Email marketing has experienced huge growth over the past few years. Understanding how to use it can improve your profitability substantially. Here are some steps to follow when thinking about email marketing:
Have an objective
Make sure that you have an aim in mind for your recruitment email campaign. Why are you sending this out? Is it to get candidate to update their CVs? Is it to get clients to send in jobs? Is it building the brand?
Remember that sending an email campaign will cost you money and time so if you don’t know why you are doing it, then you are probably wasting money.
Select your audience. Be targeted
Narrow down your audience as much as possible. Make this email really relevant to this group of people. Don’t send the same thing to accountants and JAVA developers.
Create the content
Make it relevant and well written. If the first email is poor the second email won’t be read. If you expect them to perform an action then have links going to your website so that users can convert. It is easier to manage actions (i.e. new applications and renewed applications) on your website than via email.
To design or to plain text?
Decide if you need to use a design template. Will most of your target audience be reading it on their BlackBerry? Are they interested in pictures and banners? If the answer is no then plain text may be a better idea.
Check
Make sure that all of the information is correct and that the list you have selected works. Check all of the links going from the email.
And check again
You make mistakes. Everyone does. Double check!
Release them into the world...
Decide how you are going to broadcast this information. It is a really bad idea to send things through your Outlook as there is a possibility that your email servers will be classified as spam. It is much more sensible to use a third party to provide this type of broadcast service.
Result, results, results
Find out how successful your campaign has been. If it is has been successfully – brilliant! If it hasn’t: why not? Make sure that you learn from the things that you get wrong and improve on the things you do well.
The follow up
What is the next step?
Testing is essential in email marketing. There are about 12 key variables such as time, date, subject line, design etc that can be changed. Tweaking and changes these and testing them against control emails means that you can continually improve on the way in which you market via email.
If you would like to discuss your recruitment marketing or a recruitment email campaign please get in touch.
Contact one of our consultants
Image credits Two , Three , Four
