Aon achieves a 40% increase in content engagement

“Foleon enabled us to speed up content production across the organization by empowering anybody to create content autonomously. By having our designer prepare branded templates for our colleagues to use, we can rest easy knowing that all content will be on-brand.”

Susanne Schuijt
Senior Communications Advisor at Aon Netherlands

Tell us about your organization and your role

Aon is a leading professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement, and health solutions. Across the globe, we provide results for our customers using proprietary data and analytics to deliver insights that reduce volatility and improve performance.

As a Senior Communications Advisor at Aon Netherlands, our team is responsible for our local internal communications strategy, change management projects, and all the internal-facing assets we produce.

How important is content for your business?

Content is critical to the success of Aon and helps us establish ourselves as thought leaders on important topics such as risk, retirement, and health. It enables us to make the services we provide tangible, both internally and externally.

The challenge

What challenges were you facing prior to using Foleon? 

We produce a lot of internal-facing content across different departments. The challenges we faced were trying to keep up with our ever-growing need for content and the fact that everybody needed support with content creation. This made for a heavy workload.

To solve this, we sought out ways to empower colleagues to create content on their own while ensuring control over our brand. At the same time, we wanted to make our content more engaging by adding interactive elements such as video, audio, and animations. The traditional email newsletters we produced in the past didn’t allow for this.

How was this affecting your business?

Our previous way of working was labor-intensive. It simply took us too much time to produce our own content while also helping other departments. Additionally, because of the static nature of legacy content formats, we weren’t getting the engagement we were hoping for.

For example, with regular email newsletters, we have an average open rate of 30%. Since moving to a more engaging format with Foleon, we’ve seen this go up to 70%!

The solution

What potential solutions did you investigate, and what drove you to choose Foleon?

We looked at different options, but most were just too complex. We wanted a solution that was easy to use, not just for our team but especially for other teams that are less tech-savvy. Simultaneously, we wanted our content to be more engaging and accessible on any device so it could be read anytime, anywhere. We also wanted our content to have an interactive, magazine-like feeling. Foleon turned out to be the perfect solution.

What type of content do you create in Foleon? 

Working in internal communications, we primarily create internal-facing assets like our employee magazine We are Aon that is published about 7 times a year. We’ve also recently produced our social annual report that is featured in this success story. Next to that, the Ayoung department creates its own internal newsletter for younger Aon employees.

Other departments publish monthly external newsletters with Foleon and we’re looking to branch out with the platform by also using it for external-facing marketing collateral.

Did you create measurable goals? If so, what were they?

Yes! For our employee magazine We are Aon, we set ourselves the goal to have 80% of our colleagues read every edition. We’re really happy to see that we’re currently at about 70% (and increasing steadily) and that almost all pages are being read.

What’s so great about Foleon is that we can see precisely how long and how much people are reading. This information is really helpful to measure engagement but also to optimize future editions.

The results

What measurable benefits have you seen so far? 

Since moving to a more engaging format with Foleon, we’ve seen engagement rates go up 40% compared to regular email newsletters.

Additionally, Foleon’s built-in reporting showed us that our best-performing pages were always centered on colleagues and their personal lives. Based on this, we decided to optimize our editorial formula by including more stories from Aon employees.

For example, we now share more information about how long they’ve worked here and what they do in their spare time. This might seem trivial, but we’ve seen ever-increasing engagement since making these changes. On average, colleagues now read through about 80% of the contents of our employee magazines.

Next to that, Foleon enabled us to speed up content production across the organization by empowering anybody to create content autonomously. By having our designer prepare branded templates for our colleagues to use, we can rest easy knowing that all content will be on-brand. This saves us time and allows us to keep focusing on creating quality content.

How have people reacted?

The feedback has been quite overwhelming, honestly. For example, I regularly receive emails from colleagues telling me how much they love our employee magazine and its reading experience. Foleon also allows us to add feedback forms directly in our content, making it more interactive and easier to gain feedback, which we might not have received otherwise.

What are your plans for the future?

Since Foleon has been such a big success for our internal-facing assets, we want to start using it for our external marketing content, too.

Additionally, because Foleon’s platform is so flexible we want to start experimenting more with interactive content by embedding podcasts and background videos to hopefully drive even more engagement.

What tips do you have for other Foleon users?

Have a designer set up a solid base of templates in Foleon that colleagues (even the less creative ones) can use to create content themselves. You’ll see them thrive and can rest easy knowing that all content they produce will be on-brand.

Finally, be sure to join some of Foleon’s webinars as they’ll teach you all about the endless possibilities Foleon has to offer.