Communication

You can use the Communication step in Journeys to easily automate personalized emails to new hires, offboarders, their managers or other important members of the journey. 

If you choose the General New Hire Onboarding Journey template, What to expect on your first day and Hello from the CEO are two templated steps that you can choose to edit by clicking on the drafted step. 

In addition, you could click Create a new step, select Communication and give your step a title to start from scratch.   

Like other Journey steps, the Introduction step includes a From and To field, in addition to a Subject and Body field. 

The From field will correspond to who is sending the communication/email, while the To field will correspond to who is receiving the communication/email. 

• 💡Tip: You can email multiple employees by adding a user profile in Cleary with a distribution list as their email address, and adding them to the From or To field. Learn more about creating and managing users here. 

The Subject and Body fields will reflect the subject and body of the email being sent. 

You can also add variables to the subject or body fields! If you click View all variables you’ll be able to scroll through and see an extensive list of the different variables you can use in your messaging. 

You can click on the icon to copy a variable, which you can then paste to the Subject or Body field!

Trigger 

Next, you’ll choose when to trigger adding the user to a recurring meeting. You can choose to trigger this step either at a specific time, or after a previous step has been completed.

• Note: If scheduling a communication before a new hire’s start date, their personal email address will be used. If scheduling after their start date, their company email will be used.  

If choosing At a specific time, you can adjust the variables so the step triggers before/after/on the new hire’s start date. This way, for example, the scheduling will not occur until after the user’s email has been created.

Note: This trigger will occur in the timezone displayed, not necessarily in the time zone of the employee on the journey. 

If choosing After step has been completed, you can set this step to trigger immediately once a selected step has been completed, or a certain amount of days after the selected step has been completed.

Advanced Settings 

Notification Channel

You can enable/disable Post to user’s news feed and Trigger email notification to further customize how you’d like the communication to be sent out to the recipient. We recommend leaving both of these options selected by default.

Select the Reply To and CC settings: 

This field will appear for any preboarding steps in an onboarding journey since it requires automating an email to  a user’s personal email address. Gmail often thinks emails from platforms are promotional, and will often place them in the Promotions (or sometimes Spam) folders. This is a hurdle that any platform trying to send similar emails will encounter. To improve deliverability or our emails to preboarding employees, we’ve created a couple of options we’ve observed improve deliverability to the user’s Primary Inbox: 

Changing to CC the sender and include them as Reply to, or Do not CC nor include the sender in the Reply To are the two options you can use to improve the deliverability rate=! Note that on Day 1 and beyond, we will begin sending any journey communications to the new hire’s company email address, so this will not be necessary nor an issue. 

Error handling

If the first option is selected, a new hire will be sent this communication even if they’re added to the journey after the step should have been triggered. 

• For example: You’ve chosen to schedule this step 5 days before the new hire start date, but the new hire wasn’t added to the journey until 2 days before their start date. Enabling this option will ensure they’re sent the communication even though it falls after the 2 day trigger.  

If the second option is selected, the communication will not be sent if the variables used in the content fields do not have a matching record in Cleary. 

• For example: If I add {new_hire_city} as a variable in the Notification Description field, but the city does not exist in the new hire’s user field in Cleary, this communication will not be sent and you will be alerted as such.   

Restrict this step to a specific audience 

By default, every new hire will be added to the recurring meeting. However, you can choose to restrict this step to a certain audience. 

For example: If you don’t want contractors to be added to this recurring meeting, you can set up the audience like so: 

Once you’ve configured this step to your liking, select Save as Draft or Publish for this communication. 

• If the step is saved as a draft, it will not be live when the Journey is published. You must click Publish to ensure the step is live once the Journey is. 

Finally, once saved, you can return to this step and click Send Preview Email on the top right and enter an employee to have a preview email sent to their inbox!