Learning and development (L&D) teams spend so much time and effort creating programs to help employees support key business functions. However, getting learners to complete these trainings can be difficult with only so many hours in the workday.

Email marketing is a great way to foster employee engagement and ensure trainings are effectively communicated. With emails, you can segment your audience so that your communication resonates with the intended employees. For example, a recently released companywide training might be important to the product management team for completely different reasons than the accounting team. Segmenting emails by audience will allow you to effectively communicate how this training will benefit each role or team.

Additionally, email marketing allows you to control the frequency and timing of communication. For example, emails at the top of an employee’s inbox are more likely to be opened and read when they arrive at work. So, sending weekly emails in the morning can increase email opens and, therefore, employee engagement.

Using email marketing to engage learners also allows you to track engagement through key email metrics like open rate, click-through rate, attention rate and read rate. L&D teams can even resend their training emails to those who aren’t opening the initial send and continue encouraging them to engage with the training materials.

Best Practices for Creating Engaging Emails

Again, segmenting your audience — even within a company — can allow you to create personalized emails with messaging that resonates with specific audiences. This personalization means your communications are more likely to be opened, and recipients will take the desired action.

You can do a few other things to increase engagement, too:

1. Keep emails concise.

According to McKinsey & Co., the average worker spends 28% of their workweek managing their emails, which means some employees receive more than 100 emails each day.

That’s a lot to wade through.

Keeping communications short and to the point makes it more likely that a reader will make it through. An email shouldn’t take more than a minute or so to read, and it should be easy to access all the information to complete the necessary training or call to action.

2. Add multimedia elements.

Whether it’s a button to click through to learn more about the training or a video component, like a trailer-style video about the training, adding these elements to your communications can increase the click-through rate and entice learners to take action.

3. Make it fun.

Add fun to your L&D email strategy with interactive email polls or quizzes. For example, you can send out a related quiz after employees have completed the training. Interactive elements like these further personalize email communications, helping employees retain what they learned and increasing your email click-through rates.

Choosing the Right Email Tools

There are many email marketing tools to choose from to make sure you’re implementing effective email campaigns and maximizing engagement. Alternatively, you can also choose to work with an email marketing company to ensure that your L&D email strategy is meeting the needs of your business and that you’re reaching the intended learners.

Besides segmentation, email marketing tools can also help you automate certain aspects of your strategy. For example, you can create email journeys to send communications on specific days and at specific times, or you can create reminders to nudge employees who don’t take action after a certain amount of time.

Additionally, A/B testing allows you to further understand your learners by discovering the email elements or strategies that resonate with them the most. A/B testing works by sending a percentage of recipients one version of an email and the remaining recipients a modified version. The most effective email is typically the one with the most engagement during the test.

Using Email Results to Maximize Engagement

The data collected from these tools and email best practices can help L&D teams analyze their email campaigns’ effectiveness in engaging learners to complete training. As they collect user data and analytics, including engagement rates, click-through rates and A/B testing results, they will see what works and what needs improvement. Using the collected data and changing elements of their email strategy, L&D teams can create an effective communications strategy that keeps learners engaged and ensures they complete the necessary training.