What Gets Employees to Pay Attention? It Depends.

Benefits teams regularly communicate about topics that seem broad enough to matter to almost everyone: fitness, retirement, nutrition, stress management, sleep. 

Each is important. Each may deserve workforce-wide visibility. Yet employee-selected interest data shows that no single topic reflects the priorities of even half the workforce. 

That creates a difficult engagement challenge: How do employers communicate about benefits that may matter broadly without assuming the same topic, message, or action will feel relevant to everyone? 

That’s where Evive helps separate signal from noise. 

Evive is bswift’s personalized recommendation engine. It delivers year-round, data-driven nudges designed to guide employees toward cost-conscious decisions and healthier outcomes. Each logic-backed recommendation triggers timely, relevant messages that drive action, whether encouraging preventive care, supporting condition management, or improving benefits utilization. 

Evive draws on millions of data points, including claims and spending behavior, enrollment and eligibility data, employee-selected preferences, and patterns across employee interactions over time. Together, these inputs help Evive personalize engagement with greater precision, making each interaction more timely and better aligned to individual needs. 

One source of those employee-selected preferences is Evive Profile Builder, an experience that allows members to identify the interests and health topics they care about most. Those selections add another layer of context to the broader data Evive uses to determine which content and resources matter most to each member at a given moment in time. 

For this analysis, the Signals by Evive data team examined two related signals: employee-selected interests across five common benefits and wellbeing topics, and the performance of personalized retirement, financial, and preventive-screening emails against industry open and click-through benchmarks. 

No single topic reflects most employees’ stated interests

Our data from Profile Builder illustrates just how limited any single topic is as a proxy for workforce relevance. 

As the chart below shows, fitness was the most frequently selected interest, but only 38% of employees chose it.  

Even the most frequently selected topic reflects the stated interests of fewer than four in ten employees. 

That doesn’t mean the remaining employees have no need for support in those areas. It shows that stated interest is fragmented and cannot, by itself, define what matters at a particular moment. A message about fitness, retirement, or sleep may be highly valuable to some employees while carrying little immediate meaning for others. 

The implication is clear: Topic popularity can help shape broad communication, but it cannot determine what any individual employee needs to see next. 

What employees want to hear about is only part of the picture

Employee preferences provide valuable context, but they can’t fully define relevance. Employees may not know which screenings they’re due for, which programs they’re eligible to use, or where a different decision could improve their health or reduce their costs. 

The chart below shows how that distinction plays out in engagement.  

Personalized retirement and financial emails produced open rates 19% above the industry benchmark and click-through rates nearly twice as high. Preventive-screening recommendations performed even more strongly, with open rates 27% above benchmark and click-through rates more than three times higher. 

That contrast clarifies the role of personalization. Retirement is among employees’ more frequently selected interests, while preventive screenings may not register as an ongoing interest at all. Yet a timely screening recommendation can generate stronger engagement because it identifies a specific need and gives the employee a clear next step. 

What employees say they want to hear about and what prompts them to act are related, but they’re not identical. Effective personalization needs to account for both expressed interest and needs employees may not yet recognize. 

What this means for benefits engagement

Broad communications can build awareness, culture, and momentum around shared workforce priorities. Personalized engagement carries that momentum into the individual decisions employees make throughout the year. 

Those decisions shape whether employees use the benefits available to them, complete preventive care, avoid unnecessary costs, and get support before a need becomes more serious. 

That’s why Evive draws on a constellation of inputs. Employee-selected interests provide one valuable signal, alongside claims, spending, enrollment, eligibility, and behavioral data. Together, those inputs help identify what may matter to each member now, including needs the employee may not yet recognize. 

The stakes extend far beyond message performance. The right recommendation, delivered at the right moment, can change what an employee does next. Across a workforce, those small decisions accumulate into something much larger – the difference between benefits that are simply offered and benefits that meaningfully improve people’s lives. 

Source: Internal Evive data; benchmarks: PoliteMail 2025 and Mailchimp 2025.