5 ways Bayer avoids internal email headaches

In a large organization stretched across multiple locations, getting email into the right hands at the right time is one of communicators’ greatest challenges.

This goes double for a heavily regulated life sciences company such as Bayer U.S., which has a U.S. workforce of just over 20,000 employees.

Like most companies, Bayer’s U.S. division faced a challenge: how to get through to employees overwhelmed by today’s gushing hydrant of messages, both internal and external.

Bayer owes its success in part to email metrics, affording the firm better penetration among disparate employee groups, says Lisa Noury, Bayer’s U.S. deputy director of corporate internal communications.

Noury relies both on Bayer-specific data and PoliteMail’s aggregated metrics across its customer base to answer the question, “How can their benchmarking data help us get better?”

“In our strategy, simplification addresses content length, and then relevancy is addressed by targeting,” Noury says. “So we target communications to specific groups, and the messages are written with their viewpoint in mind.”

Here are a few lessons that Bayer’s U.S. communications team has learned:

1. Segment your audiences.