Annual enrollment is right around the corner, and that means it’s time to start thinking about your communications, including how to connect with your employees and reach their families at home. The good news? There are a number of innovative communication channels to help you achieve this goal. As you plan, keep these must-haves in mind:
- Think about your entire audience and how to reach them.
- Get information to homes for spouses and domestic partners.
- Make sure you’re breaking down complex topics.
- Make your benefits information engaging.
If you’re looking to try something new this enrollment, consider creating a campaign theme to capture attention and/or offering decision support tools to help people evaluate your benefits. Additionally, making your information available online can help drive engagement and produce the results you need.
Ready to Get Creative?
If you have a benefits brand identity, you can push that even further by creating a theme specific to enrollment. A theme can help amplify the impact of your communications by leaving a memorable impression—and potentially driving more action. For one of Lenovo’s recent enrollments, we created a standout campaign with the motivating theme of “Are you in?” which helped Lenovo achieve an active enrollment rate of 83%.
Lenovo's “Are You In?” campaign
Help People Make Informed Decisions
Most employees need help deciding what’s best for their personal situation, but you can make it easier for them to choose. Enrollment can be overwhelming, and if your people don’t understand what they need to do, they may avoid it. Decision support tools can engage your audience, encourage them to think about how they will use their benefits, and help them feel more confident about choosing their coverage.
If you’re making significant changes to your plans, a personalized checklist is a great way to help people navigate all your offerings. Intentionally asking your enrollees to review voluntary benefits, like legal assistance or identity theft, ensures that they don’t miss out on enrolling in something offered only once a year. Personalized results from a checklist may also encourage your people to consider enrolling in a different plan for next year, like an HDHP.
The decision support tool we created for Autodesk is a great example of a tool that looks simple to the user but is powered by intricate programming on the back end. After answering a few quick questions, users see their expected out-of-pocket costs under each medical plan and a suggestion for which plan might be best for them. During enrollment in 2021, approximately 17% of users who visited Autodesk’s benefits website also used the tool, which is notable considering there were very few changes to the medical plans that year.
Autodesk's decision support tool
Using simple language, focusing on action items, and including just what’s needed can help reduce barriers to decision making, aid employees in assessing everything available to them, and help them take all the necessary actions on time.
Decision support tools are a great place to show off your benefits identity and theme to tie your enrollment campaign together. They can also be turned into resources for new hires, increasing their value beyond enrollment.
Looking to Print Less?
If a digital-first, data-driven approach to marketing your benefits is your goal, you need to send people to a website for information. If you don’t already have a benefits website, an enrollment experience microsite is a great option for a small investment. Adding a microsite to your mix of communications allows you to use print strategically to create awareness with a small postcard instead of a large mailer—a good solution in the face of post-pandemic paper shortages. The microsite we created for Adobe walked their employees step by step through Adobe’s plans, included a personalized checklist, allowed them to easily find enrollment webinars, and made sure they had all the information they needed to enroll on time.
Adobe's enrollment microsite
Once enrollment ends, an enrollment experience microsite can easily be adapted as a tool to help new hires enroll in their benefits.
It’s All in the Approach
Make your upcoming enrollment a success by thinking differently about your campaigns, exploring some new channels, keeping things simple and engaging, and sending at least one communication to your people’s homes to reach important decision makers.
We’re proud to work with organizations that value their people. If you want to learn more, we’d love to talk.
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