop a more targeted
approach to your communication. And by adapting your communication to match
your employees’ unique preferences and behavior, you can increase the
effectiveness of your message.

What are the key metrics you should be

looking at?
Email metrics

Click-through rate: shows you how many people have engaged with your
content by clicking through on links in your email.

Conversion rate: the number of people who have clicked through a link in your
email and completed a desired action - filling out a survey or ticking a box to
signal their attendance at a meeting.

Email forwarding: how many people have clicked the ‘share this’ button to post
the message on social media or email it to a colleague.

Intranet metrics

Page views: how many views a particular page has had.

Bounce rate: the percentage of single-page visits. Typically your homepage will
have the highest bounce rate.

Exit pages: the pages where people have left the intranet.

Time of week/day: when people are accessing the intranet.

Site searches: what people are searching for on the intranet site.

Site downloads: how many people are downloading specific documents or

forms on the intranet.

Enterprise social network metrics

Likes: how many people ‘like’ your updates.

Shares: how many people have shared your content.

Comments: how many people have commented on your content.

To gain a detailed understanding of how your employees are reacting to your

communications, it's important to use an internal communications platform that
has been built specifically for the task. These made-for-purpose programs give
you that added layer of information that can be turned into actionable
insights. Detailed analytics within Poppulo serve up comprehensive reports on
your multi-channel campaigns. We have also developed bespoke analytics
platforms that can collate and present detailed metrics for multiple channels in one
single dashboard, making for easy channel comparison.

7 Steps For a Great Internal Communications Audit & How to Use

Download here
the Results

Get a before and after picture of your

communications
To measure the effectiveness of your communication, you will first need to
understand the current state of play. What are the figures telling you? It's a good
idea to examine each figure on its own: as we've shown above, most metrics are
self-explanatory. The important thing here is that you get a baseline reading. This
will mean you now have figures that can be used to develop a before and after
picture.

Now you can start making changes:

change the time of day you send your email newsletter

segment your target audience

test different subject lines

improve navigation or search function on your intranet

add internal links to relevant information

enhance your content through multimedia

make policy documents print friendly

use a multi-channel approach to communications

All the time, continue to monitor and assess your figures so you can see if your
changes are having any effect.

Quick polls and calls to action

You can also use quick polls, or Pulse Surveys to measure employee reaction to
your communication. Have people understood an important policy of IT changes?
Asking simple questions will allow you to gauge their level of understanding or
interest in the message.

At the end of each message think about including a call to action. Whether it's
asking people to confirm their attendance at a meeting, print out and sign a
document, fill out a survey, or simply click through on a related article, by adding a
call to action you can quickly check if people are engaging with your
communication. If not, you will need to work harder at making the call to action
more obvious or informative. But again, this is where having the baseline figure
will help you, by showing you how many people are taking the requested action.

Continuous monitoring and measuring the

secret to good communication
As employee engagement expert Sean Trainor says, "measurement isn't a one-off
activity, it is a critical success factor for communications planning, execution, and
evaluation of effectiveness". Ongoing assessment, measuring, surveys, and polls
are key factors in developing an effective communication strategy. Listen to your
audience, they will tell you all you need to know about how you're doing.

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