Email Marketing Strategies for Recruiters
Knowing how and when to use email marketing as an effective channel of communication for recruitment can help the recruiter build stronger relationships with the ideal candidates.
People are key to the growth and success of any company, and building a team composed of diverse yet complementary personalities, passions, and skillsets is one of the most challenging aspects of any business. The process of finding great candidates and convincing them to apply is complex and requires a team-wide effort. It’s actually quite similar to how marketers attract and convert clients. That’s where email marketing comes into play.
Here are some of the strategies that you can use for your email marketing as a recruiter.
1. Build a compliant email marketing list
To kickstart your email marketing campaign you need to make sure that you have a list of GDPR compliant contacts on your ATS system that would be interested in hearing about what your recruitment firm is up to.
You can then build on this group of contacts by ensuring that prospective candidates have opportunities to provide their contact details with the company website by creating lead generation activities, such as a simple newsletter sign up form, or through gated content which requires prospects to provide basic details in exchange for the content which has added value such as ebooks or webinars.
This will not only provide you with quality leads but the inclusion of opt-in boxes will ensure that they can be targeted with relevant marketing communications.
2. Use email where it’s most effective in the recruitment process
Custom recruiting emails may seem anachronistic compared to social media, or too impersonal, but they can still play a critical role in recruitment strategies. For the first contact with a candidate, email can be more effective than phone or social channels.
Additionally, candidates will often respond to a second email when they ignore the first, especially if it’s persistent yet not insistent.
Email is also highly useful in following up with candidates after they’ve submitted an application or attended an interview. The candidate experience has become increasingly important, and communicating consistently through email is an effective strategy for improving that experience.
3. Get personal, but not too personal
It’s no secret that personalizing an email is more likely to pique the recipient’s interest than a formal letter. And these days, it doesn’t take much effort to add your recipient’s name to a message.
But FirstName isn’t enough. Candidates are pretty wise and they know the existence of email marketing tools that input their first names into emails.
Whether you’re contacting candidates for the first time, or nurturing them with relevant content, you should go beyond FirstName. Look for the things that other recruiters will miss:
- What college did they attend?
- What causes do they support?
- What are their interests outside of work?
- What about your organization that will really appeal to them?
4. Three is the magic number and the right number of paragraphs
Psychologically speaking, Research shows that the brain enjoys being presented with 3 choices, whereas four choices can trigger skepticism and anything higher can lead to confusion.
Try breaking your email message into 3 short paragraphs see below, offering 3 different timings for a potential call, or even using 3 different adjectives to describe your company.
5. Imagine your email on a mobile
What does it mean to create a recruitment email that will play well on smartphones? Write short and sharp. Most people view a message on their mobile device first, then again on their laptop or desktop at work.
Subject lines or messages in the body of the email that is not responsive to the mobile version don’t go well with the user experience. 66% of emails are opened on mobile devices, if you ignore the way that your messages appear on mobile phones, you’re ruining the experience for two-thirds of your audience.
If your team is using branded templates in their email campaigns, it’s important to check that the templates are mobile-responsive. This just means that it looks “normal” on your device. This is standard for email templates nowadays but checks with your design or marketing team if you’re unsure.
6. The subject line should stand out
Subject lines are the first things that subscribers see in their inboxes and can be the deciding factor in whether they open your email or not.
Therefore it’s essential that it is noticeable among the hundreds of emails that are in their inboxes from not only other recruitment firms but also their friends, family, and brands from other industries.
Try and keep your subject line short, punchy, and relevant to the content in the email. It is important to adopt an A/B testing with subject lines and resend your message to those that didn’t open it with a new title to see if this one prompts them to take action.
7. Feature valuable content
Many companies use their email marketing campaigns to feature job posts and nothing else and this results in a large amount of unsubscribes and small open rates as recipients realize that it is simply a sales email.
You must ensure that your message is positioned with your goal and contains relevant and valuable content that is informative, useful, and educational, one can include videos, ebooks or case studies that actually matters to them and is relevant to ensure that recipients consistently open your emails and take the relevant actions.
8. Include clear Calls To Action
Every email campaign that you send should have one or more clear Calls To Action (CTA) that encourage your recipients to take action.
Whether that’s finding out more about the jobs vacant in that week, reading the latest candidate advice blog, or downloading an ebook, writing a clear and direct CTA will direct candidates to the appropriate landing page on your careers page of the website.
Including social media sharing buttons in your email campaigns will allow you to promote your message to a wider audience and allow subscribers to share your content. This, in turn, will enable you to access a much wider audience than those already subscribed and generate new leads.
In summary
Following these strategies will help you, the recruiter, get a leg up over the competition, and support the other parts of your conversational recruiting efforts. Ultimately, using email to connect with your ideal candidates is just one more way to build trust and foster relationships based on human connection, which should be the goal of your conversational recruiting strategy. Email is just one aspect of effective conversational recruiting strategies.
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