PENSIONS
A guide to communicating pensions & benefits to employees
How do you get your pension communications to employees right? Follow a well thought out strategy. You don’t want to waste precious time and resource communicating to your members without any notable success. We have produced a guide which will give you all you need to make an impact on member behaviour.
We hope it helps and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.
Read our 7 steps to building an effective pensions communication campaign below:
Research is king!
Understanding the barriers and getting to know your members.
If you can answer the three questions below then you are welcome to skip to section 2 ‘Set appropriate goals’:
What is your biggest barrier to member engagement?
Do you have clearly defined audience segments?
What communication barriers do each of your audience segments face?
These are some of the key insights well conducted research will give you. Without knowing these key insights, there is a good chance that you are ‘shooting blind’, and that each of your communications stands a 50/50 (or worse) chance of having meaningful impact.
Before kicking off any research project you need to ensure you have sufficient budget for your needs. A well thought out budget shows stakeholders that you have thought about your research in detail.
* Click on the heading for more information.
+ What if I don’t have the budget to conduct research?
Your pension provider/consultant should be able to provide you with Management Information regarding your pension scheme. From this information you should be able to explore the areas below:
1. Are the majority of your members in the default fund?
If so, they may not be aware of the choices they have with regards to their pension investments, so perhaps your strategy should be around educating them on investments.
2. Are certain age groups contributing more or less than others?
If so, why is this? It could be because one group are more “savvy” when it comes to their savings, or perhaps they are at different life stages – once again, this knowledge could help you build your strategy
3. What % have logged on to view their pension statements?
This can form a macro goal (explained in our goals section) such as “increase users who have logged on by 5-15%”
4. How many members have asked to switch funds?
What triggered those members to change funds, have they read something, have they completed an attitude to risk assessment?
+ What if I don’t have MI available?
You can also look back at your past pension communications to analyse their effectiveness and often highlight areas for improvement:
1. Who regularly attends pension seminars/webinars?
These people are clearly engaged with their retirement planning and could serve as promoters of your scheme. There are ways to utilise these people to help spread the message to others.
2. Your inbound enquiry rates
If this is high, you may want to consider housing information online to reduce the queries which are coming through to your HR/pensions department.
3. The browsers
These are people who click on emails, go onto websites but don’t necessarily action any type of change.
Key insight…
All of these data points are useful tools in your analytics arsenal. They help you to prioritise areas of weakness you can improve and identifying strengths you can leverage within your strategy. You now have the lay of the land, which forms a yardstick by which to measure future pension communications, the next step is to set your goals.
2. Set appropriate goals for the long and short term
Before you simply dive in and start sending out retirement communications, ask yourself the question “what am I trying to achieve here?” Too often, we hear of companies sending out email after email with the sole intention of “keeping the member informed” but without a specific end goal in mind.
So where to start…
Find three key areas from your research.
Create three macro goals you want to hit over a 12 month period.
List as many micro goals as you can to help assist you to hit your macro goals.
Typical pension communications goals we see are…
Increasing engagement in “hard to reach” members i.e. those without access to digital communications.
Ensuring high earners avoid unwanted tax charges through pension allowance rules.
Minimise the numbers of members who have not actively selected the default fund.
Ensuring “at retirement” members have all the information they need regarding pension freedoms.
These goals can sometimes be too broad for your needs. Therefore, you may want to create Macro & Micro goals…
Macro & Micro goals
Looking back at your research, you should try to identify three areas where you can make an improvement, these are known as ‘macro goals’. Macro goals are your big picture objectives, they are often very high level and difficult to achieve, which is why we supplement these with micro goals – the smaller stuff that added together will help the macro.
Put it this way, running a four hour marathon time would be a macro goal – sounds difficult!...so break down what you need to do to achieve this and you have your micro’s:
Complete three runs per week.
Ensure you get eight hours sleep per night to aid in recovery.
Have a sports massage once per week to ensure you don’t tighten up.
Pre-prepare all your food for the week to ensure you are fuelled correctly.
Example: Typically, younger audiences don’t contribute enough into their pension.
Macro goals
Encourage younger audience to contribute more into their pension.
Improve member knowledge.
Micro goals
Send four messages throughout the year that speak about the importance of savings
Implement an “informal and plain speaking” style tone of voice/language style to resonate with our audience
Embed a video tutorial on the website about how much they should be saving
Aim to increase our email open rate by 10% (and don’t be too hard on yourself if you get lower, DID YOU KNOW that the financial industry average is only 14%?)
Key insight…
If you don’t create micro goals, the likelihood is you’ll go throughout the year sticking to the same strategy you had before and you’ll miss your target.
As you go through the year, you’ll learn more and more about your audience behaviour and interaction with your pension communications, allowing you to make tweaks along the way. You’ll be surprised at how those incremental goals can really start to add up.
3. Structure your pension communication campaigns effectively
* Click on the heading for more information.
1. Do your research!
Your pension provider/consultant should be able to provide you with Management Information regarding your pension scheme. From this you can try to pull out the below areas:
Research, ideas and goal setting (covered in steps 1 & 2) is crucial to the success of your campaign.
2. Define your target audience
Determine your target audience – You will have to identify different segments of your audience so they receive tailored information relevant to them.
3. Choose your communication channels
Decide on your communication channels and length of campaign (covered in step 5). You will need to decide on the best methods of communication and how often you need to communicate your messages over what period.
4. Plan your pensions communications campaign timeline
Create a plan – you could use a Gannt Chart or other style of plan – This is a working document to keep track of your different communications and when they need to be created and deployed. You can also keep track of resource and sign off.
5. Create your campaign landing page
Build and test your campaign landing page – You will have created a campaign landing page which you will direct all online traffic to through your communications. It is important that this page is performing well and all links are working correctly.
6. Set up goal tracking
Set up goal tracking – This is a clever trick you can use Google Analytics for. If you track your website stats in Google Analytics you are able to set up goal tracking which shows you how people are getting to your web page and where they are coming from. This will help you with your MI.
7. Begin your campaign promotion
Distribute and promote your campaign – Now it is time to deploy your plan and start sending your communications.
8. Tweak your campaign based on your goal data
Track your successes and make tweaks where needed - Make sure you keep an eye on your analytics throughout and not just at the end.
9. Build actionable insights from your results
Gather MI and data to form conclusions and pull insights to improve your next campaign.
Key insight…
If communicating pensions was easy we would identify an area for improvement, create a goal and broadcast a message to hit our target and move onto the next one. However, this is seldom the case due to their complex nature and the stigma that surrounds the topic.
Simple goals such as getting all members registered on a new online portal might be a one month campaign with two digital pushes towards a sign up page. Complicated goals such as; implementing salary sacrifice as a new contribution method, is likely to be a 6-12 month campaign with multiple communications and audiences.
Your benefits communication partner will be able to steer you in the right direction when it comes to what campaigns to focus on and how they should be conducted. Alternatively, get in touch with us and we can run through our services in more detail.
4. Implement slogans and key messaging
When writing your content, you want to come up with memorable slogans/catch lines that drive home your key messages. Key messages will filter throughout all of the content you produce no matter what media you choose to carry that message.
Let’s go back to our goal of increasing contributions for our younger members, a slogan which could be used might be…
“Save more now for a better tomorrow”
It hones in on the key message of now is the time to start saving, you must contribute more if you want a better retirement.
5. Deploy your communications
Media
Here is where we start to think about what form of media channel is going to give us the greatest impact with the message we want to send. Often, these will be decided by the following:
What our audience are responding to? Are certain age groups favouring one channel over another?
What our audience has available? If they don’t have access to digital comms such as emails etc.. then printed collateral such as flyers and letters might be a better idea.
Planning your communication methods
Multi-channel is the best approach to maximise your chances of getting through to your intended audience. Below is a list of media channels that you may have tried and some you might not have. Have a look at the list below and think carefully about which channels are the best for your audience.
* Click on the heading for more information.
+ Standard communication methods
- Letters
- Websites
- Video tutorials
- Webinars
- Presentations
- Posters
+ Creative communication methods
- SMS text messaging
- Social media
- Chat tools
- Ageing apps (here is how you will look at 60, picture yourself at this age and what you want your retirement to look like)
- QR codes (great to get offline people online by scanning the code with their phone)
- Podcasts (allows you to have a conversation with experts on certain topics)
- Personalised videos (far more impactful than a blanked video)
- Mirror stickers (to put on the mirrors in office bathrooms - again, a great way to get offline people online)
Key insight…
If communicating pensions was easy we would identify an area for improvement, create a goal and broadcast a message to hit our target and move onto the next one. However, this is seldom the case due to their complex nature and the stigma that surrounds the topic. Whichever form of media you use here, it’s important to select 3-4 so that you can have the best chance at getting in front of your audience.
Content
By getting in front of your audience you have done 50% of the job, the next 25% is getting them to understand your message and when it comes to pensions this is trickier than it sounds, but there are some tactics which will help.
Layering – Take your message and split it into three sections, 1 – high level, 2 – more indepth, 3 – everything someone could possibly want to know. We would suggest that your initial comm should be layer one and for those who want to know more, they can delve further into the layers.
Cross messaging – Avoid putting more than one topic into any communication. You want your audience to focus on a single topic, so don’t confuse your message by incorporating multiple subject matters like auto enrolment rules & pension freedoms.
Tailoring –Hopefully you have segmented your audience so that the information you are sending out will be relevant to each group. It’s rather irrelevant to send pension freedom rules out to young audience members as they are not at the stage in life where they need to concentrate on this information.
Tone of voice - This may need to change depending on who you are speaking to, younger audiences need to be punchy and straight to the point, older generations don’t mind reading through more information.
Online tools - Calculators & forecasting tools are a great way to make the information relatable to the user by allowing them to paint a picture of their own circumstances
Imagery - Technical financial jargon can often seem robotic to the audience, try breaking this up by using images of friendly looking, welcoming people.
Jargon-free - You’ve heard this a million times, but leave the jargon at the door!
Key insight…
Offline communications such as flyers/brochures etc…can be tricky to track as there are no embedded analytics, but QR codes are a great way to broadcast to these members while being able to track how many people have scanned your code.
6. Know the importance of calls to action and signposts
In most cases, the goal of pension communications is to evoke an emotional response so that we encourage our audience to take action, whether that be to log onto a site, sign up for a presentation or fill out a form.
But the single most common rule here is that whatever you want the member to do, make it easy for them. In fact, make it painfully obvious what you want them to do.
Use the rule of three
From your message, it should be no more than three clicks away that the member can action what you have asked them to.
Why is this important?
If you speak to any User Experience designer (they are the guys that ensure people find what they want on a website or app without getting frustrated) they will tell you that users will only click a maximum of three times to get to any given information source. If it is further away they will lose interest and exit the process.
7. Analyse your campaign data
Lastly, try to gather as much analytics as you can from every communication you produce. Your analysis should answer the following:
Has our audience looked at it?
Has our audience followed our signposts?
Has our audience taken action?
Is there a difference in the segments of audience?....if so, why is this? etc..
This will all help you when planning your next pension message, it will help you learn about your members and their behaviour.
Remember our micro goals?
Things like open rates on emails, scan numbers on QR codes, reduced inbound enquiries? We need the analytics to assess whether we are hitting our goals.
Too often we see organisations send out emails without correct analytics in place, they can’t tell us who opened emails, what age profile they were, what investment fund they were in etc.. Which just makes it harder to understand what is going on with their members.
Conclusion
People frequently switch off, or don’t even attempt to engage with their pension because the rules and options can change so frequently. Not to mention, the reams of jargon they have to sift through to get to the bottom line. Even those with DB pensions now have added complex decision making. For those still saving for retirement, the challenge is getting them to put money away for an occasion that seems so distant and vague, leading to lost opportunities.
Pension communications are key to get your employees to understand what benefits their pension can give them, so that they fully appreciate and engage with it. We have created this guide to help you engage your members and turn them on to their most valuable employee benefit.
If you want some expert help to engage your employees through simplicity and make the topic of pensions relatable to real life journeys, then get in touch with us – we’d love to hear from you.
Let’s inspire and empower your members to take control of their financial future.
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