Benefits-related emails see a 45% average open rate—that’s more than double the best marketing email open rates. Here’s how investing into your benefits communication strategy can drive real ROI and improve your employee’s benefits experience.
45% of HR teams we surveyed this year rank improving the employee benefits experience in their top three priorities for the coming year.
What if we told you this could be as simple as sending an email? Ok, maybe not as simple as ONE email, but benefits communications can play a big role in bringing your strategy and your ROI to life for your organization.
Here’s how you can get more out of your benefits communications.
Bridging the benefits gap with data and communications
Our latest State of Workplace Empathy study revealed average 70-point gaps between the benefits that employees want the most versus what those same employees say their employers offer. While it’s true that the employee benefits landscape is seeing a bit of a renaissance lately, we also know that benefits confusion also prevents employees from understanding and even using those top-wanted benefits.
That 70-point gap tells us that there’s a lot of opportunity to look at how you’re communicating about benefits to employees–and doing so effectively.
Familiar channels, like email, are among the best ways to get in front of employees. Email is also a data-rich tactic that can help you fine-tune your benefits communications to be as effective, engaging, and helpful as possible.
How Analytics Play a Role in a Better Employee Experience
A communication strategy is all about sending the right message and digging into your data. By analyzing employee engagement with these communications, HR can gain insights similar to how marketers use email data to reach their target audiences. This data can help you understand where employees are connecting with benefits information and where additional support might be needed.
Here’s a look at some of the data we’re serving up to our clients with our benefits insights dashboard:
Email Open Rates: Nearly all employees in our platform say they prefer email as their primary method of communication about their benefits–and it makes total sense. We can access our email virtually anywhere thanks to smartphones. Plus, regular emails means we’re helping our clients point their employees back to the benefits platform to build familiarity.
Click-Through Rates: Reading is one thing. Engaging–such as clicking on a link–tells us a whole other story. Just like in marketing, click-through rates tell us that the content we sent was good enough to entice the reader to take action. For benefits emails, that might be sending them into the platform to use a benefit that they needed or were curious about.
Benefits employees want the most: Employee feedback is some of our–and our clients’–favorite data. By helping our clients gather more insights around which benefits their employees want, we can then help them tailor their benefits strategy to put those very benefits front and center for their people. Win-win!
Read more about how analytics can help you elevate your benefits experience
How Benefits Communications Help Beat Confusion
86% of employees on average say they’re confused about their benefits, but when the experience is tailored to them, 80% say they feel more confident in their elections. Benefits communications help beat confusion by removing some of the top barriers between employees and their benefits.
This looks like:
Ditching the jargon: Who wants to read a bunch of insurance jargon? We’re not seeing any hands raised right now, so we’ll assume no one does. Using plain language to talk about benefits makes it so much easier for your employees to understand what’s available to them and why it matters.
Making it easy to get to the right benefits at the right time: Benefits are complex and beyond medical, dental, and vision, it can be a challenge to remember what you have access to and when to use it. Sending reminders throughout the year can help with that.
Crystal Clark, Senior Program Manager for Benefits at the American Cancer Society shares her tips for creating an effective communications plan on the Benefits Pulse.
How you can get started today with a better benefits communications strategy
To enhance your communication strategy and elevate the benefits experience, consider these actionable steps:
Plan Your Benefits Communications Calendar: Organize a schedule ensuring consistent, timely messaging across appropriate channels. Key communications might include reminders for using pre-tax spending dollars, scheduling annual physicals, or informing employees about company-paid benefits.
Analyze Current Data: Identify what’s not working well and explore ways to pivot strategies for better outcomes.
Use Empathy and Analytics Together: Combine empathy-driven insights with analytics to tailor messages that truly resonate.
An effective benefits communication strategy is about making benefits information as easy to understand and access as possible. While your benefits platform might do a great job of helping you administer benefits, you might consider asking yourself if it’s really helping you drive a great employee experience.
Ready to take your strategy to the next level? Let’s chat!
