How to personalise employee benefit communications

Seen as the Holy Grail of reward and benefit communication, personalisation is having a bit of a ‘moment’. We can see personalisation every day in our consumer lives whether it is personalised recommendations on Amazon, through to bespoke emails that cleverly harness your previous habits or search history with holiday recommendations. It is therefore easy to see how this approach in employee benefits could be a game changer. But how can you do it?

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Calling on conventional wisdom

Personalisation has been a popular topic for some time now. In the strive to differentiate and engage our people, particularly the need to stand out from the email and message volume we have every day, there have been several useful tactics in cutting through the noise.

The first is to simply talk to the individual in a personal tone and language. A Dear ‘Jack’ or ‘Jill’ rather than ‘Dear All’ is the first basic when it comes to cutting through some of the noise. You may want to adopt a less formal tone in your organisation and drop the ‘Dear’ for a ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello’. If this is then coupled with a more personalised subject line and personalised content, the basics are in place to start achieving personalisation.

In order to create this personalisation, and in particular the catchy subject line or personalised ‘call to action’, you need to have a data set. For example, you may believe that some people are missing out on a benefit for themselves or their family. Being able to easily segment this information is crucial and identifying non-members with dependents for example, will give you the data set needed. Technology can significantly help this approach, hopefully doing the hard graft for you and perhaps enabling the creation of communication templates. Next you need to decide the best medium.

Email overload is clearly an issue for many and you don’t want that highly personalised message to get lost in the wall of noise that is an inbox. Thankfully we have seen an increasing use of workplace communication tools in recent years that should provide a better medium to deliver the communication to the individual. Interestingly, we have found that SMS (text messaging) can be highly effective when requiring action to take place by an employee. So the building blocks so far of personalised communication look like this:

personalised introduction
personalised subject line
personalised ‘call to action’
a data set that allows you to segment your workforce
technology to support delivery.

Conventional wisdom says that if you have all the above, then you will be in a good place to start personalising your employee benefit communications. However, if you had wanted conventional wisdom, you probably didn’t need to read this.

The problem with a conventional approach

The trouble with the above approach is twofold:

1. It assumes the benefits you offer your people are relevant to them

I am afraid I have some bad news for you…chances are they won’t be. The majority of benefits packages are stale and keeping the relevance to an ever changing workforce is incredibly difficult. Even if you create the most highly engaging and personal communication campaign, chances are that your people will not necessarily find something that excites them or really makes a difference to their day-to-day lives. This is why flex benefits has ultimately been a failure – not enough has been invested in communications and recent focus on a highly engaging employee experience has focused on the technology use and not the specific benefit needs.

2. It does not have a human factor

It fails to grasp the intricate differences between people. Two 25-year-old females are not the same person. Their needs, circumstance and crucially, their personality will invariably be different. Our recent research pinpointed the impact personality has in the way people interact with their financial benefits in particular. Without this specific data set, it is difficult to see how personalisation can truly be effective.

Beyond the conventional

That all said, let’s put all this into context. If you move from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ communication approach today, to a place where you are addressing people by their first name and creating a personal ‘call to action’, you will be ahead of the curve.

However, we only need to look at what our cousins in marketing are doing to see that personalisation is without doubt the future of advertising and marketing to consumers. The same thinking, including considering your employees as your consumers, could elevate your benefits, reward and overall employee value proposition.

Are you brave enough to push beyond the conventional?

The author is Nick McClelland, director, JLT Employee Benefits.

This article was provided by JLT Employee Benefits.