Communicating with such a vast network can be tricky. There’s different brands represented in different locations, with retailer roles varying from management to sales to service. Plus apprentices. Then there’s the communication channel, how to best get the message out there? Next it’s when to communicate and how often. And what about the content itself. Who’s creating it? Who’s approving it? Who’s sending it and from where? 

Without a strategic plan in place it's easy to get in a position of not really knowing what is and isn’t working, and sending out a tick box communication just to hit a certain deadline or KPI. Once in this position, internal teams who are responsible for managing and deploying the communication can quickly lose confidence in what they’re doing. 

With such a large network to connect with email communications are vitally important to the Performance Academy, so we set about looking at their current processes for sending emails. This included the systems used, the creation of the content and copy, the internal approvals processes and the results they were seeing.  

After spending time with the team and getting to know their roles it was clear that there were several things we could help them with which in turn would improve engagement with the retailer network.

• A more efficient approach: broadcasting emails via word document mail merges which were pulled into Outlook meant the team didn’t have the agility they needed. It would simply take too long to get an email campaign sent out. 
  
  
• Consistency: with the internal team creating emails themselves, branding and tone of voice would often be inconsistent. The same email, sent at different times by different team members would look and read very differently. 
  
  
• Tone of voice: the tone and language used wasn’t conducive to building relationships and working in partnership with the retailer network. We could improve this and bring to life how the Performance Academy adds value.  
  
  
• One size doesn’t fit all: with such a diverse audience we set about splitting email communications by persona and role to maximise the relevance of the emails being received.