4 Ways (and Several Ideas) to Stay Top-of-Mind between Open Enrollment Periods While Increasing Your Value and Preparing Clients for The Next Open Enrollment Season
Planning and preparing for open enrollment is a year-round initiative for top brokers, even though open enrollment lasts for just a matter of days each year. Prepping clients for open enrollment solidifies your foundation for future growth, providing you the opportunity to increase sales associated with additional benefits and transforms how clients think about employee health and wellness.
Time between Open Enrollment Periods is Time to Use
Time between open enrollment periods is the best time to educate clients and their employees about essential benefits that people don’t realize they need until disaster hits. It’s also time to show clients why employee health and wellness is a long-term, ongoing initiative that requires proactive, forward-thinking planning and action.
And, it’s a time to provide value so that you stay top-of-mind.
Here’s how you and other great brokers may want to leverage this time to get ahead:
1. Take advantage of recognition days, holidays, and events to lay the foundation for the next open enrollment period and increase sales in the meantime.
Keeping a list of awareness days on your laptop, phone, or calendar makes it easier to find and remember the days you want to use to share helpful information and promote your services. An awareness day calendar may also be helpful.
April is full of days that could be great “excuses” to reach out to clients. For example, April is National Car Care Month, and as such, April is a great time to talk about a commuter benefits plan.
April is also a great time to reach out to clients and prospects about a variety of other topics. For example:
April is National Occupational Therapy Month. National Occupational Therapy Month is an opportunity to share helpful information about disability insurance. Nearly 100 million workers lack disability income insurance and nearly 70% of workers in the private sector have no private long-term disability insurance. Combine this fact with the reality that few individuals can live on social security alone and you have a recipe for disaster.1 Spending the entire month talking about the value of disability insurance is an excellent way to connect Occupational Therapy Month with the voluntary benefits you offer.
Earth Day (4/22). Leverage Earth Day as an opportunity to promote how you can help clients eliminate redundant data entry and automatically update carriers, payroll providers, and third parties, with no manual effort. You may also want to explain how you can help clients go paperless, get the reports they need 24/7, and improve COBRA compliance through automation.
National Playground Safety Week (4/23 – 4/30). Life has many unexpected twists and turns; a playful afternoon on the school playground could lead to a trip to the emergency room. Put National Playground Safety Week to work for you and share information about revolutionary health savings accounts that bridge the gap between what you’ve saved in an HSA account and what you owe. With many employees having annual deductibles over $1,000, a surprise medical expense could easily put them into debt.3 Explaining how you can help your clients’ employees avoid debt is a great way to make use of National Playground Safety Week.
And don’t forget…
Holidays are a great time to share information about nearly any product or service you provide. You also want to share what you learn at any conference or broker event you attend throughout the year.
2. Stress the fact that you are available all year-round and during open-enrollment to help clients and their employees with the complexities of online enrollment, so they continue to work with you.
Even with decision-support tools and online enrollment, individuals will still want the reassurance that comes from talking through their questions with a human expert. Reminding clients and their employees that you offer one-on-one support at regular intervals during the year will make them feel comfortable and confident. It will also drive engagement.
Just keep in mind you, you’ll want to feel out how often is too often to send these types of messages. This can be done by looking at email open rates, surveying clients and their employees, and asking them if they’re aware of your offer to support them one-on-one during open enrollment.
Send reminders to clients about deadlines and other essential updates to increase preparedness for the next open enrollment session and beyond.
Send automated messages and alerts to save time and keep clients up-to-date and in the loop. You’ll want to customize the messages you send to clients and communicate through multiple channels—email, mobile text messaging, and in-person meetings. Personalized emails increase click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10%, and emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened.4
Here are a few quick tips to help you customize your messages:
- Sort clients into groups based on similarities and personalize emails and messages by group.
- Create a catchy subject line for each message using the four U’s—urgent, useful, unique, and ultra-specific.
- Provide value right away in the body of the message.
4. Develop your social media presence and website to increase your reach and promote your services so you can acquire and prepare additional clients before open enrollment.
Every broker needs to have an online presence that includes a website and social media.
On your website, you’ll want to include a blog, as websites with a blog have 43% more indexed pages, which increases your visibility online.5 Use your blog to share real life stories, demonstrating how you and your toolkit of resources solved a challenge for a client.
When creating a blog post, consider the following:
- 43% of clients and prospects will skim your posts.
- 36% of your readers will gravitate toward list posts.
- 94% of people who share posts share posts because they believe the content in the post will help others.
Be sure to promote each blog post on all of your social media platforms to drive engagement and help build your network.
Help is A Click Away
Optimizing the time between open enrollment periods is essential. However, doing so is often easier said than done. If you’re unsure where to start or you need more resources to support your marketing and communication efforts between enrollment periods, partner with a reliable benefits administrator. They’ll be able to connect you to a wealth of informational materials which will cut down on the time you spend creating and promoting your services through content and communication.
With a reliable partner at your side, you’ll have more time to deepen your relationships with clients and prospects before the next open enrollment period. You’ll also find it easier to transform how your clients think about benefits. Learn more about how you can get the support you need to market yourself between open enrollment periods and ease the open enrollment process at Clarity Benefit Solutions.
Sources:
1. http://www.disabilitycanhappen.org/chances_disability/disability_stats.asp
2. http://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Paper-Waste-Facts
3. https://healthpayerintelligence.com/news/high-deductible-health-plans-dominate-employer-offerings
4. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2017/08/15-email-personalization-stats-might-surprise-you/
5. https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/blogging-statistics-to-boost-your-strategy
