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How Email Marketing Can Fit into Your Recruitment Strategies
Posted by NAS Recruitment Innovation on March 30th, 2023 
Email marketing informs the customers on your email list about new products, discounts and other services. It can also be a softer, more indirect sell to educate your target audience on the value of your brand, as well as keeping customers engaged between purchases.
Not only is email marketing a softer way to educate consumers and to sell your products, but it plays an important role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships and keeping customers engaged.
Using email marketing for recruitment is equally as significant as using it to promote products and services and nurturing relationships with customers. It aids in engaging with potential candidates, effectively communicating job opportunities and building long-lasting relationships with prospective hires.
Adding email marketing to your recruitment strategy allows you to create a business plan, gauge results and choose the best tactics to achieve your goals. You can plan when to send your emails, evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and find the best way to push your strategy and achieve your goals. See below for some statistics for email marketing in 2023.
- 37% of brands are increasing their email budget
- A majority of marketers that use email are leveraging mobile-friendly emails as part of their marketing strategy
- 33% of marketers send weekly emails, while 26% send emails multiple times per month
- 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months
Advantages of email marketing in recruitment
Some pros of email marketing include cost-effectiveness, targeted communication, automation and scalability and measurable results.
Cost-effectiveness
Compared to traditional campaigns, such as direct mail or print, email marketing campaigns are more cost-effective. There are no printers, location fees or placement fees to pay for.
This affordability is particularly valuable for organizations with limited recruitment budgets, allowing them to allocate resources more efficiently. It allows for a vast candidate pool to be reached without draining financial resources, making it an excellent strategy for startups, small businesses and nonprofits looking to expand their candidate pool without breaking the bank.
Also to be noted, email campaigns also have a shorter production time than a traditional campaign. An email can be produced in just one day, compared to your traditional direct mail or print campaigns.
Targeted communication
With email campaigns, you have the ability to segment your emails and target users by demographic. This segmentation allows ensures that candidates receive messages that are tailored to their specific interests and qualifications.
Recruiters can send job opportunities and content that align with a candidate’s skills, career goals and geographic preferences. This targeting increases the likelihood that candidates will find the content relevant and engage with it, leading to more qualified applicants.
Automation and scalability
Email marketing tools, such as automation, allow you to simplify and streamline your recruitment process. You can also create personalized, automated campaigns that can be scheduled in advance. You have the ability to set up a workflow that triggers specific messages based on subscriber behavior.
Furthermore, combining automation with customer analytics, you can refine your email targeting each time a new message is sent. This allows you to continue growing your business without losing that personal touch that users love.
Measurable results
Including email in your marketing strategy means being able to easily measure your results. Some things to measure include open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, bounce rates and unsubscribe rates. Routinely analyzing these metrics will help you refine your marketing emails, tailor your content to candidates’ preferences and optimize your efforts to attract and hire top talent.
Aside from the advantages listed above, emails require users to take action – an email will sit in the inbox until it has been either read, deleted or archived. Email marketing can also help you build relationships with your target audience while simultaneously driving traffic to your website, social media or anywhere else you’d like them to visit.
Building an email marketing strategy for recruitment
There are a number of steps you’ll need to take when building your recruitment email marketing strategy. Keep reading for more information.
Define recruitment goals and objectives
Start nailing down your strategy by defining your goals and objectives. These goals and objectives will be your guide for your email campaign, providing clarity, direction and a framework for success. Your organization’s recruitment needs should be aligned with the capabilities of email marketing.
Define any key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow your hiring managers and recruiters to track and evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts. These KPIs could include things like the number of applications received through email campaigns, the conversion rate of email recipients to applicants or a reduced time-to-fill.
Audience segmentation
Instead of sending one generic message to a broad audience, divide candidates into groups based on shared characteristics (skills, experience, location or job preferences). This allows email content to be tailored to the unique needs and interests of each group.
Not only does audience segmentation increase engagement, but it allows for highly personalized communication with candidates. Recruiters can foster a sense of connection and trust by addressing candidates by name and referencing their skills and qualifications. These segmented emails are highly effective in engaging candidates.
Creating compelling content
In a competitive job market, candidates are overwhelmed with job offers and other communications from numerous organizations. Content sent out by recruiters should be engaging and informative, while also resonating with potential candidates. This includes presenting the organization’s unique employer value proposition (EVP), which highlights what makes the organization an attractive place to work.
This content should contain a subject line that entices recipients to open the email. Your content should tell a compelling story that paints a picture of the candidate’s potential future with the organization. Content should also be concise, scannable and easy to read. Include a clear call to action in your email that will guide candidates on next steps.
Establishing a sending schedule
Maintaining a consistent and predictable cadence of communication will help you avoid overwhelming your audience with too many emails over a shorter period of time. A sending schedule can also help ensure that your emails are delivered at a time when your audience is most likely to engage.
Not only does a schedule help your audience, but it helps you manage your email campaign. By developing a sending schedule, you have an idea of what comes next throughout the course of your campaign. With this, you can also automate your campaigns based on timeline or user behavior.
Personalization and customization
Personalizing and customizing your email campaign humanizes the connection process between you and prospective candidates, allowing for deeper connections. Candidates are more likely to engage with a message if it personally addresses them. Including personalized information in your emails lets them know that you are interested in them and their skills specifically.
Not only does personalization help show that you’re interested specifically in them, but it increases the likelihood of candidates’ engagement and action. They are more likely to respond if they perceive that an opportunity is a good fit for them. Personalization and customization elevate recruitment email from a one-size-fits-all approach to a highly targeted and persuasive communication strategy that resonates with candidates personally.
A/B testing and optimization
In A/B testing, you will create two (or more) variations of an email, each with subtle differences, and send them to different segments of your target audience. Use open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates to gain insights into what resonates with candidates. A/B testing helps you identify the most effective subject lines, content styles and calls to action, allowing for fine-tuned campaigns.
Optimization is the ongoing process of using insights gained from A/B testing to improve future email campaigns. By routinely refining tactics based on performance metrics, recruiters can stay ahead of the competition, maintain high engagement rates and secure top talent efficiently and effectively.
Email campaigns for recruitment
Job openings and career opportunities
In the competitive job market, it’s important that recruiters effectively communicate any available positions and growth potential within their organizations. An email campaign is a great way to showcase job openings and career paths.
Emails can go beyond listing job openings by incorporating storytelling and testimonials from current employees who have advanced their careers within the organization. This helps to humanize the recruitment process and lets each potential candidate see themselves as part of the company’s success story.
Organizational culture and values
It is also important to include information about the organization’s culture and values in each of your emails. This allows prospective candidates to assess whether or not they align with the organization’s long-term vision. Job seekers often prioritize cultural fit and shared values as much as job roles and compensation, so conveying this information in your emails can be a game-changer.
Emphasizing your organization’s culture and values also helps to create an emotional connection between the recruiter and the candidate. Including culture and values in your recruitment email campaign will attract the right candidates for the job, in addition to higher application rates, improved candidate experience and a more efficient hiring process.
Employee testimonials and success stories
Incorporating testimonials and success stories from employees can be powerful for building an email marketing strategy for your recruitment, as it shows credibility, authenticity, relatability, a personal connection and employee retention.
Including these in your emails also helps to establish a more meaningful and relatable connection with each candidate, while creating a personal connection between employees and potential candidates.
Onboarding and orientation emails
Including onboarding and orientation emails in your marketing emails helps new hires transition smoothly into their roles. Onboarding and orientation emails serve as a bridge between the recruitment process and the beginning of an employee’s journey within the organization.
Onboarding emails can serve as a way to introduce new hires to the company’s culture, values and mission. They can give an overview of what to expect on the first day and beyond, as well as including practical information, such as workplace details, office policies, IT setup and the orientation activity schedule.
Follow-up and nurturing sequences
Follow-up and nurturing sequences have the ability to establish and maintain meaningful connections with candidates over time. These sequences sustain candidate engagement throughout the recruitment journey.
By keeping each candidate updated on open opportunities, industry trends, company culture insights and providing valuable information, organizations can stay top-of-mind.
All of these elements add a personal touch to your emails, encouraging each candidate to engage with and respond to recruiters. They facilitate long-term engagement, relationship-building and personalized communication.
Measuring email marketing success in recruitment
Key performance indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are essential metrics used by organizations to measure the effectiveness of their practices. These metrics can be used to measure a number of things, including sales and revenue, marketing, human resources, project management and even email marketing for recruitment.
See below for When it comes to tracking the success of recruitment emails, pay close attention to the following KPIs:
- Bounce Rates
- Click-through Rates (CTR)
- Click-to-open Rates
- Conversation rates
- Email forwarding and sharing rates
- Open rate
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Tracking and analytics tools
Each of these KPIs can help you assess the performance of your campaign, identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize recruitment strategies.
Continuous improvement strategies
When it comes to recruitment marketing emails, you should constantly be looking for ways to improve your strategy. This includes data analytics, A/B testing, segmentation refinement, optimized email content, mobile optimization, feedback loops, benchmarking and quality assurance, among others.
Consistently working to improve your recruitment email marketing strategy, you’re able to adapt to constantly changing candidate preferences, improve engagement rates and ultimately attract and hire top talent more effectively.
Conclusion
Email marketing is the preferred channel for business communications among the majority of consumers and plays a pivotal and increasingly significant role in the modern recruitment strategy. With recruitment email marketing, organizations can communicate job opportunities, showcase their employer brand and company culture and engage with candidates in a personalized way.
A compelling aspect of email marketing for recruitment is its ability to target and nurture talentas time passes. The power to segment candidate lists and deliver tailored messages allows these campaigns to resonate with diverse audiences. With this strategy, organizations are able to build trust and transparency by sharing employee testimonials, success stories and insights into the company’s culture and values. This content fosters connections that create a positive candidate experience and enhance employer branding.
The role of email marketing for recruitment only continues to grow in significance. It’s about more than just filling job openings – it’s about creating a meaningful connection with each candidate that aligns with the mission and culture of the company. Continue to measure, analyze and refine your efforts to attract and retain top talent.
Email marketing is more than just a tool – it is your gateway to a talent pool of qualified candidates that can help to drive your organization’s success.
Sources: MailChimp, ConstantContact, Hubspot
NAS Recruitment Innovation
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