By Jeffrey Hemker, national manager, Retirement Division, Invesco
Plan sponsors spend a significant amount of time crafting and deploying employee benefit communications, with 73% using e-mail to get the word out. Despite these efforts, 80% of participants do not open and read materials and, of those who do open, almost half don’t fully understand the content, according to an International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans’ Communications Survey in February.
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Have you noticed a manic feeling on Monday mornings when your inbox is packed with new e-mail, but you’re in a hurry to get to work? You scan through this deluge quickly, routinely deleting the apparent “unimportant” messages. But wait … somewhere in this weekly rush may be opportunity lost—for you and certainly for employees.
As plan sponsors, you often have important information to communicate to employees about their benefits, such as retirement plan changes and health plan offerings, many associated with critical deadlines. It’s imperative that employees read and internalize the information to get the most of out of their benefits program—but how?
Fine-tune your timing
What’s the takeaway from this Monday-morning delete ritual? Simply that Monday isn’t the best time to send e-mails. In fact, research shows that most e-mails are read on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Interestingly, Tuesday and Thursday—two of the highest-volume e-mail days—are also the 2 days with the highest open rates, e-mail platform Mail Chimp found in 2015.