Quantifying Success: Increasing the value of your communications
Understanding and measuring the effectiveness of participant communications is essential for multiemployer or single employer health plans seeking to improve engagement in, and awareness of plan benefits and wellness or cost-saving programs. How do you know if your communications are reaching participants? Who is engaging with them? And what tactics simply aren’t effective?
The best way to answer these questions and create compelling and impactful communications is to track and measure your communications and then adjust your outreach accordingly.
First, define your overall objectives
When starting out on a journey, it’s important to have an idea of where you want to go, before you figure out how to get there. Before kicking off a communications campaign, you’ll first want to define your goals, keeping in mind the best goals are SMART:
- Specific – what are you trying to achieve?
- Measurable – how will you know if you are successful?
- Achievable – is it realistic?
- Relevant – does it help you reach your larger goals?
- Time-bound – what is the time frame for achieving the goal?
A strong call to action
Every communication—whether it’s a letter, postcard, flyer, email, text, presentation, or blog post—should have a clear and measurable call to action. For example, the call to action might be to visit a web page, download a document, sign up for an event, fill out a survey, or subscribe to a newsletter. This will provide data (the number of hits on a webpage, registrations for an event, etc.) to evaluate the success of your communication.
Collect online data
Tracking and analyzing the activity on your plan’s website can also help you measure the effectiveness of digital, paper-based, or in-person communications, especially if the communication drives participants to the site for information. You can track the site usage, top pages visited, how long they stayed on the page and more with Google Analytics or other tools to gather insights for your next communications.
Track meaningful metrics
Web hits aren’t the only useful data to gather. You can identify and track other meaningful metrics that are not website-related, such as the number of support calls the plan office receives. This way you can see if calls decline as participants become better educated. You can also incorporate QR codes or custom links into communications and track how many people reach a specific web page via a specific communication.
Compare and contrast
You can work with your vendors to track program participation and inquiries to see if participation increases when communications about the program go out. Is there an uptick in program enrollment after an email or letter goes out? Tracking engagement before and after campaigns can help you better understand how best to reach your participants.
Gather feedback
Participants are the best source to learn what is working and what isn’t. You can ask for feedback on communications in a variety of ways: by using focus groups, online surveys, or interviews; or speaking with union reps, HR professionals or others who have frequent interaction with participants.
Increasing plan awareness and engagement can take time, and measurable results are generally only seen after a sustained period of consistent, regular communications. Measuring the success of your communications tactics and making adjustments based on the results can help you better educate your participants, boost enrollment in programs, ensure appropriate use of benefits, improve the participant experience and cut down on confusion and calls.
Want to learn more?
Rael & Letson’s Communications team works with Trustees and plan administrators to create comprehensive strategic communications plans that best reach, educate and motivate participants. We help implement and measure participant communications for the best results.
To find out how we can help you improve your participant communications and boost engagement, please contact us.