SAP get creative to grow employee benefit program engagement

Established: 1972

Industry: Technology

No. of employees: 107k globally

The situation

SAP is committed to investing in employee benefit programs, resources and support to empower their people to run at their best. The reward and benefit team is always looking for innovative and fresh ways to grow benefit program engagement.

Together with nudge, the team planned a financial education communication strategy, designed to impact bonus sacrifice engagement. The communications delivered such outstanding results that the campaign won highly commended for Most Impactful Communications at the Financial Wellbeing Impact Awards 2023.

The solution

The communication plan was laser focused on the right timings, and channels, to reach employees at exactly the right time for them and their financial circumstances. In this case, the goal of the financial education communication was to help SAP people understand bonus sacrifice and what it means for them.

Previous insight revealed that WhatsApp is the most effective channel to reach their people. All the communications were written for WhatsApp and to utilize push notifications through the benify app, to connect and engage employees, more than a standard company email ever could. The content of the financial education, that includes personalized nudges, posts, articles, stories covered:

• The SAP Bonus sacrifice window
• The benefits of bonus sacrifice: savings in NI & tax and additional savings from SAP
• Education on allowances with a link
• Instructions on how employees can sacrifice their bonus
• Flex window

The outcomes

• "Here's a smart way to use your bonus" nudge resulted in 50% open and 20.6% click-through rate. In comparison to the previous bonus sacrifice nudges we can see improvement across open rate and CTR
  • July 22 bonus sacrifice: 49.5% open and 11% CTR.
  • July 21 bonus sacrifice: 38% open

• 380 employees waiving their bonus, resulting in £5 million waived.
• The second most-read nudge article was "Tax relief on pension contributions." Demonstrating the deeper level of interest this communication plan influenced.
• Flex window communication led to 61.4% open rate and 35.5% CTR, that’s significantly over the average (30%) for this type of activity.