When it comes to delivering pension communications that make an impact, it’s all about understanding your audience and having the right strategy in place; it’s about looking at how you can segment that audience then developing appropriate communication solutions that will resonate with them, solutions that will meet them where they are on their own personal journey.
Yes, we know there’s always auto-enrolment for the disengaged to fall back on, but getting people used to the fact that they don't have to make their own decisions only puts them in a situation where they're actually preventing themselves from having choices in the future; where the level of investment, outcome and value that they're getting from their pension arrangement is going to be so low that they won't really have any choice when it comes to what they can actually do with the benefits.
Which is why, however far into that journey they are, people need help to really gain confidence when it comes to figuring out exactly what they need to do.
Strategic approach
Taking a strategic approach to communications will enable you to target the outcomes you want members to achieve. This will drive better outcomes and better decision-making and focusing on a value that enables you to demonstrate that all-important return on investment (ROI) is a good place to start.
The benefits of having a communication strategy with measurable objectives that will really help you prove that ROI are huge. Why? Because today’s members are essentially consumers who expect a level of experience that’s similar to what they see in their everyday lives with the likes of Amazon, for example.
Experiential gap
We know from our annual State of the Sector report that there is a huge gap between what people experience outside of work and the digital experience they get inside work. It's critical that you compete with these external influencers – and to get this right there has to be a two-way flow of information.
We simply can’t treat all members the same anymore. We all have different needs, attitudes and consumer preferences, as well as different ways of receiving, understanding and retaining information. It’s important to demonstrate just how much more effective you can be, by targeting certain demographics or different segments of your audience.
How do you approach this? One word: Digital.
Digital offers huge opportunities when it comes to creating bespoke, personalised experiences, something that we think will soon become industry standard in the next five to ten years.
What we’re essentially talking about here is the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of good communication and personalised experiences – and that all starts with our attitude towards segmentation.
Time to segment
There is much richer information to acquire in terms of segmentation than previously but remember to keep it simple. For example, obviously you wouldn't talk to a young audience at the start of their career, in the same way you would communicate to individuals approaching retirement. But using only segmentation based on age is not a sensible approach to take, because attitude is an equally important consideration.
The key word here is ‘attitude’. If we can use what we know about member attitudes to money then target specific messages to them, we can start to drive specific behaviour – and it's the data that will help us get this right.
Targeting your members and looking at how they’re interacting is a good way to approach that. So, it may well be that you segment the people who are not registered for online accounts and try to drive them to do so that they can interact – and, indeed, you can interact with them – in a more digital way.
By Karen Bolan, Director, Retirement Communication at Gallagher
