Inspire Employee Action with the Right Messaging
Targeted messaging is all around us—you just may not have noticed it. Using social media platforms as an example, think about how, when you open a site or app, you tend to only see posts and content about topics you usually engage with. Liking or commenting on one silly cat video can leave you bombarded with the same furry, four-legged creatures for hours or even days afterward. This is because social media is algorithmic and geared toward only showing you personalized content, so that you not only enjoy yourself but want to return to the platform.
As an influential marketing tactic, targeted messaging can be used critically and efficiently to help communicate the right message to the right person when it’s most important. Open enrollment is one of the most important events of the year, and using targeted messaging can mean all the difference in making sure employee benefits communication goes smoothly and successfully. Remember, because your employee population is diverse in age, earnings, and future goals, they’ll want that same diversity when it comes to learning about their benefits options. Using targeted messaging with a more tailored approach can help inform employees by providing relevant information on how benefits can fit their personal needs and can help inspire them to act.
Learning About Benefits Is Stressful Enough, So Help Ease the Process
Let’s imagine that this year, a major change to your health plan is being implemented. Going with your usual open enrollment communication strategy would not create the optimal results, especially if you’re known for not making significant changes to your health plans, cost, or overall plan design from year to year.
To ensure a peaceful transition and to get ahead of any confusion or anxiety, targeted communications is the way to go. We often develop campaigns targeted by current plan enrollment, so that employees can see their current benefits compared to the new offerings by highlighting key areas, such as deductibles, premiums, and out-of-pocket maximums. These multimedia campaigns (including print, online, and video) feature specific information about plan options and help guide employees toward the plan that best matches their current benefits. This helps ease the process by making it simpler to review their choices, while also pushing them toward the new plan offering.
In one case, we helped a leading private university that had spent years with little to no benefit changes, develop a successful plan to not only communicate new health plan offerings, but also drive engagement and inspire action from employees through careful messaging that included behavioral science techniques. Through partnership with university leaders and committees, we helped implement a multifaceted campaign with great results. Around 97% of employees actively enrolled during open enrollment that year, and the university exceeded their goal of at least 1,700 employees enrolling in their new health plan. Learn more about our strategy and how we achieved this feat in our case study, Communicating Change Management.
Personalizing your communications through websites, enrollment videos, benefits fairs, and other communications channels to create consistency across the board is a great way to hammer home the message that you want to deliver and to encourage employees to act. This approach is well received by employees and helps clients in reaching their enrollment goals.
It can also work for year-round engagement. For example, a client that offered a triple-tax-advantaged health savings account (HSA) to their employees wanted to encourage those who enrolled to make the most of this benefit. We helped the client develop a customized benefits brand and website to establish a good foundation for communicating just that.
While early communications campaigns encouraged employees to save enough in their HSAs to help cover health care expenses, eventually they were nudged to take full advantage of this benefit by saving enough to invest a portion of their balances for additional growth potential. This example of year-round engagement shows how a message can continue to develop over time and allows employees to learn about how their benefits operate. We helped employees identify the benefits of their benefit and how to meet the barriers head-on through targeted messaging. Learn more about our targeted campaign and its success rate—a 30% increase of new HSA investment accounts created one month after our campaign kickoff—in our case study, Using Behavioral Science to Promote HSA Investing.
Listen to the Science
Behavioral economic techniques prove that targeted messaging works when developing communication strategies. Here’s the science behind our success:
- Self-relevant information: We all pay attention when a message directly relates to us, especially when it comes to our health. Targeting messages around current plan enrollment can help focus someone’s attention when it involves their own personal needs.
- Ambiguity bias: Lack of direct information and instruction can interfere with someone’s comprehension of the message and, as a result, turn them off from taking any action at all. Avoid being unclear in your communications, and implement a call to action. This can improve the response to your campaign. By focusing on what matters most to employees—including cost elements of the health plans they care about—you remove ambiguity and make it easier for employees to choose the right health plan for themselves and their families.
Want More Information?
Read more about the importance of targeted messaging, and learn about other helpful tips and tools regarding communications strategy in our ebook series, Unlocking Successful Benefits Communication: A 10-Key Framework Every Organization Needs to Get Results.
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Briana Hodge, Staff Writer, is a skilled wordsmith, developing engaging print and digital content for a variety of clients, from large corporations to multiemployers.
