How to Market Your Financial Wellness Program So It Becomes A Highly Valued Employee Benefit

While some employers do take a tool-based or program-based approach to financial wellness in order to address niche needs of specific employee demographics, the marketing of those programs is by nature, much more narrow and limited in scope.  There’s typically a launch to the target population, and periodic reminders at benefits fairs and the like.  With everything employers have to communicate to employees, large scale marketing campaigns around a single tool, perk, or program distract from larger more important goals and can leave employees with information overload and decision-fatigue.  You need the important information to stand out, and each time you send any additional communication to an employee, you take their attention away from the core messages you want to send.

With that in mind, this post is intended for those employers who specifically are focused on offering financial wellness as an employee benefit.

Let me clarify what I mean by offering financial wellness as an employee benefit.  A financial wellness benefit is not a tool, app, niche service, program for a specific population group, a perk, or bullet 178 on the list of things you do to make your company a great place to work.  On the contrary, it is an additional employee benefit, subsidized by you, the employer, to provide every single employee with access to employee unlimited personalized financial coaching to help them maximize their pay and benefits— free of any conflicts of interests or sales pitches.  When you offer employees a true financial wellness benefit, you are making a commitment to their financial security by providing a resource they can turn to at any time, for any financial need, and know that the guidance they get is solely in their best interest, designed around their specific financial priorities, goals, and circumstances.

Accordingly, you need to market your financial wellness benefit the way you would any core benefit.

This starts by always calling it a benefit— not a program, service, platform, tool, resource, app— but an additional employee benefit that you are offering to all employees as part of their overall benefits package.

It also means leveraging all the traditional methods you use to communicate important benefits, including:

  • Your benefits handbook
  • The summary of benefits you provide to employees you are recruiting
  • Your web site in the career section
  • New employee orientation workshops and materials
  • Your benefits portal, in a prominent position as one of your core benefits but also throughout as a resource they can use to better understand the other benefits you offer
  • All your benefits statements in all forms (electronic, print, through apps your vendors provides) since your financial wellness benefit is a resource for employees to better understand and manage all their other benefits
  • All benefits communications where the financial wellness benefit
  • All information regarding changes you are making to benefits
  • All open enrollment materials since your financial wellness

This strategy accomplishes several important objectives:

  1. It positions you as your partner in your employees’ financial security. Some companies are even beginning to rebrand their entire benefits offering as “Employee Financial Wellness”, with the idea that each and every benefit drives this over-arching goal.  If this is too radical a departure from what you are currently doing or not a fit for your culture, then you can simply brand the financial wellness program as its own benefit, consolidating all services from different vendors that provide education and guidance around key financial issues so employees perceive it as a singular benefit designed to help them become more financially secure.
  2. It provides them a sense of relief knowing they have a benefit that can help them make the right decisions about all their benefits— so that as they go through the benefits portal, handbook, new orientation paperwork, they always know they have can get guidance on any of the decisions they have to make.
  3. It drives both awareness and utilization of the benefit. Every single employee should be aware that you are investing in a benefit that supports their financial security— because you care about this aspect of their lives and want them to be as financially healthy as possible.  Utilization is also higher when you classify financial wellness as an employee benefit.  Doing so signals that this is something employees should take advantage of— no one likes the notion of leaving employee benefits on the table.  Also, by integrating financial wellness into all benefits communications, you end up leveraging the infrastructure you already have in place to promote the benefit at a time when employees are actually reviewing their other benefits and most likely to reach out for help.

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