Recruitment Marketing 101 - #3 Email Marketing

Introduction

Bristow and Hardy’s Recruitment Marketing 101 blog series aims to provide senior recruitment leaders with a number of simple techniques to implement recruitment marketing.

Blog #1 looked at how agencies can ensure that they’re investing their time effectively by aligning all marketing activity to the correct client and candidate personas... Click Here To Read Blog #1

Blog #2 focused on how agencies can use social media to push brand awareness and aid candidate & client attraction... Click Here To Read Blog #2

Today’s blog looks at how recruitment agencies can use email marketing to nurture existing client and candidate networks, generate leads and keep key contacts “warm”. I begin by looking at an email’s role in recruitment marketing, before going on to provide a step-by-step guide to implementing email marketing at an agency. 

Email Marketing

Unlike other recruitment marketing techniques, email is much more direct. Email provides you with a great opportunity to directly target clients and candidates. For example, sharing jobs or providing information on your company’s services. The largest limitation of email marketing is that its success heavily relies on your agency having good quality data. 

Traditionally, a lot of agencies encourage their consultants to share “hot jobs” or mailshot candidates. This would come in the form of a plain text email that doesn’t always look great, nor perform well. 

Below, I’ve shared some thoughts on what we’ve seen work well when it comes to email marketing in recruitment agencies. Although there’s no one size that fits all, see what aspects of this approach you could implement internally. 

Step-by-Step Guide to Designing Your Email Marketing Strategy

If you’re looking to scale your agency then we recommend developing your agency’s brand, rather than individual consultant brands (although both are really important). Therefore, all of the below would be done through the company email address (hello/info@..)

1.      Goals, Purpose & Strategy

Take time to set some goals relating to your email marketing plan and also understand the WHY behind your email marketing activities. For most recruiters, it usually falls into one of the 3 following areas: brand awareness, candidate attraction or client attraction.

2.      Data Capture & Management

The success of your email marketing strategy will heavily rely on the quality of your data. If your business has good internal processes that ensure your client and candidate data is managed within your CRM (customer relationship management) system, then you’ll be in a strong position. For those that don’t, your first action will be to capture data – in most scenarios you’ll only need names, emails and company names.

Once you have the data captured, then look to organise it into specific and targeted lists. For example, I used to work in HR recruitment. So, I’d segregate my candidate data into: HR Managers, HR Directors, HR Analysts and so on. This is important as it will allow you to be much more targeted with your email marketing and therefore, increase your chances of success.

3.      Email Marketing Solution

Next, you need to select an email marketing solution where you can store data, create and schedule your campaigns and report on each email.

I always suggest using a tool, as you’ll receive benefits such as automation and improved reporting.

This doesn’t always mean implementing a new piece of technology. For example, if your CRM provider enables emails then you could consider selecting this solution.

Best of all, most solutions are free – so find one that works for you!

4.      Content Strategy

The third step is to build your content strategy. We typically recommend sending two emails every month.

The first of these emails is often more generic. Covering things such as: industry news, articles and useful value-added content.

The second email of the month is much more targeted to your agency’s services (for example; hot jobs, strong candidates or your services).

The most important part of your content strategy is ensuring that you have “conversion” opportunities as this is how you will monetise your email marketing approach. Very simple conversion opportunities typically come in two forms, a landing page or a contact form. For example, some of our clients produce whitepapers that are then protected by landing pages. Clients then have to provide their details in return for the whitepaper – this then providers your team with a business development calling list.

5.      Reporting & Optimisation

The benefit of using an email marketing solution is that you will be provided with automated reporting. You’ll be able to understand how many clients or candidates have opened your email, who has clicked through relevant links, what links they have clicked etc.

When you receive this data, we recommend following up with each contact in your data list, starting off with those that have clicked through and opened the email – using it as an opportunity to have a conversation.

The final step is then to optimise. So, if you have received a large number of clicks then we’d advise continuing sharing the same type of content. However, if you have received very limited clicks or not much interaction at all then it would be wise to evaluate your content plan.

Conclusion

In my personal opinion, email marketing is one of the most powerful recruitment marketing techniques. It allows agencies to directly approach candidates and clients with useful content and opportunities. However, it takes time to build successful campaigns and get the messaging right. 

What is your agency doing around email marketing? Click Here To Learn More About How We Could Support You With Email Marketing

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Harry Wright

Business Development Manager

Bristow and Hardy