Five tricks to keep your benefits communications innovative
- 973,000 Facebook logins
- 187,000,000 emails sent
- 38 million WhatsApp messages
- 18 million text messages
- 375,000 apps downloaded...
...and that’s just for starters.
With all this ‘noise’, it’s easy to see why companies often struggle to engage their employees with benefit communications. Here are five tricks to help keep your benefit communications innovative and make sure your key benefit messages are heard.
1. Don’t expect instant action; build awareness and momentum first
If you’re going to buy a car, you don’t make an instantaneous decision with no previous thought-process – and the same is true for ‘buying’ benefits. If you want your people to make a behavioural change, for example saving more into their pension each month, then you need to get them involved earlier in the process. We use a 5-Step Model for developing benefit strategies that builds awareness and aims to achieve maximum engagement during enrolment.
2. Get emotional
Use emotional tactics to get your messages across; by delving into the personal impact of a benefit. Some benefits can seem boring, but if you make them real to your audience by appealing to their emotions, you’ll soon see higher engagement among your employees. This is because we, as human beings, are driven by emotional triggers such as happiness, anger, fear and greed, far more than rational factors like reason or logic.
3. Get smarter with segmentation
When thinking of how to target messages, basic segmentation techniques will probably spring to mind, such as targeting different employees based on demographic factors like age and gender. But in addition to these, don’t forget to include behavioural and value-based targeting where possible. This will help your messages gel with your audience, as it’ll mean that your communications are more personal, and ultimately give an increased chance of success for your campaign.
4. Disrupt the noise
Use innovative media for your communications, such as online learning modules, videos, text messages or whatever you feel will work best for your audience. There’s no point spending months developing a customised intranet if everyone works off-site and isn’t at a desk. The right channels, targeted at the right people, can work wonders at building engagement with your benefits offering.
5. Be available anytime, anywhere
Your audience doesn’t just want to receive an annual paper statement on a Tuesday morning in March. Get active throughout the year, making your communications available to them in the ways, and at the times, that they want to access them… you should then see awareness and understanding rise.
The author is Johanna Nelson, associate director, Punter Southall Aspire.
This article was provided by Punter Southall Aspire.
In partnership with Punter Southall Aspire
We're a major new workplace pensions & savings business.
