Developing a thoughtful communication strategy is essential for a successful training launch and maintaining learner engagement throughout the process. This article provides tips and strategies to help you ensure that training runs smoothly. Use it to come up with a multi-channel approach to your overall training communications and draft your training notification messages.
Communicate Broadly
A well-planned communication strategy goes a long way in ensuring your employees stay engaged in training initiatives and complete their assignments on time. A multi-faceted approach works best—reaching employees through different channels—to reinforce the importance of developing their professional skills.
Here’s what we recommend:
- Send an internal email before training launches to communicate with employees about what to expect. When employees know that a training assignment is coming soon, the open rate for the initial assignment email goes up.
- Create and share digital signage, such as cards or posters, to get the word out whether as a ramp-up to training or reminders during a training period.
- Encourage your CEO or another executive to share why the training is important at a company-wide meeting, via messaging, or recorded video.
- Leverage your internal messaging apps to announce, remind, and celebrate training wins—via systems such as Google Chat or Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Discord, or Zoom chat, or mobile app push notification your company utilizes. If you have an Emtrain-hosted account, check out our Slack Integration to learn how Slack messages can be sent automatically.
- Send personalized follow-up messages to managers to communicate how they can support their direct reports through the training process.
- Include training progress updates in your company newsletters or other internal communications to celebrate these milestones and maintain momentum.
Start Planning
If several people from your organization will be involved in the drafting and approving of training communications, we recommend starting in a shared word processing doc, such as Google Docs. Drafting in a shared document allows everyone to see the long term flow of the messaging as well as the timing (if you choose to include this).
Your training notification setup varies according to your account type: Emtrain-hosted accounts will use the Campaigns interface in Emtrain; LMS-connected accounts will use email, your LMS, or other internal messaging system. We recommend both account types create a shared space for admins to plan communications and draft messages.
Create a Messaging Timeline
Strategic timing for your training assignment messaging keeps learners on track. The key is finding a cadence that keeps training on learners’ minds without becoming noise that’s easy to ignore. We recommend:
- A welcome message when training launches to let learners know it’s time to begin.
- Weekly reminders throughout the training period to keep them on track, with an additional message as the deadline approaches. Note that Emtrain reminders and past due notifications are only sent to learners who have yet to complete their assigned training.
- Weekly follow-up messages for learners who miss the deadline, to encourage them to finish.
- A congratulatory completion acknowledgment when learners wrap up.
If you want more information and detailed examples of notification timelines and have an Emtrain-hosted account, read Timing Campaign Notifications and How Do I Plan a Campaign Notification Schedule.
Draft Notifications
For writing messages specific to training assignments, start by reviewing our collection of notification email templates. These include specific language you can include in your messages. From there, edit the messages to your liking and to best align with your particular training objectives and your company’s communication guidelines.
As you draft the messages, refer to our Writing Checklist for Notification Messages. This covers everything to include in your messages to keep learners informed and engaged with their training assignment.
Finalize Notifications for Launch
Once you have planned out what channels and the messaging for each of them, it is time to finalize them and prepare them for deployment.
Emtrain-hosted accounts can read Create Campaign Notifications for instructions on setting up notifications in Emtrain. LMS-connected accounts should use email, your LMS, or another system that works for you.
Learn how to send a notification to yourself as a test in Testing with ‘Send to Individuals’.
Need more Ideas? Reach out to your Client Success Manager (CSM) for additional recommendations.