3 Ways Text Messaging Can Enhance Internal Communications
While texting is often seen as an incredibly effective marketing tool, here are 3 ways texting can enhance your organization’s internal communications.
Text Messaging for Emergencies
If you have an emergency in your office or out in the field, text messaging needs to be part of your organization’s internal communication strategy.
Do you really want to email your staff to go home if your office has a gas leak? Do you have time to individually call them?
If you need to quickly communicate to employees across your organization about any sort of emergency, you simply cannot rely on email as your primary mode of communication. Does everyone have email on their phone? Can you take that chance?
With SMS text messaging, you can easily text all staff from a phone or desktop computer. In the time it would take you to make one call to a department head, you can send a text message to all your staff members wherever they are located — even if they number in the thousands.
If you want to promote safety in the workplace, your strategy needs to incorporate texting.
Text Messaging for Surveys and Polls
Email inboxes are often overflowing, as the average office worker receives 121 emails on a daily basis, which is why text messaging for surveys and polls is incredibly more effective if you are looking for their feedback.
Simply send a text message with a link to a web-based survey or poll. Not sure how to format your survey? Check out this blog on some dos and don’ts regarding survey construction best practices.
With many companies struggling to engage their staff, a text message to a simple web-based survey or poll is much more likely to be read than a company email. In fact, research shows that 40% of company emails are not even opened by staff compared to a 98% open rate with text messages
Text messaging is especially important as an internal communication tool when it comes to engaging Millennials, who prefer SMS communications for surveys and polls.
Text Messaging for Meeting Reminders
Ever have a meeting time change, but you missed the email? Ever simply forget about a meeting?
Text messaging can help ensure you (and others) never miss another meeting again. Simply send out an alert to remind employees where to be and when for meetings.
These messages can be sent to single individuals or to a group. You can also set these sorts of alerts to go out automatically, which can be a real time-saver. Simply schedule your text messages ahead of time to more effectively manage your communications.
Do you have a standing meeting that happens at the same time every week or month? Schedule your text reminder to go out before the meeting that day. You can even ask attendees to confirm their attendance to determine if a meeting time should change.
The takeaway here is that texting can not only enhance your long-term internal communication strategy, but everyday issues that crop up along the way, such as scheduling meetings.
In today’s world in which many employees are working remotely due to the ongoing pandemic, the ability to efficiently communicate where and when to meet takes on even more significance.
