Employee newsletters have long been an integral part of internal comms strategies. However, in an age of increasingly short attention spans and demanding workloads, getting the wider organisation to engage with your internal comms can be challenging.
During a ‘How to create an engaging newsletter’ webinar hosted by internal comms platform Workshop at the end of January, several attendees aired the most pressing issues they face when creating their internal employee newsletters, including:
- Struggling to gather content
- Content overload
- Low engagement
- Knowing exactly what’s important to employees
- Struggling to create content relevant for all departments
“Most companies already have an internal employee newsletter,” says Devin Owens, communications manager at Workshop. “The issue is trying to make it feel relevant, engaging and worth the effort of creating and sending.”
According to Workshop’s ‘2026 Internal Comms Trends’ report, when asked ‘What types of campaigns and content do you currently deliver to employees?’, 80 per cent of internal comms professionals said ‘leadership updates’, followed by ‘all company news’ (74 per cent) and ‘surveys/interactive content’ (70 per cent).
“Most of these types of newsletters end up being very information heavy,” says Owens, “with everyone sending you all the updates they want included – all of which are very important but they’re not always actionable nor would make sense in a newsletter format. This is where we start to see engagement dip. It’s not about making your newsletters prettier, but about making them clear enough for readers to understand what matters.”
Owens, along with Workshop’s chief marketing officer Jamie Bell, provided internal comms attendees with several steps to create a more engaging newsletter.
Give it a clearer purpose
When your newsletter’s performance dips it’s most likely because the purpose of it has “gotten fuzzy over time”. The purpose of an internal newsletter is to inform your teams about what’s happening within the organisation, include their stories and accomplishments where possible, and inspire them to reach the company’s objectives. Teams must take a ‘what’s in it for me?’ approach every time they create a newsletter, as that’s what employees will be thinking when they receive it.
Once the purpose has been established, internal comms teams must then look at the tools they’re using to craft and send their newsletters. Most of the attendees use external tools to curate and send newsletters, such as MailChimp and Hubspot, as well as Outlook and Gmail, but Bell points out that many of these platforms don’t work as well for internal comms. The technical settings of such external marketing platforms might be preventing your internal newsletters from reaching their desired audience.
Change up the format
This is the more fun stuff that can ‘zhuzh up’ an email newsletter. Bell says that nine times of our 10 changing the format means simply shortening a newsletter.
“One of the most-asked questions we get at Workshop is: what is the ideal length for a newsletter? For most organisations, you really have to test it. A newsletter for a hospital will look different than one for a tech company, for example.”
Internal newsletter templates should have space for employee photos, branded elements, videos, functional GIFs and surveys. However, internal newsletters for organisations with frontline or deskless employees should feature a “simple, text-based, mobile friendly design”, but internal comms teams should remember that “the subject line is the most important element in any internal newsletter or email”.
“If your employees don’t open it,” says Bell, “then the content you’ve carefully created for them really doesn’t matter.”
(Re)brand thoughtfully
It’s not uncommon for comms teams to get bored of their newsletter. To combat this, Bell suggests creating a mini-brand that uses a consistent look, voice, tone and feel. This will help employees know what to expect from the newsletter and “develop an affinity to the content you share”.
Your newsletter’s name should be easy to say and identify within an inbox, Bell adds. While creative names are great, she urges comms teams to consider their company’s internal brand/voice, a meaningful term, a rhyme or alliteration or an industry expression.
While it’s difficult to ensure that newsletters will be relevant to all people within an organisation, merge tags can provide some personalisation. Bell says these should be available in almost every newsletter tool internal comms teams have at their disposal. An example of a merge tag would be inserting an employee’s first name into the email or subject line. For global organisations, scheduling a newsletter to hit inboxes based on the different time zones where employees are based is “a simple gesture that goes a long way in fostering a sense of unity”.
Lean into people and stories
This is, according to Owens, where newsletters really start to come to life. “One of the easiest ways to find meaningful stories is to celebrate the people behind the work – launches, the team wins, the milestones, the promotions etc. There are so many opportunities to dig deep.” When employees see their work reflected in the newsletter, the content “inevitably” feels more human and meaningful.
This strategy can also extend to customer stories, such as good online reviews, social media mentions or use-cases that show the impact the company is having on customers. This, Owen believes, will help keep employees motivated.
Newsletter creation “doesn’t have to be done in a vacuum”, says Owens. Most content challenges fall into two camps; too much input or not enough, which makes it difficult to know exactly what should make up the content of your newsletter.
According to Workshop’s 2026 Internal Comms Trends report, when asked ‘What challenges do you currently face in internal communications, broadly?’ 61 per cent answered ‘Getting content from other people/departments’. Bringing in collaborators from outside the internal comms or marketing functions, therefore, can provide support by finding stories and ideas from other departments.
Make it practical
Not every newsletter needs to be “the shining star of inspiration” or “super story-driven”. There are, says Owen, more practical pieces of information that newsletters can present to help employees do their jobs.
“We all need to know about company policies, open enrollment, reminders, deadlines and process changes. Your employees rely on it and it will build trust because they know that there’s a place where they can get all of that information.” Examples include company metrics and performance updates, ongoing training, events, holidays and observances or simply “just one major call to action”.