Jennifer Mathis is the Communications and Media Manager at Silver Eagle, one of the largest Anheuser-Busch beverage distributors in the United States. She started as a team of one, a communication specialist. Today internal comms is a complete department at Silver Eagle! 

“It’s honestly because of Workshop and what we’ve been able to do and change this last year that has really developed the role,” says Jennifer. Today’s team is Jennifer and a communications coordinator, and together they’ve taken on internal comms, media, external marketing, and many other areas of the business, too.

Internally, they’re sending email and SMS to about 1,100 employees with Workshop. It’s a mixture of team members with a company email address (about 40%) and a large workforce of frontline employees. The office roles include merchandisers, sales specialists, admin, marketing, the sales department, and accounting. The frontliners are warehouse employees or fleet drivers, so Jennifer’s team sends corporate communications to their personal email addresses.

How Silver Eagle is using Workshop

Workshop takes Silver Eagle’s internal comms to the next level! “At our size,” says Jennifer, “I feel like we’re pretty advanced for our internal comms. And we’re advanced because of this platform.”

Before moving to Workshop, the team used a combination of PoliteMail (an Outlook plug-in) for basic comms and Poppulo for newsletters and more creative sends. They also use Paylocity for their HRIS, which has some app-based comms and digital signage. That system was challenging, says Jennifer. The platforms were very limited in their design capabilities. She was manually updating distribution lists every Monday and Thursday. The templates “looked like they were from the 90s.” 🤪 She desperately wanted something that would sync with their HRIS.

“Another thing that we really wanted to implement was the use of videos and text messaging,” she told us. “It was difficult managing two different platforms just to get out all our comms. We were paying for two very similar programs, so we actually saved money by moving to Workshop.”

Using text messages and video to reach employees on the move

Jennifer knew that Silver Eagle frontline employees were more likely to check their text messages before their email inboxes when they went on break. She uses cross-posting to share all the company’s email sends to her text message distribution list.

Every Monday, she shares a Weekly Update video via email and text. The week prior, the communications coordinator will record different employees throughout the week reading a script written for company announcements. It’s a hit! Team members enjoy seeing fellow employees and putting names to faces. According to Jennifer, they like being featured on the update, (whether they admit it or not) and it’s been a major driver of employee engagement.

After the Weekly Update, a second email goes out later that week to follow up and add information. The content of each message is segmented as much as possible and tailored to the audience(s) that need to know. They divide the employee base by position, location, and teams. There’s a people manager list, a leadership list, and a veterans’ specific campaign. None of that was possible before onboarding with Workshop!

At the beginning of every month, Jennifer also sends a birthday email out to everybody celebrating birthdays that month, plus there’s an ongoing monthly campaign for employment anniversaries. Finally, the Silver Eagle comms team also sends HR-related and benefit-related materials through our platform. Whew!

Building emails and using analytics

After creating most of their content offline, the comms coordinator drafts each email in Workshop. Jennifer logs in and reviews the draft, makes suggestions and edits, and sends a test email to leadership for final approval. Then, the email gets segmented using distribution lists and scheduled for send.

“We do a quarterly report for our leadership that focuses on open rates, read time, etc., for the different campaigns,” Jennifer says. “We’ve used campaigns and distribution lists to pinpoint groups and see who has the lowest open rates.” With that data in hand, the comms team reaches out to the managers and teams to see how they can help get those employees more engaged. “It’s usually not a surprise, but seeing the actual numbers is great data.”

Support and partnership with Workshop

When we asked Jennifer for Workshop feedback, she told us, “I can’t say enough about Katie [Silver Eagle Houston’s Customer Success Manager]. From the initial onboarding team to everybody that I’ve worked with since, the whole team is extremely nice and helpful. I also really appreciate the opportunity to give feedback and the fact that you want that feedback to make the system better for the end users.”

See for yourself how Workshop can boost your comms strategy

Workshop is the #1 email platform for internal communications (and the best way to send SMS, too)! We love working with companies like Silver Eagle to help activate, validate, and grow their internal comms strategy. To learn more about how we can get results like these for you, schedule a time with us to see everything in action.