Linda Schwaber-Cohen: So I think it's a great time to get started.
Scott, it's great to be here with you today. And thank you all for joining. We are here to kickstart learning engagement in the new year. So, I'm Linda Schwaber Cohen. I am the vice president of marketing here at Hone. I actually have an L and D and education background too. So I'm so excited to be here to combine my two passions, marketing and learning together to help give you some tips to drive results in the new year.
And Scott, I'd love for you to introduce yourself real quick and then we'll dive in.
Scott Burgess: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation all week because I feel like this is such an exciting topic. So my name is Scott Burgess. I am the CEO of Continu.
We are a learning management system focused on really just the best way to describe us is we're a single source of truth for learning. And we are all about automation and collaboration. And we help companies to centralize their learning for customers and partners and for their employees.
And so, yeah, I've spent the last 20 years well, I feel old saying that I spent the last 20 years in L& D on both sides of this problem. So, yeah, looking forward to digging in.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Thanks. A few quick notes before we jump in. First of all, You have live transcription enabled for this webinar.
So if you need to use the feature, you can click on show captions. I believe it's at the bottom of your zoom window. You can do that at any time. And this is always a question we get. This webinar will be recorded. Everyone who is registered will get it. So if there is a tip we share that you want to revisit, you're always welcome to look at that recording.
And we want to hear your questions as well. We'll have Q& A time in the second half of the webinar. So definitely use the Q& A function in your Zoom tool toolbar if you want to send in any questions. And we're going to do something a little special with the Q& A today. So If you have a specific example of a program or an initiative that you're struggling to get engagement on, And you want help.
We're gonna we're gonna do a little bit of live problem solving on this call. So you can just drop it in the Q and a and we'll try and help you brainstorm at the end of this webinar. So, so let's get started. And for those of you who. Are unfamiliar with Hone. We are the all in one employee development platform.
So tens of thousands of learners have taken our classes. And what we do is we help you scale learning and development with high quality live learning experiences, whether that's from our catalog of hundreds of live classes or our other experiences such as peer groups, group coaching, and more. All of our content is highly interactive.
It's engaging. You actually interact with humans, and we provide a variety of different types of classes, whether that's public or private and all of that is backed by our platform that helps you scale engage your learners, get them to attend, right? So we do all of that work as well, and understand ROI.
So, and really measure that impact. So it's great to be here with you today and talk a little bit about how you take these great programs and drive engagement. Scott, I know you spoke a little bit about Continu. Is there anything you'd like to add as before we jump into the content itself?
Scott Burgess: Yeah, I think just to reiterate, as I mentioned, we're an enterprise LMS we work with companies to help them centralize all of their training, whether that's informal or formal training. And as you mentioned just a big part of our focus as a, as an LMS is the engagement and making sure that people do come to your learning and training.
So excited to dig in. We're also really excited to be a partner of mine. And we, I think we, we both see the world in a very similar way that learning is human. And something we'll talk about a bit more today, but excited to dive in.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: So we've all heard this quote, if you build it, they will come. I'm sure you've heard somebody say this to you in the past. But we know, I think that this isn't the full story. So some might say if you build it, you get buy in from executives, you send a strategic series of emails, you tell people it's mandatory.
Maybe you bribe them in some way, right? You give them an incentive. You create some leaderboards. then they'll come. But that's still actually not even the truth. I think the truth is that if you build it, you get all that buy in, you do all this work, you create a really strategic framework about promotion, then maybe 60 percent of them will come.
I'd love to hear in the chat if any of you relate to this. If you have a number other than 50. 60 percent that you think on when it comes to engagement. But I think this is the reality that we all face, that we can work really hard to get people to engage with our programs. But realistically, we're competing with a lot of priorities.
So learner engagement takes more than just great content. It requires a marketer's mindset. It requires a knack for storytelling and it requires some good old fashioned persistence. But the good news is you actually don't need a marketing degree or a million dollar budget to make people hap to make this happen to get more people into your business.
into your programs. And today we're actually focusing on some really tactical tips borrowed straight from marketing to help you grab your learner's attention. And I think it's incredibly important. And Scott, you might relate to this as well. When we think about like the job of a learning and development professional, it's not just to build great learning programs.
You actually have to consider these plans as you're getting started.
Scott Burgess: Absolutely. And I think what I love about this topic as well, a lot of times the content gets blamed, right? We, we spend so much time on our content and our development of our content, and then it gets blamed when we're not seeing the engagement.
And I think part of it is we're missing that other 50 percent of the equation, which is, how do you market it effectively? How do you make sure that you really. Putting your content in front of the right people, the right times and doing the right thing. So yeah, really excited to dive in. And I think there's a lot we can borrow from marketing with the, within L and D to make sure that we're getting the most engagement
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: for sure.
So I've got a poll for you. I think Caitlin, our friend Caitlin, who's on the line has the poll. She's going to launch it. And the poll is what's the number one reason. You here for employees, dodging LND opportunities. Dodging is a strong word. We can talk a little bit about, about that sentiment too.
Is it, they're too busy. It disrupts their workflow. My manager isn't asking me to do this. I don't see how this applies to my role. I don't think I really need to work on these skills, or I didn't even know we had these resources. Or maybe it's something else and you want to chat it in. But you here.
Scott Burgess: Maybe it's a little above as well.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: So I'll give it another minute. I think what's really interesting, especially from a marketing perspective is this last answer. I didn't even know he had these resources. Can't even tell you how many times I'll share a message and people still won't know it. Right. And it's not any fault of their own.
It's just, there's so many things grabbing their attention, I think.
Scott Burgess: Yeah. I think it's also part of the, like the remote culture that we're in right now as well. A lot of times we have to repeat ourselves and make sure that we're marketing in different ways to different audiences. So I think that's a good call out.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah, but these poll answers are fascinating because like there is a clear winner. I am too busy and this disrupts my workflow. Like I cannot prioritize this. I have too much stuff to do. And I hear, I see some chats in that, We hear all of these all the time really it's something else. That's always more urgent comes up Which yeah, I can I mean I relate to that as a professional and I'm sure you do too in your regular life Right, and so let's dive into these tips.
Let's see how we can help out when it comes to getting people to prioritize L& D. So our first tip is to tell a story and make your learners the hero, right? It's one thing to share what learning is available. It's another thing to really share the why. And I wrote here, The with them the what's in it for me, and I think that oftentimes people think of learning is something they have to do, but they don't always see the value in it long term and just in time learning, right?
That's really taken off because of its relevance. People learn all the time, right? I have to solve a problem. I go to Google. I ask a question. I'm learning like every day all day. But If you can craft a story that helps answer the question, what's in it for me, I think you'll be laying the foundation for positive sentiment around your training.
And it's like the very first part of getting people to prioritize things. So there's a few ways that you can do this, right? You can share relatable stories. You can use testimonials, short videos. You can really help people understand. Yeah. That through human led stories, you can create a journey.
So help people understand the context. And we use this in general when we're crafting trainings, right? Like, what's the context of this learning? Why would I need to do this? And why does each part make so much sense? You can do before and after, right? Highlight transformation, show some success stories from your programs, and you can definitely use visuals, right?
We have to break through the noise. We have to pair these stories with images that highlight real world benefits. And you don't need a huge budget to do this, right? This can be something that you do on Zoom. This can be something that you do, like, really easily by just Grabbing an employee that really loved training, let's say in the past and helping them share the benefits of why it was so important.
I'm really curious to hear if anybody's actually done something like this when they're sharing and launching a new program. But I think like why this really works is that people love stories and also people love to know why, especially adults, right? So. If you can hook people, if you can really help them frame train training in their minds as part of a bigger story for their career and for what they're trying to achieve, both short term and long term, I think they'll really feel.
More invested. So if there's one takeaway from this slide, it's really this kind of what's in it for me that I hope you'll take with you as you consider the learner journey. I see from Jay, it says people favor user experience testimonials more than the company selling it like Reddit or Google reviews.
Totally. For sure. Everybody wants to know what others are saying about something before they buy it. Totally. That's great insight, Jay.
Scott Burgess: I think also just making learning fun, right? I think it should feel it shouldn't feel like a chore. It should feel engaging and fun. I think that really ties in nicely to the next tip, which we're going to talk about, which is making learning social.
It's all about community. And I spoke about this earlier, which is Really, learning is human. And so how do you bring other people together? It shouldn't be just an isolated experience. Sometimes learning does happen on your own. But at the same time, it's also great to be able to learn together and bring others into the equation.
In fact, a lot of our learning that happens in the workplace happens informally. And so how do we do that in an informal nature? There's some great tips here as well around just making. Making, learning more done in a shared way. So to doing it in shared spaces peer interaction.
So even, whether that's comments or liking or favoring I think Jay caught out before even the whole like, user engagement around having others ranking content brings other people into the discussion. Spotlighting achievement. So again making people feel like the hero of the story.
That's a really big part of training in that way. So there's so much you can do around the social engagement. And that we've seen from the Continu lens, we've seen that learning that's more social gets a lot more engagement, it gets a lot more follow through. We find that people tend to want to come back to that type of training as well.
It's not just a. Sort of one and done initiative. And it just brings more people into the fold, which is really important. So, I would say, yeah making, going back to that. I think the biggest call out, like I said, I'm probably going to keep saying. Is learning is human. So like, how do you bring that human interaction into your experiences?
And like you said, Linda, it doesn't have to be an expensive initiative either. It's really maybe it's bringing people into a round table like this, maybe it's bringing people into. A chat within the learning experience it doesn't have to be a really expensive initiative to do that using slack and teams and other solutions as well to bring that learning into like a centralized place or the LMS.
So that's, there's a few tips for, I think the social collaboration piece of it, which is really key.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Totally. And when it comes to community, I think one of the things we can borrow directly from marketing is the whole influencer mindset, right? Everybody who's on social media in one way or another sees products shared by influencers.
And I think that there's just an opportunity to find the influencers within your organization or create them, right? So, Even just creating some sort of learning council, people who you know are excited about what you're doing, people you're friendly with in the organization, or maybe even those you haven't met, if there's an opportunity to nominate people, right?
So how can you get those people who are embedded throughout the organization to influence on your behalf as well, to talk about your learning and development opportunities when you're not in the room, right? So it's not just you talking about them, but it's rather. Other people who are enthusiastic about it.
I think I've seen some of our best in class customers have learning councils. And a lot of the time that's something like an executive level type initiative, right? One person from each function comes together and actually influences the learning as well. So they're already really bought in. And now they're more excited about the learning and are more likely to then share the opportunities you've created with their respective teams.
Scott Burgess: There's also some ways to gamify learning in that way too, right? By bringing people together. Like we say in the last piece of this, just like highlighting group progress. Getting people bought in that way getting a spotlight on them of them achieving. That's a great way to also gamify and make people feel bought into the training, which is important.
And yeah, I love what you mentioned about like the council. I think that's a fantastic idea for people to to try to replicate.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah. We'll talk a little bit more about gamification in a couple of slides too, but the next one here, I think like, I think this really actually speaks to it best, which is incentivize your learning program, even without a big budget.
There's a lot of ways you can gamify, even actually in the Hone platform, you can see what kind of completion you've seen across different teams. So you can showcase different teams and create a little competition. I've seen people do pizza parties or whatever it might be. I know that a lot of us are remote now, but maybe it's like sending DoorDash gift cards to the team that completes.
They're training first or maybe there's launch challenges, right? Encouraging learners to complete tasks with simple rewards. Maybe it's these milestones. And one of the stories that I have on the screen, and actually I saw Adrian, you're on this webinar. I grabbed a slide from our case study with Georgia's own and this is a really compelling way that they created a journey.
It really just levels people up as they continue learning throughout their journey and throughout their career throughout the year. So there's a nice way to create friendly competition here to share progress to honor people who might really be investing in learning and in progress. So I think there's a lot of ways you can think about incentivizing or gamifying your program and gamification.
We know you're nobody here is a stranger to gamification. I'm sure it applies inside actual learning content in so many ways. It frames our programs and there's gamification like. Everywhere in our world in a lot of different ways. Yeah, Patricia saying a lot of organizations already have a reward and recognition program and point systems.
You can tap into that is such a good point, right? Like, you don't have to recreate the wheel tap into something that exists in your organization.
Scott Burgess: Yeah. And like you said, it doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to be a cost. It can be, Patricia is right, like, tap into what you already have celebrate wins.
Also, even that social aspect of what we talked about earlier, celebrate wins in public ways that make people feel rewarded.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Totally. Scott, I know repurposing content is something you and the Continu team are really passionate about. It's something I'm very passionate about as a marketer as well.
You want to tell us a little bit
Scott Burgess: about this one? Absolutely. I think, that's the other piece of this is we don't have to always Recreate something that new every time there's so many things we can do to make our content stand out and repurpose it. I know you mentioned Linda, even like micro learning is something that's really critical and it's a way that people digest content in a really quick and easy way.
So thinking about ways to reshare content or repurpose content, it could be, creating snippets of something that already exists, making it to micro learning. It could be Taking pieces of different types of learning to really consolidate into one, making it into sort of net new piece of material.
But it's really important to to think about your content journey and think about the way that you're wanting to even one of the great things here is building anticipation. So actually having. Almost a countdown to the content dropping or maybe even having little trails of bite sized learning that you can bring out before you get to the main course, if you will.
So that's a good way of really using and reusing content. We've also seen that a lot of companies particularly within the Continu platform, they will repurpose content throughout the org. So they might borrow content from. The marketing team or the sales team and they'll use content that's really existing so that they're already using the same voicing and tone of their content and they can repurpose it, reshare it.
So it's good ways to think about your content. And we said earlier that, Folks sometimes the content gets blamed when the marketing isn't there. And so by repurposing it, you can also put your content out over and over again. And again, with marketers, you think about this from a LinkedIn perspective.
A lot of times you'll share and reshare things. It's the same thing when you're marketing your content from a learning perspective. You don't have to just do it. It doesn't have to be one on done initiative. It can be happening over a series of time. And that's also how people learn. People need refreshes.
People need different models of learning, different modes of learning. And so it's a good way for you to be able to repurpose what you might've already created and might get more oomph out of it, so to speak.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we think about how many people actually attend any given training session, let's say that's that you do, there's just so much of your population that either forgot, wasn't really paying attention or could use the refresher.
Sometimes things like When we're resharing content or when we're reformatting it, or when we're sharing key snippets, they might feel old to us because we've lived in it so deeply. And it's like, I'm sharing this again. But the reality is that most people haven't seen it nearly as much as you.
They're not tired of it. They probably forgot that you even told them before. So there's really a great opportunity to, like you said, Scott really reinforced And also just do more with less in this way. So you can like share those quick clips or sound bites or quotes. And also I really love this tip around like curiosity hooks where you can pose questions or challenges.
Like an example is like. What's the number one mistake new managers make? It sounds like clickbait, right? But like, I'd click on that article all day long, right? If like Buzzfeed came into my life and said, what's the number one mistake new managers make? The first thing I think is like, am I making that mistake?
What is it? And I for sure want to know. So absolutely something you can use as you're promoting, as you're promoting your programs.
Scott Burgess: Yeah, I love that.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Our next tip, Scott, segmentation. You want to share a little bit about what segmentation is and how people can potentially consider using it?
Scott Burgess: Yeah.
I think the best way to describe segmentation is making sure the content goes to the right audience. We have, this is actually part of our I think in the poll people, one of the second, I think most rated item in that poll was the content isn't relevant to me. And I think that's really important is that we don't just, you don't want people to feel like they're drinking out of a fire hose and just getting a bunch of information from us.
And so segmenting and tailoring the content to the right audiences is really key. One of our customers were famously said to us once the system that they used to use or systems they used to use content was everywhere, which means it was nowhere because people couldn't find it. They couldn't really get into the relevant information.
It's important that you're putting content into. The hands of the right people at the right times, and you're not trying to overwhelm them with too much. And so segmentation allows you to tailor the experience and make it feel really customized for your audience. There's a number of things you can do to make sure that you're doing that, which is leveraging the data.
Like looking at the right types of information that could be as simple as a demographic information. Is this content relevant to them in their regions? Is it relevant to them in their role? Is it relevant to them based on performance trends or completion rates? And so it's a good way for you to make sure you're putting content into the right, right places there.
From a persona perspective. I think you just use a good example in there of, you might be a new manager. You might be a there might be topics that are, will be relevant to certain audiences. You're not necessarily going to be putting, very HR focused content in front of a salesperson.
So making sure that you're putting the right types of content. content in front of the right types of learners is going to make sure you get much more engagement from them. And then also looking at like the personalized communication aspects of it, I think that's really key. And I know we'll talk more about that in this presentation, but Making sure that your presentation material and your personalization, that content is accurate.
You mentioned earlier, it could be clickbaity to have a title of, what a new manager is doing wrong or managers doing wrong. But it's also good to find that hook, just like we do within marketing, find the right hooks for people that can help them to really latch onto the content, understand it.
So we're, we're big believers in that. We don't want to just click a button. Bunch of content out into the world. We want to make sure that we put the content out in the right types of mediums and put them in front of the right people. So, yeah, I'm sure you have other tips as well to share with the segmentation as well.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Well, one of the things you actually, you made some really good points. And one of the things you really sparked for me is that concept of like decision fatigue, right? Like how do I find what I need? I don't even know what I don't know. Right. When it comes to getting started with learning, how often do you, especially if it's for soft skills, right?
Like how often would you prioritize like getting really much better at a soft skill and even from a self awareness perspective and less, You're somebody who's dug deep in self awareness. You might not even know where you need to improve. So I think making decisions really simple through segmentation is incredibly helpful.
There's some data and I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but there's quite a bit of data around how many CTAs you should have in an email CTA call to action, right? So we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a little while, but Having one clear call to action makes it far easier for people to act, as opposed to having to decide between, let's say, five, 10, 100 items.
So just making it very simple. And the way that you do that is really understanding who you're writing to and what they want. So like some segments you might consider are like you said based on like leadership level, or maybe people moved into different roles, or maybe you did. Like, a personality assessment like DISC, which is something we offer, right?
So, and there are certain things that you think might be interesting for different different profiles based on characteristics you might know about those profiles. You can really segment based on any data you have. So, for sure. Consider that when you're marketing, it sounds a little bit overwhelming, but if you break it down and say like, I'm going to send, I'm going to send emails to five different segments and I'm just going to tweak them a little bit.
Yeah, we'll have better results.
Scott Burgess: Absolutely. One call that I'd also make is just keep it simple because what I see the most happening the most with a lot of folks, when they try to approach this, they try to get really complicated with their segmentation and they try to use every single data point to segment content.
And I think it's really important to just keep it simple. And then you can always go a layer deeper and layer deeper. And. Test content. There's nothing wrong with testing messaging or testing the way you segment to see how engagement changes. So we always encourage folks to keep things simple, and that will also help you to just have much cleaner data as well as you're trying to analyze this stuff.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah, and also, if there's one thing that you can do to help people take action, it's shorten the amount of information you give them, like, the number of times that I get emails, I'm sorry to all the HR folks out here, but it's like paragraph after paragraph, and just the thought of it overwhelms me, so I mark it on red, and I'm like, I'll come back to this later.
That's common. Like if you can actually just create emails that are a few brief sentences that give people direction so that they can learn more, opt in, get excited, you'll be much better off when it comes to driving action. And then we've talked a little bit about this tip, social proof. I can't remember who shared like the Reddit Google reviews example, but it's so, so true, right?
So people don't believe you. You're the person who created the training, right? Use social proof to build trust. Share, take that influencer council that we recommended you build before and share their quotes from the program, especially if it's a recurring program that you're offering over and over again, or if it's something like Hone that's just available and people can opt into classes throughout the year, let's say.
Highlight the feedback promote success stories, right? So like, what are people saying? Sometimes people had just like a fabulous experience. Why? What are they saying about it? It's really not difficult to ask. For these types of testimonials. And the truth is you won't get them if you don't ask. And you can also use numbers, right?
Like give people a little bit of FOMO, fear of missing out, right? If most people in your organization have done something and they're in the minority, like how can you use that to your advantage to get more people to do. What you need them to do, right? Showcase participation. And. Along the same lines as we were talking about before, and I'm breezing through some of these so we can get some of the questions as well, and we really want to use a multi channel communication strategy.
I'd actually love to hear in the chat. Like, where do you promote your training? What are the different places? That you promote your training and Scott, I'm curious, like where your customers or internally, where you hear people promoting their training as well.
Scott Burgess: Yeah, I think, I think the, for us, a lot of folks use the LMS, so they use Continu to promote their training through our system.
However We're all, we're big believers of also using the tools, the workplace tools that you're already using. So whether that's Slack or Teams, or we heard about the intranet here or email, go to where users are go to where they, you need to meet them where they are and not expect them to go to a destination.
And so big, a big tip that we always give our customers is just. Where did, where are your learners? What are your employees? What are your customers? What do they spend all their time? And that's the best place to try to to bring them in. So, we're seeing a lot of folks using teams or Slack.
That's a really great channel to, to promote. And even what you mentioned earlier about just the having the right messaging, having the right personalization of that messaging, that's another great way to do that in those channels that people already are going to. And again, it ties back to what you said earlier about social The more that you put things out there in those open transparent channels, the more you're going to see engagement from others across the company.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah. So got a few options here from the audience as well. There's teams channels, there's Slack channels, lots of intranet users or like SharePoint. And naturally this is a place where people have a lot of challenges. I hear Christian saying, he asks. It's people leaders to promote hone at their team meetings individual outreaches or personal notes.
This doesn't seem like a lot of work at all. So just kidding. Point is have a multi channel communication strategy, have a plan, like don't just wing it, but say, if you're going to promote it, where are all the places you're going to promote it? And how many times are you planning on it? One email is not going to resonate.
You actually have to, Use, first of all, a mix of channels and then hit them a few times. And yeah, I love the idea of also getting that network effect in, right? Like how can you share the idea through people, leaders are at. If you have all hands, depending on the size of your company, or the top five priorities, I think one person mentioned, or top five announcements for the week.
So cascading information, and then when you're using this multi channel communication strategy, you're going to want to break through the noise. One of the things that I leverage quite a bit is like a little tool called subject line. com. It's like, it looks spammy, so I'm just going to warn you, but it's actually not.
It's a really good way of scoring your subject lines. So it tells you like, are you using subtle urgency? Like, does this seem like something that will stand out based on the science? of subject lines when you're sending out an email, right? So how do you, again, break through that noise by using strategic communication?
Another thing that I always mention is like what is, and I said this when it came to shortening your email communication, but it's like, what is the level of the language you're using, right? So A lot of people especially when they're talking about learning and development will use complex language, long sentences, things that are hard to consume.
So like how can you shorten that? Grammarly has a lot of good tools to look at like what's the grade level of what I'm actually, what I'm actually communicating and actually like the lower grade level levels are better, right? Like aim for like. 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th grade level. If you're above that, then it's actually quite a bit of cognitive load for somebody to actually like rock what you're trying to tell them.
So those are a couple of like really practical tips that you can use in your communication itself.
Scott Burgess: That's such a good call out. One other thing I would say, because you mentioned like there's multiple touches, I think, and I need to get the source of this, but I believe it's about seven touches that folks need to really interact with your CTAs.
And so as a result of that, it is important, like you said, to use multiple channels, but to also not Be shy of making sure that you are following up and obviously, to your point, making sure the language is right. You don't want it to be too long. You don't want people reading a novel. Keep it really simple.
Keep, keep your CTAs really clean and concise. And I think that's a great tip about using something like Grammarly or another tool to really understand the grade level. That's probably one of the biggest mistakes that we see with communications is that folks Typically, they want to be very formal and buttoned up, and sometimes it needs to be a bit more informal and friendly to actually get that, that resonating with the audience.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah, just make it so easy for people to say yes, right? Like, make it easy for people to say yes, for people to understand. There's a few tips that I'll highlight when it comes to this multi channel multi channel approach. I think for one, You can, and somebody mentioned this in the chat too, you can use chat GPT to help you, right?
So you want to adjust your message slightly for different places. You can absolutely use tools like chat GPT to help you craft these hyper personalized messages that can help you automate some of this. Some of this work and it is a lot of work, right? So like, let's assume you're going to hit email three times.
You're going to hit Slack twice. You're going to, you're going to send a personalized message to every single one of your leaders, right? Like that's a lot. So, leverage tools like chat to BT to definitely like help you refine that information. And also a V test, right? Like try different email tones or formats or like, depending on your company called share, like Have you included emojis?
What are you doing to make people feel happy about the message that they're getting? Make people feel good. You can also like run quick pulse surveys to ask people like what they want to learn about and then use that data to popularize your training and help prioritize what topics you might share.
To so that you're really whatever you're saying really resonates with them across different channels. So really here we want to eliminate like a 1 size fits all approach and use as much of a multi channel communication strategy as we can.
Scott Burgess: Absolutely.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: And then I think we talked about this a little bit, but do anything you want to add on this 1 Scott.
Scott Burgess: Yeah. Look, I think we touched on a lot of good things and you have some really great tips there around just the messaging and keeping it short and sweet. I definitely think like frequency, we talked about that a little bit, but making sure that you really focus on the right frequency for your type of audience.
So if it's a large program, you might want to have a group campaign that's three to five emails, maybe seven emails long. If it's smaller, you don't want to overwhelm the audience, but you want to still have a couple of touches in there to make sure that they really. Understanding and even that they're aware of it.
I think that's something we talked about earlier in the poll was, are they even aware of the training? So making sure that you can really meet them where they are at the right channels, but also have consistency. I think also the timing of things is really important. So When do you want to actually, when is the best time of the day to actually send a message out to your audience?
What time zone are they in? Are they in multiple time zones? Are they in different countries? Are they in different area codes? So making sure that you're sending things out maybe it's three weeks before, maybe it's one week making sure you're reminding them as the data approaches.
It goes back to the other side of the talk about building curiosity. How can you have really good hooks in your messaging that will get them to think clearly about when this is happening and really be anticipating this or when it's going to happen. And then on the day of making sure you're really letting them know exactly when it's happening, I'm sure we sent out a link before this to make sure that folks turn up to the webinar and it's the same thing with your training, making sure that you're dripping things out at the right times.
And that they have useful information that they can action right away. And then you touched on that before, which I thought was a great idea. It's just making sure you're writing the best subject lines and using tools, whether that's chat, GBT or other platforms to find really good, short and sweet messages that.
Isn't going to sound spammy or too cheesy, but something that will actually get people to, to engage. And then lastly, I think the most important thing is really clear CTAs and you said it earlier, and I think you're spot on, which was. Simple CTAs that are, firstly do one CTA, not do a hundred CTAs.
So people know what to click and when, but also CTAs that are very short and sweet and can get into the get them into the content right away.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah. You made me skip ahead to tip 10. We'll come back for now. Yeah. And like CTAs have to be super clear. Your calls to action just have to be really obvious.
People have to know what they need to do, make it specific, showcase the benefits, create that urgency, right? Like last chance make sure that people see it. There's CTAs and marketing. It's like, should I change the color of this button? There's one color. Make people act more than another and you have probably a much more.
Unless you have a, unless you work in an enterprise company with 300, 000 employees, like the sample size probably isn't big enough for you to really do any kind of incredible testing like that. But the point is that bold colors, right? Like, simple CTAs are really going to move the needle for you.
And I think, like, there was 1 word on tip 8, it was plan. And I just want to make sure that if there's like one thing you take away from this particular kind of slide about crafting these messages, it's that you have to plan. This cannot be an afterthought. This cannot be something that you do As like it's your side gig.
This is like part of your main job. If you are trying to make learning and development programs successful, right? I wouldn't launch a product without having a product launch plan. It's usually like a spreadsheet with many rows, or it's in a sauna or one of the other tools that we use for project management, right?
And we're tracking this and it's part of the groundwork of the program we're creating. And if it's an afterthought, you won't be able to do a good job on it. It has to be considered like a core part of the work that you're doing. And you have to have a plan for it. And actually the good news is that my colleague, Caitlin has prepared a few templates for you so that you can definitely go ahead and get Your plan templates had after this webinar, we'll share that with you so that if you want to get started with that work, you can and tip nine, thrown it back to you Scott reminders.
Scott Burgess: Yeah. It's so important. So nudging people and having notifications and reminders is just so critical because at the day people are busy. And they're not just looking at your learning and your training content.
So making sure that you're having reminders that are automated. They're going out at the right candidates and going back to what you said, Linda, having a clear plan of when you will send these messages. I mentioned earlier, just around making sure you're thinking about the time of the day, When are people busy?
Thinking about it, even from a email marketing perspective, you're probably not going to send emails out on a first thing on a Monday morning when everyone's really busy. So making sure that you're looking at the right time of the day for your audience and maybe Monday morning is important for your audience.
If you have training at noon or training that day, but making sure you have really well thought out automated reminders email. Creating urgency. So you said this before, like the FOMO aspect of this making sure that people know that they only have a certain time or there's a last chance or that it's filling out maybe a workshop only has so many spots available in it.
So to making sure that you create some level of urgency will help them to have the right level of engagement. And then, yeah the. The personal follow up. So, so not just sending out a follow up that comes from a maybe a generic email, maybe having it coming out from an actual person maybe having it from their manager, maybe having them nudge from an escalated contact.
That's really important to ensure that you're really going through the right The right channels to get them going there. And then, in terms of other tips, you could use things like countdown timers. Those are really helpful. Again, it creates a little bit of urgency there to know that things are actually happening on a, at a certain cadence.
So those are some things that I think would be really helpful. There's a lot we can borrow from again, from marketing in terms of the time of the day to post the best time to, to nudge someone. At Continu, we do a lot of things, even with escalation, where we look at, can we send a reminder from the manager of the learner to, to really Get them to pay attention to the message.
So it doesn't just come from a generic email address or an engineering Slack notification. So those are some things that we've seen really do work. And again, we talked about the cadence in terms of how often so just making sure that you're, you don't want to, you don't want to nag someone.
I'd be too frustrating with them and then give them a hundred messages, but making sure you're giving enough to remind us that they can remember and they can, again, action those things. Based on the CTA that you design.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Totally. Kevin, you have a great tip in the chat as well. When are people most likely to read emails, right?
And without interfering with their other work. If you're sending an email on like, at 5 p. m., it's just gonna, by the time people actually make time for it, it's gonna be buried underneath the next morning's emails, right? So how do you make sure that when they see it, they can act? It's a great tip as well.
And we talked about these CTAs, so we'll breeze through that. I want to share that asset that I mentioned. Which is this Learning Program Launch and Promotion Workbook. So you can download the workbook now. And I, Hope it's really helpful. I think all the tips that we shared today are going to be in this workbook.
And then you can also go ahead and get the templates for actually going ahead and planning and thinking through the what's in it for me, what's your narrative, segmenting your audience by really understanding like who our target audience is thinking through your multi channel approach, like where will we promote this program?
And again, like your takeaway should be if you do not plan this. You will not have success. This is like part of the job. It is, it should not be an afterthought. So the goal of this workbook is really to help you make it part of your job and make it an easy part of your job. So, you'll see that there's a promotional timeline, best practices, and all of these tips will be in there.
So I hope you'll go ahead and grab this. And I did see that we had a submission, somebody who wants us all, and I hope there's a bunch of you on the and I hope you'll help us. I'm going to stop my screen share.
I hope you will help us go ahead and solve this problem. Let's let me let me grab it.
Just give me one moment. And the problem that was shared with us was We currently use FifteenFive. It's a performance management software. And we get around 70 percent engagement from employees completing monthly check ins. The goal is for every employee to take 15 minutes a month to give a thoughtful pulse check, and for managers to take 5 minutes a month.
reviewing and giving meaningful feedback. So how can we get that number from 70 to 100? So what can we do to get through to that additional 30 percent of the population? So first of all, I want to invite anybody who has tips as well to answer this. To answer this challenge to leave them in the chat and we'll address them.
But Scott, um, any thoughts about how to get that additional 30 percent to engage in these regular surveys.
Scott Burgess: Yeah, I think. Firstly, thank you for the question. I think that the best way to look at this problem is reverse engineering the outcome. So we want to get that 30 percent to do their their surveys.
I would look at it from the perspective of, are we sending enough? Sort of reminders is there is the reminder cadence, correct. And it's the time of those reminders, correct. I think you mentioned this just now under one of some things at 5 PM where people is going to be buried in someone's inbox or buried in their Slack or teams.
And so, send it at the right intervals of time, making sure that there's urgency that's built, making sure that there's really, I think the other thing that a lot of folks don't typically do is Tell people the why of why it's important. And I think that's really important for something like this, like the survey.
So, making sure that there's there's a why of, um, why this matters to the business and what the outcome is, especially for the managers. And then, going back to that sort of human element of it, how can you have your managers, how can you have your team being more engaged with the With the need of this.
So, maybe there's even a recognition system that you can put in place. And we talked about that today around rewarding the right behavior. So instead of it just being a nag let's turn into a positive and really reward the people that do it first. And maybe there's some level of incentive and, we talked before it could be a point system.
It could be. Public praise. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything that cost the business any additional money, but making turning the behavior that you want into a positive will, will always kind of help to increase the engagement and then just looking at visibility of those surveys too.
Is it visible to the right audiences? The other piece, the last thing I'll say here is. The data, can we also potentially pull those people that didn't do the surveys on time? And I understand why, maybe there's something that's. That's very obvious that we might be missing.
Sometimes that's the easiest way to uncover these problems is just to ask the question of, Hey, why didn't we do it on time? Was it that you didn't want to do it? Or is it that maybe you just didn't, weren't aware that you need to do it in time or weren't even aware that you had to do it at all.
So those are some of the things that come to mind without knowing all of that. The internet today.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah. Another thing that comes to mind. I've actually, I've used 15 five and one of the coolest things was just the buy in from the executive level. Like, is the CEO doing it? Do you know what I mean?
It's all of the, all the VPs doing it. Is this something that like is universally embraced and maybe it is. But if it's not, and those are the people I would actually focus on first, and I would have a conversation with them, right? Peer to peer conversation and if you're not their peer, then I would get their peer who you report to, to talk to them about it and the importance of like, why you're doing this throughout the organization and why their buy in is so essential.
Because I think that when everybody's looking and seeing like, well, like, they're not doing it, like if my VP, like, If my VP can make time for this activity, then I can make time for this activity is something that I feel like I've heard from. Especially like individual contributors. So making sure that you're setting a good example across like the leadership team is pretty key there.
And James, I think, like, I don't it's totally possible that I don't truly understand the mechanics of the activity here. Right. So like the 15 minutes versus the 5 minutes or how that works. Totally. But it's like, what's the action that's being taken from this survey? Like, I feel like a lot of times when people don't do something like this, it's because they just perceive it not to matter.
Like, I don't really, like, why should I spend all this time on this? It doesn't, it's not going to make a difference. So to the extent that you can really show that if you're going to do this, it matters. And there's something we're getting out of this as an organization and you have the opportunity to have your voice heard or not.
I think that might be key. So hopefully some of these tips are helpful for you, Allie. And if not, Maybe we can get some more in the chat, but that's what I think comes to mind.
Scott Burgess: Thanks, Holly. That was a great, that was a great question. Yeah. And I think it's really it's really applicable.
I think that there's just think going, yeah, going back to what you said, Linda, like why does it matter? Making sure that people really understand that this does, that is important and it does serve the greater good. So, yeah, a lot of good stuff in there.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Bringing it back to WIFM, right?
I don't know if people actually say WIFM. What's in it for me? I'm
Scott Burgess: going to start using that now. I like it.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Next question here. What if I have a really tight timeline to promote? What are the best tactics to use in that scenario? Tight timelines. I
Scott Burgess: think again, it would go down to the channel. So like, if you have a tight timeline, really choosing the right channel that you want to promote this in that, your audience is in and that they're going to see.
And then I think what you just said earlier, Linda, like executive sponsorship or a sponsorship from their manager could be a good way to really promote. timely attendance.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah. The hard part about this question for me is that tight timelines are usually self inflicted. Like, I always go back to, did I enforce this tight timeline on myself?
And or does it come from like, let's say top down, somebody said you have to get this, we need this L& D thing done, we need it done now. I think that actually happens a lot with like, compliance based stuff, right? Like, this has to happen now, we don't have a choice, it's mandatory. But I do think like the first way to avoid a type 10, the first way to combat a type Timeline is to avoid it in the first place with the planning motion.
And if you can't avoid it, yeah, Scott, I totally agree with you. It's just like multi channel, like you make sure that you're getting through to people and breaking through the noise, however you can. I've sat through meetings with people like small meetings, five people in a meeting where like something is discussed and then five minutes later, it's like that conversation never happened, like it just goes in one ear out the other.
And I think this is especially common in the remote world when a lot of us are multitasking. All exactly. Guilty, I multitask during meetings sometimes. It's not my, I try not to , but I do.
Scott Burgess: Well, no, you're right. I think James also has a good comment here is like, who makes the communication matters as well.
So when you can't avoid, and I totally agree, sometimes you. If you can plan and you can avoid that bunch, then that's super critical and important and helpful. But if you can't avoid it, then yeah, I think who makes the communication also matters a lot. Is this something that their manager should be pushing out to them to make sure that they understand the urgency of it?
But yeah, I totally agree. I think planning, if you can, in a perfect world, we would have the best planning and we would make sure that we don't have too much of a crunch.
Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Yeah, totally. We are nearing the end of this conversation. I want to flash up on the screen one more time, the place where you can download this launch and promotion workbook.
I also believe that you'll get a survey at the end of this webinar. If you want to give us feedback, we love it. We always want to make sure that we're able to serve this community of HR and L& D professionals in the best way we can. We know how Scott, thank you for joining us today. It was a pleasure chatting with you and collaborating with you on this.
I hope all of you in the audience have a wonderful holiday season. I hope you have a few clear takeaways that you can grab from this webinar to use to improve learner engagement in the new year. And I really do appreciate you being here. So thanks everybody. And thank you again soon.
Scott Burgess: Thanks for having me.
