Are you acing your airport marketing? Give yourself a big pat on the back! Marketing is integral to your business and no easy feat, so if you’re killing it with regular email communications, driving traffic to your airport website and getting those all-important conversions, you’re starting 2023 on a high! But (yes, there’s always a but), remember your airport needs to communicate with more than just passengers.
Communicating with your employees, stakeholders, and partners is just as crucial to running a happy and thriving airport. Join us as we discuss why your airport needs to send more than just marketing emails and the best practices for your airport’s internal communications strategy.
Why does communication with employees and stakeholders matter?
Your airport wouldn’t exist without passengers, but the same applies to employees and stakeholders. These people play a vital role in the success of your airport operations, so it’s crucial that they feel connected to your business.
Research into internal communications in workplaces has shown that effective communications positively affect employees in terms of improving:
- Productivity (well-connected teams see an increase of 20-25%)
- Engagement
- Trust
- Retention
Internal communications should keep employees up-to-date with what your airport is doing, and its latest initiatives while also serving as a constant reminder of its values and goals. It’s essential that employees feel connected to your business (even when working remotely) and that everyone is on the same page. Transparency is also key. Keeping employees informed establishes trust and helps fight the rumour mill, especially when navigating change and transformations, as discussed in our article ‘how airport innovation teams secure stakeholder buy-in.’
However, internal communication isn’t about bombarding employees with information. Any communications must be two-way and speak to employees personally, making them feel valued and ensuring they understand how they are contributing to the success of your airport.
Building an internal comms strategy
Internal communication is about keeping employees connected and informed while creating a mutual understanding of your airport’s strategy, values, goals and culture. There are various ways to achieve this, but worryingly 60% of companies say they don’t have a long-term strategy for their internal communications.
The truth is, when it comes to communicating with airport employees and stakeholders, you can’t afford to wing it. Your airport needs an effective communications strategy that:
- Ensures regular contact
- Keeps employees, stakeholders, and partners informed
- Ensures communications are accessible to all
- Opens the door for communication and feedback, so every voice is heard
- Encourages collaboration
- Reflects the values and goals of the airport
- Is supported and used by senior managers and decision-makers
- Is measurable
- Uses the right tools or platform
Rezcomm will help your airport build an effective communications strategy using our powerful Email / SMS Sending Service. Download our marketing brochure to find out more.
Best practices for internal email
Here at Rezcomm, we champion email as the best platform for marketing your airport to customers and communicating with employees, partners and stakeholders. Email is a powerful and efficient way of communicating quickly and succinctly, you can access it from almost anywhere, and it can incorporate everything from videos and GIFs to surveys and comment boxes for greater engagement. Not to mention that you can also measure email communications to determine their impact and effectiveness.
The only downside of emails is that your employees and stakeholders will get a lot of them. So, you need to find a way to ensure your internal email communications stand out in a crowded inbox. Here are our best practice tips for internal emails:
1. Make sure email communications stand out visually
If you want employees and stakeholders to engage with your email communications, they must stand out in their inboxes with a captivating subject line. Secondly, the design of the email must align with your branding, so it’s instantly recognisable. Thirdly, you must present the content in a way that’s easy to read and include visually attractive elements like photographs or even a GIF. Finally, your email communications must visually engage the recipient to ensure they make it past the first click.
2. Use responsive email designs
Nothing is more off-putting than opening an email that doesn’t sit right on your screen. A poorly designed email will be difficult to read and make clicking or tapping on links impossible. Instead, use responsive design to ensure everyone can access and engage with your email communications. A responsive email will use special coding to ensure it displays perfectly, whether opened on a mobile, tablet, laptop or desktop computer.
3. Create engaging email content
Let’s be honest; business newsletters can be incredibly dull. But yours needn’t be! Find a way to make your internal email communications stand out by populating them with valuable content that your employees, stakeholders and partners want to engage with.
Keep informational messages short and succinct, with short attention spans in mind. It’s also worth breaking up your email into easily digestible sections using clear headers and powerful visuals.
If you’re making an announcement, consider creating a video for your email communications. A video thumbnail can improve engagement by almost 41% in an email. Visual infographics are also great for sharing business insights and statistics in a less mind-boggling format.
Consider other forms of content that will interest and inspire your employees – a message from leadership, an exciting blog post, or even a poll or comment box that encourages two-way communication. These will improve engagement and provide valuable insights into the type of content your employees and stakeholders are most interested in.
4. Use data to personalise your internal email communications
At Rezcomm, we’re always telling our airport partners how important it is to personalise passenger email communications. Well, the same goes for your employees and stakeholders! Using data to personalise email communications will help you maximise engagement by delivering the content your audience is most interested in.
We recommend segmenting your internal communications subscribers by teams, department, location, interests or anything else you can gather from their interactions with your email communications to hone in on the type of content they want to receive from you.
It’s also worth considering personalised emails you can automate with the Rezcomm Email Sending Service to engage with your employees and make them feel valued, such as a Happy Birthday email or a ‘Thanks for another fantastic year’ email on their work anniversary. This may seem trivial, but email communications like this will go a long way in improving engagement, increasing productivity and retaining employees at your airport.
5. Review, analyse, learn & optimise
Lastly, it’s crucial that you monitor your employees, stakeholders and partners’ engagement with your email communications. Tracking data such as opening and click-through rates will help you evaluate who is engaging with your internal communications and the type of content they are most interested in. Your airport can then use these valuable data insights to create even better-targeted email communications in the future.
Deliver hyper-personalised emails at scale in sub 2 seconds with our automated Email Sending Service and benefit from a host of powerful tracking tools to increase visibility and engagement. You might be interested to hear that some of our airport partners, including Raleigh-Durham International Airport, are already using our Email Builder and Email Sending Service to communicate with more than just passengers. We’re supporting them with internal communications for airport employees, tenant employees, directors, and shareholders too.
Principles for an effective employee communications strategy
By now, we imagine that if it wasn’t already, creating an internal communications strategy is high on your list of priorities. So to recap, an effective employee communications strategy should:
- Create a sense of belonging & a shared sense of purpose aligned with your airport’s strategy
- Receive attention and support from your airport leaders and management
- Encourage two-way communication and give everyone a voice
- Makes use of accessible and easy-to-use communication tools like email
- Collect and use data to assess the effectiveness and optimise future email communications
A cohesive internal communications strategy, implemented using effective communications tools, will go a long way in cementing a culture of trust and openness, which will be paramount in the success of your airport, both now and in the future.
Avoid communication overload and complexity
Creating effective communications doesn’t have to be costly or complex, and it certainly doesn’t involve overwhelming your employees and stakeholders with too much information. So forget generic mass emails and take a more personalised approach with Rezcomm’s Email Sending Service. We will simplify your internal communications and ensure you deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. For more information, download our marketplace brochure and book a meeting to discuss your airport’s best email communications strategy.
Orchestrating digital strategy, Victoria Wallace is Rezcomm’s Chief Digital Officer. With specialisations ranging from digital marketing and CRM to UX design and ecommerce, she is an expert in integrating innovation and technology to deliver outstanding results in sectors like travel, parking, and airports.
