Five ways to maximise pension engagement with members approaching retirement
A vital component to any pension communication strategy is engaging with members approaching retirement, but the question is how? We take a look at why it’s important to engage members aged over 55, and how to maximise your efforts.
Recognise how members are feeling – it’s a daunting time!
Pension members who are approaching their retirement will be making decisions that will ultimately affect the next 20-40 years of their lives. Coupled with the fact that they have been saving this money for the majority of their career/life, it is understandable how some members will feel daunted by the prospect of making a call on what to do. And if we know one thing from human behaviour, it is that when we feel daunted, we put things off and bury our head in the sand.
Our research conducted in 2017, asked 200 people over the age of 55 how they felt about their retirement. Only 17% felt they had been supported and felt fully prepared for retirement. Meaning there’s definitely work to be done to ensure members are confident when they begin retirement.
Here are five tips on how to engage your members and ensure they are ready for retirement:
Don’t start communicating too late
Many organisations attempt to communicate with this audience too late in a ‘last-ditch’ effort to show some willing. However, successful strategies will have begun the conversations much earlier in the lifecycle of a member.
Ensure you take a strategic approach to all of your pension communications, moving through the main ‘key messages’ during an employee’s career.
Research the key messages
As with any communication campaign, a good idea is to brainstorm some key messages which will run throughout your campaign. Pay attention to your tone of voice, the language used and how you signpost members to useful links. As we eluded to earlier, your members will no doubt feel a little overwhelmed by this process, so a key message would be of support – guiding them through these big decisions.
We would also suggest you make financial advice available. Tools and modellers are great but they only give an outline, you need an adviser to paint the full picture.
Segment your audience
To get the right messages to the right members, you must first locate them. The first port of call would be pension scheme and payroll reports, which you’ll be able to export into excel, coupled with a simple calculation to generate members’ ages. You can then segment these members in your communication software programmes to ensure they are receiving tailored messages. We would suggest you do this exercise each year to capture new members who have entered the pre-retirement category.
Getting the communication right
You can have a great email campaign which sends 90% of members to a website, but if they don’t interact with the website your campaign has failed. Likewise, you can have the best group presentation prepared but if no one attends, again you have failed your members.
So we need to split out our methods into two categories: driving members to information and information to influence audience behaviour.
Drive members to information
Ensure you use a multi-channel approach. It’s a common misconception that older audiences don’t interact with digital communications, but research has shown this is an inaccurate assumption. So use both online and offline channels to signpost members to relevant content.
Deliver information in easy-to-understand ways
There are no great surprises here, we would suggest a mixture of methods will ensure you have the greatest levels of engagement with your audience.
Case studies can help members see a real-life example of how someone in similar circumstances has dealt with retirement. It is a powerful way of providing information about how to get to a desired outcome and what to watch out for along the way.
Tools and calculators bring the information to life. Modelling tools can project which route is best for individuals in retirement by using interactivity and gamification.
Group presentations can lay the foundations for the conversations which will follow. It also gives members who are in similar situations the opportunity to compare and contrast thoughts.
Financial adviser sessions can help with big decisions. People often need hand-holding and the facility to ask questions and discuss the pros and cons of their circumstances, which a financial adviser can help with.
Personalised videos offer extremely high levels of engagement and are a great way of showing members their options.
Measuring engagement and learn from results
This can be a real challenge. Each pension team will have different variables in determining success or engagement. One might say that having a room full of pre-retirement members listening to an adviser and asking questions would show engagement. Another might look at the analytics of websites and how long people have spent on modelling tools. While another might simply look for feedback from members via surveys – these along with countless others are all good measures of engagement.
However, whatever way you choose, you need to be able to measure what is happening now and ensure you can return to those same variables to see if there has been an increase or decrease.
The key is to create actionable insights to make the next communication hit the mark, and make sure your members are fully engaged when approaching retirement.
For more information on pension communications, see our online guide.