In Retirement Savings, Young Women Catching Up to Men: MassMutual

Additionally, for older women, "everybody's got a hand in that age group's pocket," Caminiti said. "They're sandwiched in between paying for their own mortgage, paying for their own retirement. Their children are coming up to planning for hundreds of thousands of dollars in college costs. Their parents, who probably didn't save as much as they should have, they're now stepping in and helping them. I think there are more objections in that group just by the nature of the increased demands on them."

MassMutual is not just competing with other retirement plan providers for their customers' attention, but with every other advertiser. "What we try to do in our communications is get five, 20 seconds of the participants' time," Caminiti said. "We know we're competing with Macy's, Dunkin' Donuts, the car ads of the world, so we're trying to get them to focus on what we're trying to say. We want to be one of those three or four messages that really cuts through the noise."

To do that, MassMutual created "personas"to target its communications. The firm combines data from employers like marital status, gender and age, with information it gets from participants' website visits and email responses, and third-party data.

"If we bucket all of that together, we create what we call personas," Caminiti explained. "It's like attributes, like behaviors, like attitudes, and with that, it helps us build a familiarity, build a consensus, which is really important because it helps us get in the mind of those unique individuals and relate to them on a level that matters to them. What that leads to for us is better decision making for our female participants."

MassMutual used this strategy recently on its national campaign. "While to the untrained eye, our campaigns all look the same, we have versions for three different age segments in both genders. The imagery that we use is specific and targeted to each persona."

In addition to sending targeted postcards and emails to participants, MassMutual also targets its personal communications in meetings and webinars, Caminiti said. "It's not a one-size-fits-all. We don't take a blanket approach. We want to make sure that based on the data, based on our research, based on third-party research, what we're saying is important and impactful."