Email Best Practices for Automating L&D Report Subscriptions [GUIDE]

Watershed's email subscription feature allows you to sign up users to receive regular emails featuring Watershed reports. This is an extremely powerful and convenient way to keep important L&D data in front of stakeholders. This blog post shares best practices to help ensure successful delivery and that your stakeholders find value in your reports.

Email Tips for L&D Reporting Subscriptions

Use these helpful tips and reminders when setting up email subscriptions in your Watershed account:

1) Let people know they'll get emails before you sign them up.

Watershed requires users to opt in to receiving report email subscriptions (this is to keep us compliant with GDPR and standard email best practices).

So, tell stakeholders they’ll need to opt in while explaining the value they’ll get from reports. This helps ensure their participation and engagement with the emails.

2) Add context to email so people understand what they're getting.

You can add a message in the emailed reports sent via Watershed. This allows you to fully explain the data you’re sending and why it’s important to the selected recipients.

3) Think carefully about the regularity of the subscriptions.

You want to email stakeholders on a consistent basis to stay top of mind, but you don’t want to clutter their inboxes and risk being ignored.

In other words, create a balanced schedule that allows you to regularly send useful data without agitating recipients. We recommend tailoring your subscription cadence to each report, and thinking about when your stakeholders need to see the data.

4) Don’t use mass internal distribution lists.

Sending email to internal distribution lists opens yourself up to a number of issues. Remember, each subscription email has an opt out feature in the footer to comply with U.S. and E.U. laws. So, if just one person on a distribution list opts out of the email subscription, everyone else on the list will be opted out.

Corporate IT teams also frown upon external systems sending email to distribution lists, so they’ll likely blacklist Watershed from being able to email your organization—essentially blocking any email sent to your organization via Watershed.

5) Talk to your IT team before setting up email subscriptions.

Speaking of corporate IT teams, be sure to give your IT team a head's up so they can make sure Watershed’s subscriptions are successfully getting through spam filters and being delivered to stakeholders’ inboxes.

6) Send a test email to yourself before signing up others.

Once you receive your test email, review the layout and message to make sure they set the right context before sending it to others. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to spot a typo or realize there’s a missing detail in a separate context.