Using Email forEffective Open Enrollment

Communications

Simple ways to get employees to enrollfor benefits faster

It’s that time of the year again: benefits enrollment.

There are a lot of messages, reminders, and questions from employees andcommunicators. Why do many employees wait until the last possible minute to enroll? Are employees reading their email, or are these notifications gettinglost in the noise of Covid-19 messages?

What’s worse from a communications perspective is losing the ability to reach employees in the office cafeteria and other common areas because the majority are working from home.

So, the question you may be asking is: “How do I get more people to take action on our open enrollment emails when employees are already overloaded with email?”

The answer can be boiled down to identifying your audiences, increasing your frequency, and providing clear, concise messaging.

Identify your audiences

The problem with one-size-fits-all campaigns is they are more likely to be ignored, as these long content-heavy messages ask people to wade through irrelevant information to get to the bits important to them. Here are the key audience segments to keep in mind:

1. Employees new to your open enrollment process 2. Employees not enrolled 3. Employees already enrolled

You can further segment your enrolled employees into groups based upon factors important to you:

4. Employees who enroll late 5. Employees with enrolled dependants 6. Employees self-enrolled

With these audience lists, you can create moreconcise and relevant messaging for each. For example, only people new to your process are likely to need the What, Why, and How-Tocommunications. Those already enrolled only need information on what’s new and what’s changed. Know that those with dependants will likely need information they can bring home and share with their spouse or family members. And by knowing those who usually enroll late, you can put them on a different campaign withmore FAQs and higher reminder frequencies.

Increase your frequency

No one likes receiving too much email, but often too much is related to content length and not the number of messages.

The first thing you will want to do is get the open enrollment period, or at least the opening and closing dates, on your employees’ calendars. You can send an appointment message out a week or two prior to the opening, which sets acalendar reminder. With the right tools, you can also measure who didn’taccept so you can repeat the message to them after three days to a week.

In this message, you should put the date right into the subject line, keeping to 42 characters or less so the entire subject can be read on desktop and mobilepreviews. Something similar to “Benefits Enrollment Opens Tuesday, Oct. 27th” and within the body remind people why this timeframe is so important:

Open Enrollment is the only time during the year where you can make changes to your benefits selections.

If you do not sign up for health insurance and other benefits during Open Enrollment, you will not have another opportunity to sign up for coverage unless you experience a Qualifying Event.

A typical open enrollment period is a two-week window, so whether you intend to send an email every day or every other day, or just two or three in sum, one key is to coordinate with HR and pull people out of your campaign as soon as they complete their enrollment.

Provide clear, concise messaging

A concise email (under 250 words) is faster and easier to process and increases both readership and click rates. As 20–40% of employees will view email on their mobile device, ensuring your campaign is mobile-responsive is critical to getting the response you want.

Also, limit the number of links you are providing.

Our email benchmark data proves the more links you add, the lower the click rate you actually get. Ideally, each click would have just one call to action, with the button or link called out at the top of the email and perhaps repeated at the bottom of the email contains 4-500 words.

If it’s before the open enrollment period, theCTA should be getting employees to understandeverything about their possible benefits andoptions. Some employers have a recorded session or a landing page containing everything employees need to know about their benefits options.

Generally, HR and communications teams compile all of their open enrollment and benefits information into one large document, including detailedcontent from insurance providers. Employees can only process this content in small, digestible bits.

Instead of dropping one giant document viaemail, post that content on your intranet. Then, use communications best practices and break itdown, simplify it, and craft compelling summaries that provide the key points.

For each audience, devise a series of brief communications designed to answer common questions, provide education, and encourage action. With enough time, professional communicators will tailor these headlines and summaries to each audience, helping them decide which benefits fit best based on their life situations.

Loop managers in

Enrollment and benefits alignment is a team effort. While the majority of the work falls on HR, engaging managers early, providing them with communica-tions in advance of the broadcasts, and even sending reminders from the man-ager’s address to their employees all help to boost engagement. This is another list segmentation exercise, with hierarchical groups by the manager, which pays dividends by speeding up the process and better satisfying employees.

Gentle reminders will help you achieve higherenrollment before the deadline

If you followed the best practices recommendations for your open enrollment email campaign, you might discover you still need to push people toward the goal line. By far, the most effective approach to getting your employees to take action on open enrollment is frequent broadcast emails.

You don’t want to be annoying, and you certainly don’t want to send emails to anyone who has completed the process. Keeping your messaging fun, interesting, and educational is the key to success.

PoliteMail’s corporate email benchmark data shows email provides the best reach, but about 10% of the audience will ignore any given email, and generally, just above 60% will really pay attention.

Increasing enrollment success and employee satisfaction depends oncommunications! Health and benefits coverages can be complicated, so by breaking down and clearly summarizing the options and targeting information to specific audience segments, communicators can increase employee understanding, satisfaction, and engagement.

How do you overcome this? By increasing your frequency while reducing your content length. The best way to make sure everyone participates in open enrollment is to keep following up, but not incessantly.

Realize that each month, employees are sent 22 corporate broadcasts on average and 172 links. That volume has increased during the pandemic. So, here is how to leverage email data analytics to send effective, gentle remind-ers to boost benefits enrollment without alienating or overloading employees.

Think like a marketer by staging campaignsaround behaviors

Internal communications and marketingcommunications have different audiences but similar processes - from getting attention to education to consideration and action. Effective marketers target prospects based on these stages, and so should you. Anticipate that groups of employees begin in differentstages of the enrollment process, andproduce communications to addressthose needs and move them along.

A traditional approach is for HR communications teams to send three messages, one with the dates, another with a ton of information, and a final deadline reminder or two. While this may be sufficient, it certainly isn’t optimal.

Better to segment your audiences based on their anticipated needs, and then segment further based on their behavior and stage:

• Who opened the email and who didn’t read it? • Who has and hasn’t clicked yet? • Who has clicked through but didn’t complete the process?

Based on this behavioral segmentation, you could customize the subject lines to optimize engagement based on the stage they are at in the process.

• Never opened or ignored the email: “Reminder: Open enrollment has started.” • Opened the email but didn’t click: “Start your enrollment today.” • Opened the email and clicked on the enrollment link: “Have more questions about benefits?”

Keep a consistent schedule, and send the follow-up emails first thing in the morning

During the enrollment period, keep your campaigns on a routine schedule. Whether daily, every other day, or weekly, sending messages at the same time keeps employees tuned in.

If you want action to be taken, send it early. From our research, emails that are at the top of the inbox at the start of the workday have the highest readership and click-through rates. It’s quite possible that you might get a higher open rate at the end of the day, but our research shows that higher attention engagement happens in the morning.

Keep stakeholders informed

If you are enlisting managers to help with the enrollment process, providethem with advanced information and at least weekly updates regarding theparticipation of their teams. Providing them a list of employees by stagewill help identify who may need assistance and enablethem to reach out more efficiently.

For example, your follow-up email to managerscould include a table of three groups,

• Not started • Started but not completed • Completed

Embed “did you know” information into reminders

You can increase engagement by not simply sending reminders, but providing a targeted snippet of educational content along with it.

You might create content blocks for new benefits, changed benefits, or benefits the audience may not be taking full advantage of.

Here are a few examples for “Did you know…” content blocks:

• You can get new eyeglasses every two years. • By increasing your 401(k) contribution by just 2%, with the company match, you will double your retirement income. • Families now have two options. One includes a health savings plan.

By making these more interesting and exciting, you will nudge your employees to engage with the email, learn more about your benefits options, and trigger them to take enrollment actions before the deadline.

Don’t remind people who don’t need it

Because of the small open window for benefits enrollment, things move quickly. But don’t neglect the employee experience. While it’s important to createengaging, relevant campaigns with useful reminders, once employees are done, they won’t appreciate any more reminders, no matter how creative.

Coordinating your lists with your HR team and providers, and pulling employees out of reminder campaigns upon completion is an important consideration.

If you follow the tips above, you’ll find that employees will complete theirbenefits enrollment sooner and not become annoyed by unnecessary emails.

Best of luck on your enrollment period!

Because Email Is Now More Important Than Ever… Let’s Get Smarter About It!

Schedule a Live Demonstration of PoliteMail in Action:https://politemail.com/demo/