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Benefits represent nearly 30% of everything companies spend on their people. Only 44% of employees feel they have a good understanding of the health and wellbeing benefits available to them. And employee satisfaction with benefit offerings has actually fallen over the past year, from 66% to 61%.
The gap between what companies spend on benefits and what employees actually experience is, in almost every case, a communications problem. One with a practical fix.
The instinct that makes it worse
The instinct is to treat benefits communications as a launch project. The benefits team spends months on procurement, implementation, and stakeholder sign-off. Comms gets four weeks. The result is a front-loaded all-staff email on day one, a page buried in the intranet, and a staff handbook nobody reads after their first week.
GRiD research found that organisations use four channels on average to communicate benefits, the most common being welcome packs, day-one briefings, and staff handbooks. All passive, all front-loaded, and still the message isn't getting through. A further 18% of UK employers leave uptake entirely to employees to initiate themselves. 34% of employers believe their staff are unaware of or don't understand what's on offer.
The problem isn't invisible to HR teams. Fixing it requires a different way of thinking about the work.
From launch-thinking to lifecycle-thinking
Most benefits communications is built around the launch moment, not the moments when a benefit actually matters to someone. A new parent wants to know about parental leave when they find out they're expecting. Someone feeling cost-of-living pressure wants to know about the discount card in that moment. The information exists. It reaches people at the wrong time.
The shift that makes the biggest difference is from broadcast to lifecycle. A launch is a moment. Engagement is ongoing. The comms plan that stops at go-live produces a spike in day-one logins and flat utilisation by month three. The real work is what happens after launch: the relevant, timely communication that keeps benefits visible in the moments they matter.
There's a useful way to think about the two layers of communications any benefits programme needs. The first tells employees what happened: your enrolment is confirmed, your wallet has loaded, your life event has been recorded. The second drives them to do something: here's a benefit you're eligible for and haven't used, here's your enrolment window closing in three days, here's what colleagues in your situation have found useful. Most benefits platforms only do the first. The second is where engagement is actually built.
What segmentation actually means in practice
HR systems already hold the data needed to segment benefits communications: demographics, life stage, location, employment type, benefit eligibility. Two or three audience profiles built from that data, with a message designed for each, is enough to improve relevance meaningfully.
49% of employees say personalised benefit recommendations would increase their confidence in making benefits decisions. Employees who receive personalised guidance are nearly twice as likely to feel prepared for retirement, 81% versus 47% (Voya). Personalisation is what makes the difference between information and action.
Channel matters as much as message. Email defaults dominate because it's familiar and measurable. But for employees without desks, in warehouses or on the road, it barely registers. Reaching those employees means going where they actually are: Slack or Teams on a mobile device, a Monday morning briefing, a line manager conversation. A manager briefed on what's changing is far more useful than one who gets the all-staff email at the same time as everyone else.
Most enterprise Reward teams are running communications out of spreadsheets, HRIS exports, and email tools that nobody owns end-to-end. Segmentation requires exporting employee data, cleaning it manually, re-importing it into a separate tool, and firing a send that nobody can measure back to benefit enrolment. The result is campaigns that are infrequent because they're painful to set up, generic because proper segmentation is hard, and unmeasured because there's no feedback loop.
What it looks like when it's working
At Ben, we have a Slack channel where employees share what they've spent their flexible allowance on each month. Those posts are the best benefits communication we produce, because they're not communication at all. They're evidence. Real people, real choices, real outcomes. That does more for utilisation than any well-written all-staff email.
The principle is straightforward: move from 'here are your benefits' to 'here's how we support you.' The message that names a situation a person is in, and connects it to something they have access to, lands in a way a benefits catalogue never will.
What the platform needs to make this possible
A marketing approach to benefits communications only scales if the platform supports it. Most benefits platforms treat communications as a broadcast function, which goes some way to explaining the utilisation numbers the industry is currently reporting.
Ben's Advanced communications module is built around a different premise. Segmentation is built directly on the HRIS data Ben already holds, so a Benefits Manager can target new parents, employees in a specific country, or people who haven't engaged with a benefit they're eligible for, without exporting a spreadsheet or switching to a separate tool.
Campaigns are delivered across email, in-app, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, which means the message reaches employees where they actually work, not just where HR assumes they check in. Event-based triggers fire automatically when an employee joins, has a life event, or changes eligibility, turning one-off broadcasts into always-on, behaviour-driven engagement.
And campaign analytics tie back to benefit enrolment, so the Reward leader can show not just that a message was sent but that it drove action.
That last point matters more than it might seem. When the Reward team is asked to justify the benefits budget in front of the board, the data they currently have is "68% of employees enrolled." What they need is "the campaigns we ran drove 24% higher uptake in the segments we targeted." The first number doesn't justify next year's spend. The second does.
One structural difference worth naming: Ben charges a fixed annual fee for Advanced communications with no per-campaign charges. Competitors who charge per campaign end up throttling the exact behaviour the product is supposed to enable. Reward teams ration sends, skip the follow-up nudge, and don't experiment. A pricing model that penalises frequency is a communications strategy that can't compound.
The post-launch phase most teams skip
The phase that almost every benefits communications plan underinvests in is the one after launch. Pre-launch creates anticipation. Launch makes the announcement. Post-launch is where most of the value either gets captured or lost.
Low utilisation usually means employees forgot, didn't understand how to access something, or received the communication at the wrong moment. A targeted reminder built around a seasonal moment, a life-stage trigger, or a usage data signal is enough to move the dial. Back to school, new year, key renewal windows, financial wellbeing moments. A content calendar built around these touchpoints is one of the most practical tools available to a lean benefits team.
The data to build that calendar already exists inside the benefits platform: utilisation rates by benefit, by segment, by time period, engagement with previous communications. The signal is there. The question is whether the platform surfaces it clearly enough to act on.
The return on getting this right
Benefit costs are rising, up 3.6% in the past year, and 90% of US employers cite rising benefit costs as their top strategic issue. The pressure to demonstrate return on that investment is real.
The benefits are often genuinely good. Closing the gap between what companies are spending and what employees are experiencing takes a marketing approach, applied consistently, supported by a platform built to make it operational.
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