Your email audience will almost always be some of your most engaged, enthused users. But, if you don’t cultivate this group of VIPs and provide them valuable, optimised content, you might lose out on a great opportunity to deliver your recruitment marketing message.
These are some quick tips you can use right now to start building a better email subscriber list, and improving engagement rates.
1. Start By Building your Subscriber Base
Nothing else on this list matters more than starting with an email subscriber base which is actually enthused and engaged with your content. You could write the best emails in the world, but if you send them to the wrong audience then you’re unlikely to get any impact.
Quick tips for building an email audience from scratch
Ensure the process for subscribing to your email newsletter is easy, and functions well. Place buttons and forms prominently on your website so that they’re easy to find, and don’t ask for more data than you need.
Build traffic to your website. Only a low percentage of website users will sign up to the newsletter, so the more traffic you get to your website overall the better. Better recruitment SEO can help, or you could run targeted ad campaigns too.
Offer something valuable in exchange for a user’s email address. Incentives are fabulous drivers of email sign-ups, including unique industry insights, trends reports, career advice guides, service discounts and other enticing content.
Segment your email audiences. Your agency may cover multiple specialties, in which case it’s likely you have email subscribers with quite different needs. Segmenting these audiences and sending multiple different versions of your emails will help ensure you target the right people with the right content, and avoid sending irrelevant emails to the wrong people.
Learn more: Email marketing for recruiters
2. Try to Personalise Your Content
Tailoring your emails to the individual recipient can dramatically improve performance. In fact, emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, and marketers using personalisation have found as much as a 760% increase in email revenue by segmenting their campaigns (Campaign Monitor).
You don’t need to write each recipient a unique email. Even small efforts to tailor your message can yield these results.
Quick tips to personalise your email campaigns
Segment your audience. Like we mentioned above, segmenting your email audience allows you to send relevant messages to key groups, without sending those same messages to people who won’t care.
Use people’s names. Always try to include someone’s name in your emails, and sometimes the subject line too, so your messages don’t appear impersonal and ‘spammy’.
Test dynamic content. If you’re utilising email automation software, you might be able to implement dynamic content. That is, content (like paragraphs or videos) which shows up for some people but not others. This will help you deliver targeted content to users based on what they’re directly interested in.
Personal offers or advice. For clients, you might send personal offers and curate VIP email lists to make your most important audience members feel more special. For candidates, if you have information on their sector and skillset you could personalised career advice tailored to their needs.
3. Write Compelling Subject Lines
Good copy starts in the subject line. It’s one of the first things anyone reads when they open their inbox, making or breaking the chance that they’ll actually click and engage with your content.
So, the more your subject line grabs attention and compels a click, the higher your engagement ratings are likely to climb.
Quick tips for writing good email subject lines as a recruiter
Be concise. Brevity is the name of the game. Depending on the user’s device, you may have as few as barely 40-50 characters to play with. So, trim and crop and try to craft something snappy.
Be clear. Vague click-bait puts a lot of people off (they think it’s spam). Always tell people what your email is actually about.
Personalise. We really can’t drive this point home enough. Occasionally use someone’s name, and ensure the message is tailored to the recipient’s segment.
Offer value. People often want something in return for their attention, so indicating in your subject lines that your email will offer value can help drive clicks.
Ask a question. Newspaper headline writers know that questions drive engagement, leaving the reader wondering what the answer is. But avoid yes/no questions – if they answer “no”, what will drive them to click?
Use strong words. Try to cut the fluff. Strong, commanding words grab attention and can better drive engagement.
Mix it up. Try not to do the same thing over and over again – it may look like spam. Mix things up to keep your content fresh and diverse.
A/B test. If your email software gives you the option, A/B testing will help you understand what works best with your audience. Over time, these results can help build stronger email subject guidelines designed to generate real impact with your specific audience.
4. Write Compelling Body Copy
Your email body copy is the stuff inside the email. Once someone gets past the subject line, the email itself has to engage and enthuse, otherwise they’ll click away and never bother with your emails again.
What makes a ‘good’ email?
It provides value to the reader. They learn something, or get something, or it gives them something to do that benefits them.
It contains images or videos. Images help move the eye down a page, draw attention and add colour to an otherwise white wall of text. Use them to break up copy, draw attention to important parts of the email, and fill your message with strong branding.
It has an objective. You shouldn’t generally email someone for the sake of it. Rather, try to ensure each email has a purpose. This will help you drive engagement, because the message will have a clear goal. See point 5 below.
It’s concise and clear. Emails aren’t big. Try to keep things snappy, with not much content to read.
5. Use Strong Calls to Action
A call to action (CTA) is a message, link or button somewhere in your email that urges the user to perform a particular action. That action might be to go to a certain page and read it, sign up to an event, download a guide, contact your team or something else.
If each of your emails have a clear strategic goal, then the CTA is the mechanism for the reader to achieve that goal.
Remember to use strong language and action words to urge clicks (‘discover more’, ‘get started’, ‘sign up today’, etc.), and where possible try to use graphics to enhance your CTAs with brand colours and images.
6. Remember Mobile Users
Do you check your emails on mobile? So do plenty of other people.
Mobile users make up a significant proportion of users (often over 50%, though this varies business to business), which means your emails must be optimised for mobile in order to achieve their maximum effectiveness.
Quick mobile optimisation tips for recruitment emails
Write concise copy. Long blocks of text will seem even bigger and longer on mobile.
Keep things to a single column.
Use optimised images. That means smaller file sizes, so they load quickly even when someone’s on data instead of Wi-Fi.
Test test test. Test your emails before they go out, checking multiple devices, to be doubly certain everything looks correct.
7. Monitor and Improve with Analytics Data
Your recruitment email marketing campaigns will generate analytics data over time, telling you some really useful information such as email open rates, clickthroughs and conversions, bounce rate, and email sharing or forwarding.
But what do those email metrics mean?
Open rates. The percentage of recipients who opened your email.
Clickthroughs. Also called clickthrough rate (CTR), this is the percentage of recipients who clicked a link or button within your email.
Conversions. Also called conversion rate, this is the percentage of people who went on to achieve the goal of your email (such as signing up to an event, or downloading a guide).
Bounce rate. This is the percentage of emails sent which could not be delivered. Internet service providers also use bounce rates to determine the trustworthiness of a sender. Bounces most often happen when an email is invalid, and these recipients should be removed from your subscriber list so they don’t affect your reputation.
Email sharing or forwarding. This one’s fairly self-explanatory – it’s the people who shared your message with someone else! This is a fabulous sign of engagement.
Track these metrics over time, checking in on a regular basis and noting how trends are evolving. This will give you a pile of evidence with which to make tweaks and optimisations over time, testing different strategies, styles, audience groups and automation to get the best results.
