The benefits marketing sweet spot: Communicating to achieve population health goals

You want to create a workplace where employees are healthy, happy and able to do their best work. Your suite of health benefits plays a huge part in this and meets diverse needs. But with hundreds of benefits and perks available to your employees and their dependents – how do you make sure that they know about the benefits available to them, in their time of need, without being insensitive or intrusive? 

It’s hard to thread the needle between sharing essential benefits information and overwhelming employees with a barrage of communication from every benefits vendor. Yet data shows how important it is for employers to leverage benefits communication to improve employee retention and satisfaction. 

Expect your benefit vendors to come to you with a communications strategy tailored to your specific population and workforce demographics, driven and supported by data, and working within the channels that you already use to communicate benefits. Also expect your vendors to be constantly learning and improving, as well as sharing performance results. 

Why building awareness is so important 

Guiding employees to your carefully vetted benefits is the key to unlocking their impact potential – both in population health and in population costs. 

Newer categories will require enhanced awareness-building efforts to interrupt the current patient behavior. In the case of digestive health, employees think they need to go to their primary care physician, wait 40-100+ days for a consultation with a local gastroenterologist, and when their symptoms become too distressing, will turn to the emergency room. 

The fact that digestive symptoms are the #1 cause of avoidable ER visits illustrates the challenging landscape of accessing GI care nationwide. 

In contrast, with just a few clicks, a well-informed employee can access Oshi’s team of gastrointestinal specialists who can begin addressing the root cause of their GI issues, leading to a life-changing digestive care experience and reclaiming their life and work from the debilitating effects of GI conditions. 

Your effort to drive awareness and engagement is directly related to your population outcomes and impact: 

Benefits professional, strategic marketer 

Clinically validated specialty healthcare programs are increasingly available through health insurance partners (and billed through medical claims), yet employees aren’t likely to know they have access to this specialized care. Even though Oshi Health is listed as a provider with hundreds of health plans, provider directories are notoriously difficult to navigate and structured for geographic proximity to brick-and-mortar providers. 

Especially for this new breed of virtual, value-based medical benefits available through your health plan networks, employers must embrace a new role: Strategic benefits marketer. 

Your benefits partners will bring you proven elements that strike the right chords of helpful communication. But you know your population best, and other benefits in your ecosystem that pair nicely together. Approach awareness-building with the true spirit of partnership. 

Here are proven strategies to help you succeed in this new role: 

As always, content is king

You might be surprised at how much there is to say that your employees will find valuable. Your benefit partners like Oshi will create content tailored for you – a mix of awareness, education and helpfulness.

Make every direct touchpoint matter…and be measured

Direct touchpoints need to share content that’s helpful to everyone – building trust and credibility. With Oshi Health, we make sure the population knows they do not need to go to the emergency room, nor wait 3 months to see a local gastroenterologist. 

Continual communications that are genuinely helpful allow Oshi to be top of mind when symptoms arise – and make it incredibly easy to start a journey with Oshi with a single click.

Here are three active ways to educate your population in measurable ways: 

#1: Create an educational email drip campaign

Email gets a bad rap, but data shows that email remains effective and helpful, provided that the campaigns are strategic and targeted. 

We recommend that employers market Oshi Health through an email cadence that includes educational content, information about the market, information about GI health, and details on the benefit offerings. This cadence, sent over time, builds trust and helps employees who are suffering from GI distress to get the content they need to address their problems.

#2: Mail flyers to the employee’s home 

Many of the benefits you offer impact family members. By mailing flyers to employee homes, you can reach decision makers in each family, as well as make all beneficiaries aware of the benefits offered to them. 

Flyers should give details on a specific specialized benefit that you offer, share use cases and give the beneficiaries information on how to access that benefit.  

#3: List health & wellness benefits in your offer letters

New employees often set aside dedicated time to pour over all of their paperwork, making it an ideal time to introduce benefits or give employees insight into what they are offered.

Adding a list of benefits and a short description of each one to your offer letters is a great way to show your new hires the thoughtful offerings you have, and to give them an easy place to reference these benefits should they need them at some time in the future. 

Quietly build awareness in passive channels 

Your benefits partners should provide constant monitoring of employees enrolling in care via passive channels as well. Expect your vendors to keep you continually informed, with data, to show what tactics are working. 

Here are three passive ways to help your employees find the care they need: 

#1: Meet them where they are: Bathroom flyers

When we first started telling benefits teams about hanging flyers inside of bathroom stalls to let employees know about Oshi Health’s GI care benefits, most people snickered at the idea. They’ve proven to be incredibly effective. Employee after employee learned about a benefit that they needed… and reported to their HR teams that this knowledge made a huge difference in their health.

Since then, these have become one of the best performing communications tools. 

#2: Educational content on employee intranet

Sharing helpful health information via your internal portal, your website, or a company newsletter is a great way to help employees become aware of the benefits they have available. For example, this article about how gut health impacts mental health sheds light on how poor GI health can trigger anxiety and depression. Or perhaps sharing a healthy recipe that can support GI health would be helpful to employees who are struggling. 

#3: Host a “here when you need it” webinar

Most companies offer a suite of benefits that include specialized programs that are only needed at certain life stages or in certain situations. That said, when someone needs these services, they need them.

Offer a “Here When You Need It” webinar, record it, and make it easily accessible on internal information channels. 

What about segmentation? 

The audience for digestive health information is…almost everyone. GI is a unique category because of its prevalence. Two out of three employees experience GI symptoms every week, but only 1 in 4 are formally diagnosed. If your employee doesn’t struggle with their own digestive health, chances are good that they have a loved one who does. 

Identifying your GI-prevalent population is difficult. GI-related issues are the 2nd highest cause of workplace absenteeism – right behind the common cold, but gaps in diagnosis and care make it hard to identify people about to escalate. 

One other thing to keep in mind is that GI health flare-ups can be episodic – they don’t align with open enrollment or with a benefits roll-out, so providing your employees with helpful information is a great way to build a supportive culture, and to get employees thinking about their gut health proactively. 

A healthy, engaged and informed population

A recent survey demonstrated that as many as 52% of employees don’t feel like they fully understand the benefits they have available to them. Still, we also know that employee retention and satisfaction (not to mention productivity) are tied to effective internal communications. In fact, one study we saw said that employees who consider themselves “healthy” are as high as 60% more productive, and more than 40% more engaged. 

In simple terms, we know that our care model works. Our outcomes justify the need to market Oshi to employees – because when employees utilize Oshi Health services, they feel better and therefore become healthier. In fact, 92% of Oshi patients find relief in 10 weeks or less. 

At Oshi, we are here to support you, just as you support your populations. We want your people to know that they already have high-quality digestive health support available to them, and we want you to have the tools to share Oshi with your teams. 

Ultimately, by giving your employees the information they need to access the benefits they have, you save your company money without costing your company anything. Oshi is likely already an in-network provider with your health plan, so your team can reap the benefits without spending a dime – as long as your employees know about it. 

By supporting your employee’s health, everyone wins. Your employees, your company, and you.