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Interactive employee magazine increases engagement

Client: Macy's, Inc. Industry: Retail Get in touch

Macy’s internal digital magazine keeps 125,000 nationwide employees informed, engaged, and interacting with company news.

Challenge

With more than 125,000 employees located in hundreds of stores, 16 distribution centers and corporate headquarters locations across the U.S., Macy’s, Inc. faced a tremendous challenge communicating news, culture, fashion and other critical information to their teams.

Macy’s utilized two targeted internal publications to address the challenges – one for company news and one for highlighting Macy’s brands and products and retail employees education. These printed publications presented several key limitations:

  • the length of time required to produce printed magazines restricted the ability to provide news quickly and frequently
  • printing and distribution costs were extensive, and high volumes of printed materials didn’t fit with the company’s commitment to sustainability
  • the inability to interact, respond to and engage with readers
  • multiple communication channels leading to missed opportunities

To add to the challenge, the vast majority of associates are in-store and lack computer access at work – which meant the company’s large-scale intranet wasn’t a complete solution.

Services:

Research & strategy Content audit & inventory Content development Search engine optimization User experience planning Information architecture development Responsive website design & development CMS implementation & customization Custom application development Ongoing maintenance & support Measurement & analytics reporting

Macy’s internal digital magazine keeps 125,000 nationwide employees informed, engaged, and interacting with company news.

Services:

Research & strategy Content audit & inventory Content development Search engine optimization User experience planning Information architecture development Responsive website design & development CMS implementation & customization Custom application development Ongoing maintenance & support Measurement & analytics reporting

Challenge

With more than 125,000 employees located in hundreds of stores, 16 distribution centers and corporate headquarters locations across the U.S., Macy’s, Inc. faced a tremendous challenge communicating news, culture, fashion and other critical information to their teams.

Macy’s utilized two targeted internal publications to address the challenges – one for company news and one for highlighting Macy’s brands and products and retail employees education. These printed publications presented several key limitations:

  • the length of time required to produce printed magazines restricted the ability to provide news quickly and frequently
  • printing and distribution costs were extensive, and high volumes of printed materials didn’t fit with the company’s commitment to sustainability
  • the inability to interact, respond to and engage with readers
  • multiple communication channels leading to missed opportunities

To add to the challenge, the vast majority of associates are in-store and lack computer access at work – which meant the company’s large-scale intranet wasn’t a complete solution.

Coast to Coast site featured on multiple screen sizes to showcase its responsive design
Close up of the Coast to Coast header area; showcasing the main menu and community photos

Strategy

Macy’s reached out to us to strategize on a new communication solution. First, we conducted a company-wide survey to gain insights into what topics and functionality were most meaningful to audiences. We leveraged our findings to create an innovative interactive digital magazine platform. We developed an in-depth content strategy and an internal marketing and promotional campaign to build awareness and drive users to the site, ensuring maximum reach and return on investment.

The new platform combined both printed news sources into a single, responsive website with a sleek, high-end design. The new content-rich site covered everything Macy’s associates needed from business strategy to styling ideas in one current, comprehensive website. From the option to like articles and the ability to subscribe to updates to contests, in-line article polls and forms to provide feedback and story ideas, site visitors had a wide variety of interactive features to engage with.  

This highly interactive platform was built using the Umbraco content management system (CMS) which enabled the Macy’s team to easily add and update all content quickly. Site administrators could create articles with any number of components including unlimited photography, videos, sliders, callouts, polls, forms, metadata and more providing maximum flexibility. 

To facilitate internal promotion of new content, content was streamed to digital signage across Macy’s locations. To prevent having multiple instances of the same content, we developed a custom tool to pull content from the site and automatically populate the signage, making a potentially tedious and time-consuming process effortless and consistent.

Tech stack

The following languages and platforms were used to bring this project to life:

Languages

HTML5
CSS

Frameworks/tools

ASP.NET
.NET MVC
MS SQL Server
Bootstrap
jQuery
jQuery UI

CMS

Umbraco CMS

APIs/integrations

Google Analytics

Results

Visitors are able to read and respond to what they see on the site in ways they were never able to with the earlier print publications. The website has quickly grown into a vibrant and vital communications tool, nearly quadrupling in users and sessions, and more than doubling its subscribers in less than six months. High time spent on the site indicates deep engagement with the content, and research shows high awareness and recall of content.

 

Do you need strategic help with your own communication challenges? Let’s talk!