Benefits communications is broken. Here's what global enterprise leaders are doing about it.

When was the last time you sent a benefits email and genuinely believed it would reach the person who needed it most?

Not the early adopters or the people who already know where to look. The person whose partner was just diagnosed with cancer. The one taking more sick days than usual. The one who's been with the company for three years and still doesn't know the fertility benefit exists.

That was the question at the centre of Ben's Q2 Product Innovation Forum. And the answer, from a room full of senior Reward and Benefits leaders, was uncomfortable.

Most of them weren't reaching those people. They knew it. And most of the time, they found out three months too late.

"Until it's relevant, you block it all out"

There's a version of benefits communications that looks fine on paper. The email goes out. The open rate is reasonable. The benefit is technically available. Job done.

The problem is that benefits aren't like other communications. A mental health coaching app, a fertility benefit, a compassionate leave policy — these things only become important to someone at a specific moment in their life. And that moment rarely coincides with the quarterly wellbeing newsletter.

One leader put it directly: "Until those things are relevant for you, you just block it all out. And then when you find out it's three months too late."

Another described something harder to fix: "I don't think anyone's going to come into work and type 'miscarriage' into their intranet site. So you have someone who's deeply in need of support but can't access it, doesn't know, isn't aware. We spend all that money on those benefits — and the person who actually needs it has zero knowledge or awareness."

This is the gap between what organisations think their benefits programme is doing, and what it's actually doing.

The gap between ambition and infrastructure

When the room was asked who felt confident in their marketing skills, a few hands went up — cautiously.

One attendee described the problem clearly: "Marketing is not only communications — it's also: do I do the data analysis that a real marketing function would do before and after? And I don't think I'm doing this well enough. A provider does it for me, but do I really look thoroughly through the data to measure the impact of what I've done?"

Another flagged the effort-to-output ratio: "The effort to produce eight versions of one email was immense. You change one word and you have to change it in eight places."

Leaders weren't struggling with ambition, they were struggling with infrastructure.

A marketer in the room

The Q2 forum introduced someone new: Ben's senior email marketing manager, Lauren Smith.

She joined us to share how lifecycle marketing actually works — and why the same principles can apply directly to benefits communication.

Her starting point: every campaign, regardless of size or sector, follows the same logic. Define the outcome. Pick the audience. Choose the channel and timing. Write the content. Measure what worked.

Simple enough. But the execution is where benefits teams consistently fall down.

"Marketing is about relevancy," she told the room. "If it's not relevant to someone, it's just annoying."

She walked through how a fashion retailer might handle a single campaign to three completely different audiences — new customers, repeat buyers, lapsed shoppers — with different triggers, different messages, and different calls to action. Then she applied the same logic to a mental health coaching benefit.

• New joiners get context: here's what this is, here's why we offer it, here's how to access it.
• Employees already engaged with wellness benefits get a nudge: you use the gym benefit — this sits next to it.
• Employees taking above-average sick days who haven't enrolled yet get something different entirely: quiet, empathetic, no pressure. We've got this. Six sessions, fully confidential. Here's how it works.

Same benefit. Three different conversations.

Finding the right channels for your audience

The consensus in the room was that email still has a place — but nobody was under any illusions about how crowded the inbox is. Slack and Teams have higher open rates, but come with their own chaos: misinformation from well-meaning colleagues, anonymous channels, and posts that spiral.

"Someone would go onto our internal Facebook equivalent and say 'I've heard we're relaunching the iPad scheme' — then they start embellishing the details. That post just blows up. It becomes another channel you have to manage," said one attendee. Their team decided to shut down all country-by-country benefits Slack channels as they were becoming too hard to manage. Comments were turned off on intranet posts.

"One bad experience from one employee can get back to your CPO and you're spending days trying to explain the situation."

One leader flagged that moving questions to a ticketing system like ServiceNow at least makes the data traceable — but acknowledged the friction: "It's easier for someone to just fire off a quick comment. People are lazy."

And toilet door posters, for the record, were unanimously endorsed as underrated. "Captive audience," as one attendee put it.

Taking care with signal-based targeting

There was a section of the conversation that gets to the heart of why benefits communications is hard in a way that eCommerce never is.

Signal-based targeting — using sick day data, life events, engagement patterns to reach the right people — is powerful. It's also sensitive.

"I'm not going to target every woman over 25 with a fertility benefit, like I'm saying 'tick tock, time is ticking,'" one leader said. "That's totally inappropriate."

The room agreed that the answer isn't to avoid targeting. It's to be careful about the language. "It's less about the audience and more about the messaging," said Lauren. "You'd say: 'We noticed you haven't seen this — did you know we have this available?' That's very different."

One leader added a point that often gets missed: most benefits — menopause provision, for example — aren't just relevant to the people experiencing them. Partners need to know it exists too. "You're probably never going to target men with menopause-related content. But actually, if you're a good family member, all of those things matter to you."

Parental leave campaigns that only go to mothers. Fertility benefits that only go to women in certain age groups. These are the assumptions baked into many targeting approaches.

Where the right technology can help

The product demo centred on a campaign for a mental health coaching benefit. The platform had already identified who was using it — and who wasn't — flagging 310 employees who had recently become parents as potentially experiencing increased stress, and 400 employees who had shown prior engagement signals.

From that, the platform suggested a ready-to-review, three-step campaign: email first, Slack for anyone who didn't open, in-app for anyone who still hadn't engaged. Different copy generated automatically for each cohort. Suppression lists built in. A defined value action — book a session — with a success target of 20 bookings within 30 days.

The reaction from the room was immediate.

One leader described a pension campaign they'd run: 26 different email versions, segmented by contribution rate and age group, all written manually by a communications expert. It worked. But the effort was significant. The idea that the same level of segmentation could be available to any benefits manager, on demand, landed hard.

"This is game-changing," said one attendee. "I've been trying to do this for a number of years. If at a global level we can set certain parameters and the agent can suggest things for local teams to run — they can run things on a more regular basis rather than firefighting."

The bigger picture

What stayed in the room after the demo wasn't really about technology.

It was about what it would mean for a Reward and Benefits team to actually operate like a marketing function. To know which employees are most likely to need a particular benefit, and when. To send three different messages instead of one, without tripling the workload. To close the loop between what was sent and what actually changed.

The gap between intent and execution in benefits communications is well understood. Most teams know they're not reaching the people who matter most. What's changing is the infrastructure to do something about it.

As one attendee put it: "I don't want them thinking I was targeting them because they had sick days. But I do want to reach them. The difference is in how."

Hear from those who attended on the day:

Want to be part of the next conversation?

Ben's Product Innovation Forums bring together a carefully selected group of senior Reward and Benefits leaders from complex, global organisations to talk honestly about what's changing — and what actually helps. We meet quarterly for a working session of practical discussion, live product demo, and space to challenge what's next.

If you're a Reward or Benefits leader and this kind of conversation sounds useful, register your place for our Q3 event.