Through its history working with leading carriers of all types of voluntary and workplace benefits, the company has developed and refined the following engagement best practices:

Use business intelligence to understand your audience. In order to perform the proper data analysis, you'll need to collect demographic and sociographic information about your members from a variety of sources. This will help you assess each member's baseline engagement level and their unique needs, preferences and lifestyle.
Segment your membership. Once you have all of the information detailed above, you can then segment your member population to prepare for implementation of personalized outreach. For example, engagement efforts to promote a disability plan to older, self-employed individuals is a very different process compared to encouraging a millennial at a tech startup to purchase travel insurance.
Develop your targeted interventions. To start, consider implementing simple drip campaigns using channels like email marketing. However, you'll also want to collect a member's communication preferences up front to better understand whether text, email or other outreach is their desired channel.
Show, don't tell. Engagement outreach should be predominantly visual, as videos, infographics and imagery all receive better response rates than content-heavy methods.
Get interactive. Solicit member feedback through surveys and quizzes to encourage dialogue with the member, while collecting valuable data about their lifestyle and preferences.
Mix it up. Using the same tired messaging and visuals will make your engagement efforts feel stale. Developing unique outreach efforts each time is critical to maintaining engagement over time.
Engage, don't sell. While there are opportunities to upsell and retain members inherent in the engagement process, always remember that your aim is to build a dialogue and to give members valuable information and resources.
Tracking response rates and refining your approach. For example, Genius Avenue offers a business intelligence dashboard which contains all of the insights collected about a group's members. This includes age, gender, premium rate, and length of vendor relationships. It also integrates financial, web, census, and Twitter data to provide a full picture of each member.

While there is more to engagement than meets the eye, these principles point to some of the critical steps involved in developing, refining and measuring a consumer engagement model. Research shows that engagement strategies like these can drive increases to member retention, referrals and overall satisfaction.

Instant Insights /

The consumer engagement model is poised to shake up the benefits industry

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