How to Use Personalisation to Ask the Right Questions, at the Right Time, to the Right People.
A straightforward and effective way to segment your audience for personalisation, is to simply ask the right questions.
What is segmentation? It’s the first step in determining who your marketing efforts should target. Segmentation helps you understand which groups exist so you can later identify which groups to target and when.
Asking customers their reasons for visiting your website, becoming a user, or subscribing to your email can be remarkably easy, but invaluable. It can give you insightful data that can lead to your business sending incredibly targeted emails.
Asking the right question at the right time is just as important as asking the question itself.
There are two distinct differences to your database. The candidate and the clients.
Your clients and candidates will be going through a journey on your website, your job is to know at which stage in the recruitment process they are so you can ask relevant questions tailored to their experience.
There has never been more competition for our attention in the noise of the digital landscape. This is no different to how you attract your clients and candidates eyes and ears.
Many businesses have been incredibly slow to take up personalization. In fact “it has been reported that only 5% of companies personalize extensively.” — Econsultancy.
When we go to networking events, we don’t stroll in, stand in the middle and talk loudly and aimlessly in the hope that someone will hear us and decide to join the conversation.
When it comes to personalising your email marketing it’s exactly the same concept. You don’t want to be that person that sends out loud, pointless emails in the hope someone will respond.
There are relatively simple, yet sophisticated, ways to use personalisation in your emails that target the right people by delivering the right content at the right time.
What we’re going to cover in this article:
- What Questions Should You Be Asking?
- Do You Know Who You Are Asking Them To?
- Know When To Ask Them- Inbound Recruitment Methodology
- Showcase Your Businesses Personality.
What Questions Should You Be Asking?
Targeted, personalised emails are designed to exceed the expectations of your clients and candidates.
Instead of receiving a campaign with generic, one-size-fits-all offers and messaging, your subscribers will receive an email that is targeted directly to them. Imagine a world where a client receives information about hiring and a candidate receives information about applying for a new job..no, we don’t want to imagine it either.
You can do this through asking the right questions, or giving access to tools that are time relevant as part of the recruitment process.
For example, including a CV building tool on your website allows you to hit two birds with one stone. You know instantly that this lead is a candidate. Then you can segment even further to know that this is an active candidate, that’s looking to update their CV.
Use this information to your advantage. Take this information in the knowledge they are likely to be looking for a new role. Start to send content like ‘5 Failsafe Tips for Writing a Covering Letter’.
Forms are also a great way to capture data and a perfect chance to ask questions designed to squeeze out the information.The essential information you need to create a targeted approach.
These questions could be:
General data; Name, email address, phone number.
What role they are looking for? (Be candidate and client specific; hire or apply for)
What industry? (Hire or apply for)
Take all this incredibly important information and nurture, nurture, nurture & then nurture some more.
Do You Know Who You’re Asking Them To?
The information you take from asking the questions can then be analysed and interpreted into segments of your database.
Segmenting your database (which every recruitment agency should do) is the start of creating specific buyer personas.
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal clients and candidates. Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to acquisition and retention.
For example, one of your personas could be ‘Client Clive’.
Client Clive is a director in the accounting and finance industry, looking to hire the top talent for his firm.
This enables you to target or personalise your marketing for different segments of your audience. Put it this way, you wouldn’t send an email to a recently placed candidate with tips on how to create a winning CV.
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends on how certain leads find and consume your content so you know exactly who you’re talking to.
If you need help in creating your buyer personas, HubSpot have a awesome guide.
Know When To Ask Them- Inbound Recruitment Methodology
Using the inbound methodology allows you to know exactly when to ask the right questions or send the relevant content.
You can see in the diagram how the inbound methodology can be related directly to inbound recruitment. What’s more, it directly tells the process you go through to turn strangers into leads, candidates/clients and ultimately promoters that refer you to family and friends.
Now you understand how the inbound recruitment methodology works.
Take these methods and apply them to your target clients and candidates but in a personalised way.
For example We all know that certain times and days are better for posting content than others. Why? Because of the way us, as consumers, choose to consume content in the natural stages of our days.
This works in the same way when you’re sending out emails. We are sure you have A/B tested this and found the optimum time to send your emails- if not, what are you waiting for?!
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing experiment wherein you “split” your audience to test a number of variations of a campaign to determine which performs better.
It’s more than likely not all your clients/candidates are in one location or respond to emails at the same time. They may be all around the world, scattered across different time zones, and possibly receiving your emails at non-optimal times.
To fix this, why not use the data you have to personalise your emails to be sent at the best times for each individual.
Mailchimp have a pretty good tool to help you do this.
It’s easy to forget the small things that could be making a significant difference to your open and click through rates.
Want to learn more about the inbound marketing for recruitment?
Showcase Your Businesses Personality.
Personalisation shouldn’t just be limited to using your clients/candidates data. It is also about personalising your brand. Personalisation can soften the edges of big business and add a level of human connection between you and your ?
Your clients and candidates want to feel valued by you, but they also want to feel connected with you and your brand.
Having a brand persona can be just as important as personalising. Don’t be a stranger, we were always warned by our mothers to not talk to strangers.
Be a friendly, informative and helpful solution for your candidates and clients to feel nurtured, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. Nurturing your leads.
These tips will get you well on the way to understanding your clients and candidates so that you can resonate with them on a deeper level.
However, don’t threat. If you’re still in need of a helping hand or some expert advice on how to personalise, you’re in luck.
We specialise in Inbound Recruitment to help you place more candidates, more frequently to more clients.
