As we continue to emerge from the pandemic and apply lessons learned, employers are embracing ways to care for their people more holistically, creating a culture and providing benefits that support whole family health. Nearly half of employers plan to expand or add some form of family care as part of their benefits solutions.
Introducing any new benefit—as welcome as it may be—is an exercise in communications and change management. Cleo has a dedicated Enrollment Marketing team to provide customized support throughout the process. Our goal is to ensure your working families engage with Cleo support, and by extension, your existing suite of benefits. With up to 60% of clients’ eligible employees enrolled in Cleo within the first 6 months, the team reflected on what goes into a successful benefits launch.
Learn from previous launches
What went well? What didn’t? Analyzing past successes and failures is critical for creating a launch plan that yields excitement and drives engagement among your employees. Learning from the past can always inform strategy for future campaigns. Share these learnings with your vendors as well so that they can customize their strategy, messaging, and marketing to your unique populations.
Take stock of all available channels—and how they reach different populations
What are the different employee populations you’ll need to reach? Corporate? Distributed? Hourly? Salaried? Remote? Onsite? Great. Now, try to list every available channel you have to get a message in front of each of those populations. Think beyond your intranet and benefits portal. Is there any digital or physical signage onsite? A regular employee newsletter? Lunch n learns? Think outside the box and if possible, ask employees from different segments how and where they find information. Using a multichannel approach is important when building an effective enrollment strategy.
Educate key stakeholders and secure advanced buy-in
Word of mouth is often the number one driver of awareness. Take a look at any Employee Resource or Affinity Groups that might be especially receptive to this new benefit. Identify ways to educate and inform key group leaders as well as HR business partners and people managers across your organization before you go live with your new benefit. This enables them to not only become proactive advocates, but to also be informed with answers when their peers and direct reports have questions or come to them with a challenge that could be solved or alleviated by the new benefit.
Establish referral pathways between vendors
Ideally, your combined benefits create an ecosystem of support to employees. Think about everything available and how they may relate. Connecting vendors behind the scenes to ensure referral pathways can help drive continued enrollment and engagement. Co-led live information sessions with multiple vendors can help paint a more comprehensive picture for your employees and showcase the breadth of related support available to them. From providing marketing materials and communications copy to creating complementary co-vendor promotional materials, ask your benefits vendors to do the heavy lifting. It’s in their best interest!
Promotion doesn’t end at launch
Outside of health insurance, most benefits are available for enrollment at any point throughout the year. Find opportunities to meet employees where they are in terms of life changes and in turn, changing benefits needs. Ensuring a regular cadence paired with reaching employees through a mix of channels is key. And be sure to request measurement and tracking of enrollment awareness campaigns directly from your benefits vendors. This will inform and improve future campaigns and perhaps even bring to light new information about how your employees like to receive information.