Edenred is a market leader. In the employee benefits sector, it is doing most things right. It was the company that invented luncheon vouchers, pioneered childcare vouchers 25 years ago, and supplies many UK companies with pensions, employee incentives, eyecare vouchers and a host of other services. It's doing pretty well. 

But when we started talking last year, we knew we could still improve. One area in particular was that we felt we were missing an opportunity to cross-sell services amongst smaller customers. Large corporates had account managers dedicated to working with sophisticated HR departments to manage equally sohpisticated programmes. But smaller companies didn't warrant that kind of support – nor would they appreciate it. 

Research into the needs of those SMEs (companies below 250 employees) revealed a few things about decision makers:

• They were unlikely to be as expert on employee benefits issues
• They were unlikely to attach as much importance to them
• They were unlikely to have a formally allocated budget for employee benefits

This told us that they needed an entirely different programme of support. So we created e.plus – a content and communications programme built around a few key ideas:

• That we should do more supporting and less direct selling 
• That we should appear more friendly, less corporate
• That we should offer content and messages designed for SMEs, not corporates.

Characterised by its friendly, illustration-based style, e.plus was a hub that contained the kind of things SMEs wanted. Tips on how to maximise retention. Advice on burning issues (eg what on earth do you do about pensions auto-enrolment?) and step-by-step guides that trod the thin line between impenetrable jargon and patronising over-simplification. In short, we gave them what they wanted, supported by a structured email programme.

An added touch of genius was to enrol all SME contacts into a scheme called e.plus discounts – giving decision makers a personal incentive to look forward to Edenred emails. E.plus Discounts took the exclusive High Street savings usually reserved to corporate customers, and made them available to all Edenred SME customers. On this point alone, we felt that perhaps treating them as one and the same was a good idea...