Static to dynamic, headache to pain reliever, Wayne Wall is looking to transform the way employers communicate benefits through technology - and the CEO of Flimp Media, Inc. believes Flimp's "video landing pages" are the answer.

While the product is useable across any number of industries, an example of one school district that was able to successfully establish and implement an open enrollment communications plan in only 10 days shows its relevance to the employee benefits arena.

The landing pages, themselves called "flimps" (which stands for "Flash interactive marketing platform"), consist of customizable Web sites created with Flash technology that include customer or Flimp-produced video, links to printable PDFs, flexible online forms and other "calls to action" that direct the employee to the next step, says Wall.

Success story

The School District of Philadelphia utilized the technology for their 2010 benefits communication. "Flimp enabled us to solve a very significant problem for benefits communicators of educating employees in a cost-effective and simple way without regional meetings or unnecessary print brochure mailings," says Director of Benefits Stephanie Fedoroff. "We received a great response from our initial flimp campaign."

The 6,500 district employees received a trackable e-mail directing them to their relevant flimp. As employees visited the Web site, detailed data about their engagement with the videos and other links were made available to the school district. Flimp is able to monitor multiple performance indicators, such as number of views, amount of time spent on the site and average viewing time, as well as where the e-mails are forwarded.

"We're getting 10 times more engagement time than you get with static communication - and we can measure it," says Wall.

Of Flimp's 150 customers' 3 million flimp views across 250 active accounts during 2008-2009, the average watch-to-completion rate was 40%, while average viewing time totaled 1.3 minutes, Wall reports. Impressive compared with the typical eight seconds a person spends viewing a standard HTML e-mail. Additionally, the video start rate was 98%, with an average response rate of 23%.

"We're at the very early stage of this transformation from static to rich in the benefits communication world," says Wall.

The School District of Philadelphia's success provides an example of the benefits. The district saw an increase in flexible spending account participation of more than 22% - double their anticipated goal.

"Flimp video sites are a perfect solution for workplace benefits enrollment, as they are measurable, inexpensive and much more engaging than traditional mailing of print brochures or static e-mails and benefits Web content," says Wall. "Intelligent video communications are likely to play an important role in employee benefits enrollment and education in the near future for health care, insurance and financial services."

CDHPs

The increasing use of consumer-driven health care plans will only escalate the need for employee engagement in benefits communications, Wall adds.

"What we're seeing with larger employers is more employee-driven plans, and there's a lot of education involved in that," he says. "I think this is where we're going to see a lot of activity because the employer wants to drive their employees to consumer-driven health plans but doesn't have a good, compelling communication strategy for getting that done. You need audio-visual content to really educate and explain why that's more desirable - and have it be on demand so that those employees can send it home and watch it on their own computers and interact with it."

The alternative - print communications - just doesn't cut it any more, he adds. "When in comes to insurance, financial products and even health care products, it's too dry for people to want to wade through all that information. They're not going to engage unless it's presented to them in a more entertaining way."

Multiple levels

Flimp has already worked with Humana, Willis, USI, Affinity, Allstate, MetLife and "a number of different insurance companies" in their communication and marketing efforts. The product is conducive to the brokerage structure because one master account is able to support multiple underlying accounts that allow individual brokers and consultants to aid and track their specific clients' interests.

The data are particularly helpful in showing agents which voluntary benefits offerings are getting the most page views and forwards and which ones don't. "These metrics blow the minds of some of the marketing people in the insurance industry because they're not used to getting such data in real time that really drills down to what the individual is doing," says Wall.

"We can see where people go and who they are, and then we can export the data for the insurance provider or the employer to show them what the employees are responding to. It's dynamite for voluntary benefits, but it also gives us additional insight on health or financial benefits on what people are interested in."

Cost control

Going all-digital with open enrollment communications is not only beneficial from a time-saving and engagement standpoint, but it also saves employers, consultants and insurance carriers big bucks on paper costs. "People are trying to really turn down that print spend," says Wall.

The annual cost to maintain a Flimp account is usually based on the number of landing pages in an account. For those customers who want Flimp to create their videos for them, the company is able to produce professional videos quickly and inexpensively through a video production partner that maintains 2,000-plus videographers around the country.

"Technology is a headache," says Wall, "and if you can empower people to do marketing communications digitally without having to have IT resources or programming capabilities it's really a huge breakthrough."

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