Challenge
Getting people to engage with their pension is hard enough at the best of times. With the cost of living pressures shifting priorities, it’s tougher than ever to get people thinking about their future, over their right now.
At the same time, it is arguably more important than ever too, so people can understand how easy it is to keep track of their pension, to help them enjoy more choice and freedom when they retire.
We discovered that 82% of Scottish Widows members had never logged into the Scottish Widows app. Our challenge then, was to motivate those people to register and start checking in on their pension.
But simply knowing what’s in your pension isn’t going to cut it. We also needed people to know what it meant for them and their future, and encourage them to act.
Solution
Every year we support Scottish Widows during what’s known as ‘Pension Engagement Season’ (PES).
This year, the focus was on encouraging people to pay their pension some attention – the perfect opportunity for getting more people to log into the Scottish Widows app.
We needed an idea that created a buzz and got people talking.
Our insightful research showed us that is can be far more interesting and motivating to see how your savings compare to others like you.
So to do that, we teamed up with Scottish Widows, to gather pension data across people aged 18 - 70. And then created an innovative, interactive tool that scans your face and guesses your age. So you can see what other people your age are saving. The Pension Mirror.
Not only would this motivate people to log in to see what’s in their pot in a fun way (not a word you normally associate with pensions…) but it would give them a meaningful benchmark to measure where they were, so they could see what they need to do to stay on track.
Results
It worked. Our simple idea drove a massive 193% increase in app registrations and a 39% increase in app logins for existing users.
Perhaps most impressively – and unexpectedly – people started sharing their results on professional platforms like LinkedIn and more personal platforms like Meta and X. Helping Pension Mirror reach people far and wide.
Thanks to these results, we also had the opportunity to tweak Pension Mirror to work for people without a Scottish Widows pension and spread the message even further. To support this, we ran a Meta ad for two weeks and saw an incredible 1530% increase in Pension Mirror users and a 340% increase in those users visiting the app store.
By marrying creativity with strategic insight, we’ve motivated people to engage with a topic they’d usually do anything to avoid, while generating fame for Scottish Widows as a pension provider that understands how to engage their customers. With callouts in the press and the Pensions Policy Institute’s yearly report for Pension Mirror’s impressive ability to boost employee engagement with pensions.
Ultimately, we’ve driven tangible change by giving people a springboard to start building a brighter, more secure retirement future.