UJ enhances staff communication with internal email banner campaigns

Facing the challenges of Covid lock-down and staff working from home, The University of Johannesburg (UJ) used Rocketseed to ensure consistent branding across both external and internal emails and improved their internal communication with staff.

The Client – The University of Johannesburg

Dynamic, vibrant and multicultural, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) is one of the largest contact universities in South Africa with a student population of over 50,000, of which more than 3,000 are international students from 80 countries.

Recognised as the country’s second strongest brand, UJ offers world-class academic programmes in both undergraduate and postgraduate education, with a mission of “inspiring its community to transform and serve humanity through innovation and the collaborative pursuit of knowledge”.

The Challenges

UJ was seeking a solution to brand both external and internal email with consistent signatures and marketing campaigns to meet a series of specific challenges.

• When Covid lock-down restrictions were implemented, staff had to work from home for the first time, highlighting the need for all their emails to be consistently UJ branded and with clear contact details. Up to this point, all UJ staff had manually-added email signatures and, depending on where their emails were sent from, risked omitting signatures from their emails completely.
• Improve staff’s engagement with internal UJ communications – a challenge made more difficult by their remote working and being inundated by 50,000 students needing to be assisted virtually. This included making staff aware of, and upskilled on, the new fully-online Performance Review system – an essential new evaluation initiative launched by UJ’s HR department.
• Increase awareness of Covid-related advice amongst both UJ staff and students.
• Promote online UJ events including the Cloudebates that take place four times a year.

So how do you keep remote-working staff consistently on brand and informed, whilst also driving student awareness and event engagement – all without requiring them to open even more emails or use an alternative platform?

The Solutions

UJ were able to meet all these challenges easily with Rocketseed Campaign Enterprise, the signature management and marketing solution ideally suited to large organisations such as UJ.

• Rocketseed’s email signature management tool gave the university’s IT team the centralised control they needed to consistently brand and easily update all staff’s email signatures (as per the example below). Also, as long as remote-working staff use their designated UJ email accounts, the university knows for sure that all email signatures are secure and will display correctly regardless of the device they are sent from or viewed on.

• The university’s HR department were able to drive direct staff engagement with the Performance Review system by using Rocketseed to create and assign impactful, interactive email banners to all internal staff emails for the duration of the campaign. The eye-catching banners (below), with their interactive calls-to action (CTAs), successfully encouraged and enabled staff to simply click through to learn about and log on to the new system training – far more engaging over time than a single dedicated email. A simple, highly effective ‘internal marketing’ campaign.

• Using Rocketseed’s banner campaign functionality, UJ was also able to roll out an essential, informative Covid banner, giving it high profile at the top of all staff emails sent to one another and to students for the duration of the pandemic. Again, this made far more impressions than a dedicated bulk email would have.

• To promote the Cloudebates, awareness and reminder banners – with a clear, clickable registration CTA – were applied to staff emails a few days before each event and on the days of the events themselves. Rocketseed’s analytics, reporting and real-time click alerts made it easy for the organisers to measure the level of recipient engagement and expected attendance.

Results

A prime example result was the promotion of the Cryptocurrency Cloudebate held on the 10th of May 2021. The banner campaign (below) achieved a 39% engagement rate ensuring an extremely well-attended and successful event.

UJ say…

“Rocketseed’s solution ticks all the boxes. A solution-orientated tool that actually works and makes everyone’s life easier. Coupled with the best customer service I’ve ever experienced makes using Rocketseed the best decision we’ve ever made. Marketing communication has never been more effective.”’

Monique Evert | Marketing & Brand Department | University of Johannesburg

Looking to brand all your staff emails with consistent signatures and boost internal email engagement? Let’s talk about how we can help you.